1 Kings14chapter 14

1 Kings 14:7-9

Forasmuch as I exalted thee from among the people: The oracle opens by naming Jeroboam's rise in the Lord's own words, exalted from among the people and made prince over Israel, the office language of 2 Sam 7 turned toward a northern king. Verse 8 sets him directly against David, who kept my commandments and followed me with all his heart, the standard this book will measure every king by from here forward, north and south alike. Jeroboam is charged with going further than any king before him, making other gods and molten images, the same offense Aaron committed at Sinai now repeated by a king who had stood in Egypt's shadow himself.

David also sinned, and John Wesley names the difference: David kept to the true worship of God and repented of his sins. Jeroboam left that worship and held to his course. The kings of Judah are measured against David in the same way, at 15:3 and 15:11.

Albert Barnes reads all who came before as every ruler from the days of the judges, and he recalls Gideon's ephod at Judges 8:27. Matthew Henry notes that Saul never served idols and Solomon never made Israel sin. Jeroboam set up idol worship for a whole nation.

1 Kings 14:10-11

I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam: Him that pisseth against the wall is the Old Testament's blunt idiom for every male of a household, and it makes the sentence total, the whole house swept away like dung from a threshingfloor. Verse 11 opens a formula this book repeats over three doomed dynasties: him that dieth in the city shall the dogs eat, and him that dieth in the field the fowls of the air, spoken here first against Jeroboam and later against Baasha's house at 16:4 and against Ahab's and Jezebel's at 21:19-24. Its own fulfillment against Jeroboam's line waits for chapter 15, worked by a king who does not yet know he is pronouncing the same sentence over his own future.

Albert Barnes notes that dogs cleared the streets of the city and vultures, the birds of the air, cleared the open field. John Gill reads the sentence as no burial at all for anyone belonging to Jeroboam. For an Israelite that was the worst of ends.

1 Kings 14:12-13

when thy feet enter into the city: The child's death is timed to the mother's own footsteps, tied to no illness and no delay, so the sign cannot be read as coincidence. Verse 13 turns the same death into the family's one mercy: all Israel will mourn and bury this son, because in him alone is found some good thing toward the Lord in the house of Jeroboam. The text names no particular deed behind the good thing, and Wesley and the older commentators read it as a private piety in the boy himself, which the exposition leaves standing where the verse leaves it.

Matthew Henry takes the good in the boy as a love for the true worship of God and a dislike of the calves. John Wesley adds that he was good in a house full of bad examples. Isaiah 57:1 says the righteous are taken from the presence of evil.

1 Kings 14:14-16

raise him up a king over Israel: Verse 14 closes with one of the chapter's hardest phrases, but what? even now, and the bench divides over whether it names an already-rising rival or simply breaks off Ahijah's sentence in urgency, both readings held here without a verdict between them. Verse 15 promises Israel's own exile centuries early, root up Israel out of this good land and scatter them beyond the river, the Assyrian deportation described before it has a name attached to it. Verse 16 gives the book's first who made Israel to sin, a refrain that falls sixteen more times before Josiah burns the Bethel altar at 2 Ki 23:15, and every northern king from here forward is weighed against this one sentence.

as a reed is shaken in the water: John Wesley reads the reed as a picture of the kingdom to come, tossed by invasions, rival kings and civil wars. Albert Barnes notes that the warning of Deuteronomy 29:28 is here first applied to the ten tribes. Assyria fulfilled it at 2 Kings 17:6.

This phrase becomes the refrain for the kings of Israel: each is judged by the sins Jeroboam caused Israel to commit. Matthew Henry notes that kingdoms fall by the sins of their heads. Nadab walks in them at 15:26.

1 Kings 14:17-18

came to the threshold of the door: The child dies exactly where Ahijah said he would, at the threshold, and a word spoken in a back room to a disguised woman is confirmed in public without embellishment. Verse 18 credits the fulfillment to the word of the Lord which he spake by the hand of his servant Ahijah the prophet, the closing formula this book uses when a prophecy against a house meets its outcome, used again for the man of God from Judah at 13:26. All Israel mourns the boy, the one member of Jeroboam's condemned house the text allows a public grave.

all Israel mourned for him: John Wesley gives two reasons for the mourning: Israel lost a prince of promise, and his death opened the way for the judgments that followed. The word of verse 13 came true in full.

