Tuesday
Tuesday
The Northern Kingdom
If today you will be a servant to these people and serve them … they will always be your servants.
1 Kings 12:7
When Solomon died, the people assembled to make his son Rehoboam king. They appealed to him to lighten his father’s yoke of oppression; then they would serve him. But Rehoboam rashly followed the advice of his young and inexperienced counselors, who urged him to make his father’s yoke even heavier. This folly provoked the ten northern tribes to proclaim their independence of the dynasty of David, and so the divided monarchy began. The northern kingdom was Israel, with Jeroboam its first king and its capital Shechem (later Samaria), while the southern kingdom was Judah, with Rehoboam its first king and its capital Jerusalem.
In order to wean the hearts of his subjects away from the house of David, Jeroboam was resolved to stop them going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. So he established two alternative sanctuaries (Dan in the north and Bethel in the south) and installed a golden calf in each. Five rather nondescript kings followed him, and then the dynasty of Omri, whose son Ahab married the Phoenician princess Jezebel, began. Jezebel actively promoted the worship of Baal within the royal court and beyond.
This brazen apostasy provoked the prophet Elijah, who, although not a literary prophet like his successors, wins our admiration for his fearless witness. Firstly, he challenged the prophets of Baal to a public contest on Mount Carmel, in which Yahweh was decisively vindicated as the true and living God. Secondly, Elijah confronted the king for murdering Naboth and stealing his vineyard.
Only about thirty years after Jehu’s dynasty ended, during which a succession of military rulers occupied the throne, Samaria fell (in 722 BC) to the Assyrians, and the country was colonized, resulting in the mixed population we know as the Samaritans. The judgment of God had fallen on two hundred years of religious unfaithfulness.
For further reading: 1 Kings 12:1–17