Biblion Bible Commentary
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Shishak Takes the Gold
1 Kings 14:21-31
21 Rehoboam the son of Solomon reigned in Judah. Rehoboam was forty-one years old when he began to reign, and he reigned seventeen years in Jerusalem, the city which Yahweh had chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, to put his name there. His mother’s name was Naamah the Ammonitess. · WEB
Judah does no better than Israel, Egypt strips the temple in five years, and the golden shields are replaced with bronze ones nobody mentions again.
Judah did that which was evil in Yahweh's sight, and they provoked him to jealousy with their sins which they committed, above all that their fathers had done 1 Kings 14:22.
The narrative turns south, and the verdict is not softer. High places, sacred pillars and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every green tree 1 Kings 14:23, and the cult practices of the peoples the conquest displaced 1 Kings 14:24. Jeroboam gets the famous condemnation, but the book is careful: the tribe that kept the temple was doing the same things within sight of it.
The note about Rehoboam's mother, repeated twice in the chapter — Naamah the Ammonitess 1 Kings 14:21 1 Kings 14:31 — belongs to the same account. One of Solomon's treaty marriages produced the next king of Judah, and the syncretism that followed had a nursery.
In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem; and he took away the treasures of Yahweh's house and the treasures of the king's house 1 Kings 14:25–26.
Five years. Everything chapter ten spent thirty verses counting — the gold of Ophir, the tribute of kings, silver as common as stones — is carried to Egypt in a single campaign, and the pharaoh who takes it is the one who sheltered Jeroboam 1 Kings 11:40. The wealth accumulated against the law's warning Deuteronomy 17:17 did not last a decade past the man who gathered it.
King Rehoboam made shields of bronze in their place, and committed them to the hands of the captains of the guard 1 Kings 14:27.
The detail is the finest piece of quiet writing in this stretch of the book. Solomon's three hundred golden shields hung in the House of the Forest of Lebanon 1 Kings 10:17; the replacements are bronze, and they are kept in a guardroom and carried out only when the king goes up to the temple 1 Kings 14:28. The ceremony continues exactly as before. Only the metal has changed, and everyone in the procession knows it.
It is the book's picture of a religion outliving its substance — the forms maintained, the shine kept up, the reality gone to Egypt. Nobody in the account says a word about it.
There was war between Rehoboam and Jeroboam continually 1 Kings 14:30.
The closing formula arrives, and from here the book settles into it: the acts, the annals, the years, the burial, the successor. Two kingdoms, alternating, each king measured by one standard, for the rest of the work.
settled What this mark means