1 Kings 14:19-20

the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel: The narrator points the reader to the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel, a source now lost, distinct from the biblical books of Chronicles and cited across the rest of both Kings as the record standing behind the summary the text gives here. Jeroboam reigns twenty and two years and dies unreformed, the man who received the sure house language at 11:38 and forfeited it within his own reign. Nadab succeeds him, the first son in this book to inherit a throne the text has already sentenced before he sits on it.

John Gill notes that Jeroboam outlived Rehoboam and reigned into the second year of Asa, which 15:25 confirms. Gill takes Nadab for a younger brother of the Abijah who died. The house of Jeroboam falls within two years, at 15:27 to 29.

to put his name there: Rehoboam's introduction repeats the name formula that runs through the temple chapters, the city which the Lord did choose... to put his name there, restated the very moment the kingdom splits, even though Rehoboam now rules only a fragment of it. His mother is named here and again at verse 31, Naamah an Ammonitess, a wife from the nation Solomon's foreign marriages at 11:1 had already drawn into the king's household. A son of that marriage now sits on David's throne, the immediate domestic cost of the multiplication Deut 17:17 forbade a king to pursue.

1 Kings 14:22-24

Judah did evil in the sight of the Lord: Judah's own indictment is framed to outdo the fathers, above all that their fathers had done, so the south's decline begins in the same chapter as the north's judgment, on the very site the Lord chose for his name. Verse 23 names high places, images and groves built on every high hill and under every green tree, the Canaanite worship pattern Deuteronomy warned against in that same phrase. Verse 24's sodomites in the land, cult attendants tied to the fertility shrines, are read by the bench as evidence that the Canaanite religion Israel was sent to dispossess had been adopted rather than destroyed.

on every high hill, and under: Albert Barnes reads they also as a charge that Judah copied the high places Israel built at 12:31. John Wesley reads every high hill and green tree as corruption through the whole land. Deuteronomy 12:2 had ordered such places destroyed.

Adam Clarke gives the Hebrew word as kedeshim, persons consecrated to the service of idols through impure rites. Deuteronomy 23:17 forbade them in Israel, and Matthew Henry reads their presence as the LORD giving Judah up to the abominations of the nations before them. Asa drives them from the land at 15:12.

1 Kings 14:25-26

Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem: Shishak's campaign against Jerusalem in Rehoboam's fifth year has independent confirmation: the Bubastite Portal at Karnak lists a Palestinian campaign in the pharaoh's own hieroglyphic record, evidence standing alongside the biblical account rather than replacing it. He strips both treasuries, the house of the Lord and the king's house, and takes the shields of gold Solomon had made, the same gold Solomon multiplied past Deut 17:17's limit now leaving the country in a single raid. 2 Chr 12:2-9 adds that Shishak came because Judah had forsaken the law, a reason this book does not itself state here.

Solomon made two hundred large shields and three hundred small ones of hammered gold at 10:16 and 17. Adam Clarke calls the plunder the greatest ever taken in one place. It came in the fifth year of Rehoboam.

1 Kings 14:27-28

made in their stead brasen shields: Rehoboam cannot restore the gold, so he replaces the shields with brass and posts guards to carry them for the king's appearances at the temple, a substitution the text records without comment. The house Solomon filled with brass furnishings by the ton at 7:45-47 now supplies brass for a king's show of glory, the same metal running downhill from temple vessel to royal prop within a few chapters of its casting. Verse 28 has the guard fetch the shields out for each appearance and return them to the guard chamber afterward, the ceremony kept up over a glory already gone.

Albert Barnes notes that Rehoboam still went to the house of the LORD in state while idols spread in Judah at verses 22 to 24. Matthew Henry reads the bronze shields as a sign of glory lost. Lamentations 4:1 mourns gold grown dull.

1 Kings 14:29-31

the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?: The southern kingdom gets its own named source here, the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah, matching the northern formula the narrator used two verses earlier for Israel. Verse 30 records continuous war between the two houses without describing a single battle, a hostility the book will keep marking by this same short notice through several reigns to come. Rehoboam dies and is buried with his fathers in the city of David, his mother named again as at verse 21, and Abijam his son succeeds him to a reign the next chapter measures and finds wanting.

there was war between Rehoboam and Jeroboam: John Wesley reads this as border fighting in small raids, since 12:24 had forbidden an invasion. Open battle came later, under Abijam, at 15:7. The two kingdoms stayed at war.

Naamah the Ammonite is named twice, here and at verse 21. John Gill reads the repeat as a pointer to the source of Rehoboam's idolatry, which went on under his son Abijam. Matthew Henry notes that the marriage was made while David was still king.