Canter Bridge

Israel’s biblical historians are often taciturn in the face of behavior we might have expected them to condemn.

It is their way of respecting the reader. Not every moral, not every lesson need be spelled out. The listener is expected to arrive at his or her own conclusions based on instruction that is both prior and ongoing.

One of the sad features of both David’s and Solomon’s reigns is the unfortunate and even chaotic manner in which they lurch to their conclusion. We should probably suspect that Solomon’s amassing of both riches and retinue as a consequence of his fabled wisdom is not an entirely promising trend. The Queen of Sheba was impressed to the point of breathlessness. We should not be.

The proof, as one says, is in the pudding.

Solomon’s royal corpse has barely turned cold when the Davidic and Solomonic kingdom begins to tear itself apart along old fault lines.

Rehoboam is the villain, though nowhere is this stated in so many words. Rather, we are invited to observe Solomon’s heir look to the left—where old, wise men guarded their hard-won counsel—and then to the right, where young hot-heads with no capacity for honorable compromise awaited their moment of glory on Rehoboam’s coat-tails.

The seams of monarchy are without doubt a convenient moment for settling scores. The Old Guard knew this no less than Rehoboam’s Young Turks.

Jeroboam, out of favor and dangerously renegade, sends a delegation to inquire about making up with Solomon’s house now that the old man has passed on. The oldsters, having learned perhaps that not every rift is about policy or concept but as often as not a consequence of personality and character, counsel an olive branch. Jeroboam, it seems, almost follows their advice.

Yet his own contemporaries want all the glory with none of the sagacious self-restraint that builds things that endure. Kingdoms, for example.

Their response is both memorable and an icon of folly:

When Jeroboam son of Nebat heard of it (for he was in Egypt, where he had fled from King Solomon), then Jeroboam returned from Egypt. They sent and called him; and Jeroboam and all Israel came and said to Rehoboam, ‘Your father made our yoke heavy. Now therefore lighten the hard service of your father and his heavy yoke that he placed on us, and we will serve you. He said to them, ‘Come to me again in three days.’ So the people went away.
Then King Rehoboam took counsel with the older men who had attended his father Solomon while he was still alive, saying, ‘How do you advise me to answer this people?’ They answered him, ‘If you will be kind to this people and please them, and speak good words to them, then they will be your servants forever.’ But he rejected the advice that the older men gave him, and consulted the young men who had grown up with him and now attended him. He said to them, ‘What do you advise that we answer this people who have said to me, “Lighten the yoke that your father put on us”?’ The young men who had grown up with him said to him, ‘Thus should you speak to the people who said to you, “Your father made our yoke heavy, but you must lighten it for us”; tell them, “My little finger is thicker than my father’s loins. Now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.“‘

Famously, all Israel returned to their tents in the gloomy aftermath of a young ruler’s self-absorption, darkening the sky with their rhetorical question and its despairingly rebellious coda:

What share do we have in David?
We have no inheritance in the son of Jesse.
Each of you to your tents, O Israel!
Look now to your own house, O David.

Israel would be reunited with Rehoboam’s Judah only in the prayers and songs of the faithful and in hope for a divine rearrangement of the two nations’ affairs in some future Golden Age.

The historian sees the Lord settling old matters by engendering this unnecessary division. It allows Rehoboam to boil miserably in his own juices, with no word of explicit condemnation for his kingly myopia.

A united Israel is no more.

The young men, one imagines, enjoyed their clear, pure rage for a moment, while opportunity seeped into the bitter soil, irrecoverable.