1 and 2 Kings for Everyone

By John Goldingay

This seventh volume in the popular Old Testament for Everyone series tells the story of Israel when it was a monarchy, from the accession of Solomon to the exile.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781611641202

John Goldingay

John Goldingay is David Allan Hubbard Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Fuller Seminary.  

Book preview

exile.

1 KINGS 1:1–53

How to Manipulate the Old Man in Order to Get Things Done

I have friends in Kyrgyzstan, where a few weeks ago there were protests against the president and the government on the part of the opposition party and its supporters, citing widespread government corruption and abuse of expense claims. My friends deemed it wise to stay home during the riots that followed; scores of people were killed. Eventually the protesters took over the security headquarters and the state television station; the president and his family left the country; and the former opposition set up a new government. In Britain there were scandals last year over similar matters, and these will be a factor in the way people vote in an election that happens tomorrow. Political corruption is also an issue in the United States. But at least in both contexts we have a system for changing the government every few years and in this way punishing politicians. While the system’s administration is subject to abuse and there can be controversy about the validity of an election’s results, neither country has had a coup lately.

You could say that Israel was more like Kyrgyzstan. God’s promise to David in 2 Samuel has established the principle of dynastic succession. God is committed to David’s household. In the British monarchy the king’s eldest son becomes the next king, and it rather looks as if Adonijah assumes this rule should apply. Of his elder brothers mentioned in 2 Samuel 3, we know that Amnon and Absalom are dead, and by implication Kileab has also died. While Adonijah comes next, God has not laid down that the eldest of a king’s offspring should succeed him (or even that it should be a son rather than a daughter), and in the Old Testament God often shows an inclination to defy the regular rule whereby the eldest son is the senior one; for instance, God preferred Jacob to Esau. So there is no presumption regarding who should succeed.

David, too, has taken no action in connection with who should succeed him. It is an aspect of the way he has become more and more irresponsible and feeble as years have gone by. The point is illustrated by the pathetic account of his dotage with which 1 Kings begins. It seems sad not least that this king with many full wives and secondary wives cannot get one of them to keep him warm and that his staff assume he needs a nubile girl to do so. It’s not clear whether they assume she will be another secondary wife for him, and thus that his not having sex with her is another sign of his feebleness.

Adonijah and his supporters could well argue that in the circumstances someone needs to take decisive action rather than leave the nation with this apology for a leadership, and that as David’s eldest son, Adonijah is the person to do so, but he goes about it the same way as Absalom, by accumulating the outward trappings of kingship. He has David and Absalom’s good looks, too, and leaders should be good-looking; F. D. Roosevelt in his wheelchair could never have been president if it had been more obvious to people that he had to use a wheelchair. Second Samuel has portrayed the way David failed his sons in not exercising any discipline in relation to them, but the point is here most explicit: he had never vexed Adonijah by challenging him about his behavior. David could confront his enemies but not his sons (like the Old Testament’s comments on this subject elsewhere, such observations on discipline likely relate to them as one’s offspring as they grow up and become adults, not to small children).

The leadership of Israel is totally divided about who should succeed. Adonijah wins the support of one of David’s key officers in the army and one of the two senior priests. The other senior priest and several other figures in the military, along with the prophet Nathan, support Solomon. Adonijah holds a festive banquet to which he invites David’s other sons and David’s staff, but he pointedly does not invite Solomon and his supporters. (If it seems odd that there are apparently two senior priests, the explanation may relate to the way Jerusalem has become Israel’s central sanctuary after David captured it from the Jebusites (see 2 Samuel 5–6). Psalm 110 speaks of David himself having become a priest in the order of Melchizedek, who appears in Genesis 14. In other words, he inherits the position of priest and king in Jerusalem in accordance with the arrangement when the Jebusites lived there. Connecting some dots, it looks as if Abiathar belongs to the priestly line by birth, while Zadok is a former Jebusite priest who is adopted into the native Israelite priestly line.)

Nathan’s reporting that Adonijah has become king attributes to the banquet a more concrete importance than the actual account of the banquet did. Adonijah was certainly planning to take over as king, but Nathan is cutting corners in his description of the event’s significance. It is not clear why Nathan would support Solomon, though it may simply go back to the story of his birth in 2 Samuel 12:24–25. God had struck down David’s first son by Bathsheba; he had then sent Nathan to tell David that Bathsheba’s second son was someone God would love. In these stories, the word for love often means be committed to and loyal to. So Nathan could connect some dots and conclude that God intended Solomon to be king. A willingness to draw this inference and to attribute to the banquet more significance than it actually had would link with the plan he presents to Bathsheba. It would be quite natural for her to hope her son would end up as king, and not simply for the usual motherly reasons. The transition from Saul to David illustrated how people who might look like rivals for the throne and people who might support such rivals are in a dangerous position during the transition process and afterward. If Adonijah succeeds to the throne, both Solomon and Bathsheba may not live long. So she would be quite willing to remind the befuddled David of a promise that (as far as we know) he had never made. Adonijah in turn will know that his number is up when David at last takes the decisive action he needed to take long ago.

Just after I wrote that opening line about my friends in Kyrgyzstan, one of them e-mailed me to say he had been listening to a recording of my classes on iTunes. Someone asked why God uses all these sinful people in the books of Samuel and Kings, and I answered, Well, he doesn’t really have much choice, does he? My friend told me how he laughed out loud at that comment on the public transit. God works though people’s manipulations and failures and fears and plotting. That doesn’t necessarily mean we get away with them.

1 KINGS 2:1–46

Coping with the Aftermath

As an undergraduate, I often walked past the Martyrs Memorial, standing where Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and Thomas Cranmer were burned at the stake in Oxford in 1555 and 1556, caught in the conflict between different Christian groups. Many stories tell of Christians martyred by pagans; stories about Christians being killed by other Christians are more disturbing. We are fortunate to be living in a time when holding the wrong views does not cost you your life as it did a few centuries ago, but it is still the case that when you take sides, you take risks. Over the past year or so, two acquaintances of mine have lost their jobs because they said things about the Bible that clashed with the theological positions of the seminaries where they worked. Holding the wrong political views and backing the losers in an election will also not imperil your life in Britain or the United States, but it will do so in other parts of the world.

So it did in Israel when David came to the throne and when Solomon succeeded him. Indeed, some of the violence involves the continuing effects of events associated with David’s accession. Joab is an instance. David had an older sister called Zeruiah, and she had three sons, Abishai, Joab, and Asahel. Joab rose to the position of commander-in-chief of David’s army, yet his story shows him to be a person who made up his own mind about things. In the course of the conflict over who would succeed Saul, he killed the commander of the forces supporting Saul, Abner, who had himself killed Joab’s brother Asahel in the course of this conflict. Joab killed Absalom, against David’s orders, and confronted David over his subsequent preoccupation with Absalom’s death. In the course of David’s attempts to mend the wounds in the nation after Absalom’s coup, Joab lost his position as commander-in-chief to Amasa, another of David’s nephews, who had supported Absalom, and Joab also killed him. He then supported Adonijah.

If you’re confused, it’s OK, you have good reason. Anyway, Joab has a number of strikes against him. Abiathar the priest just has the one strike, his support of Adonijah, but that is enough to take him into early retirement, and thus simplify arrangements at the sanctuary; two senior priests is one too many. The requirement that Solomon take action against Shimei perhaps looks a little mean. The action of Adonijah in seeking to marry David’s hot caregiver looks at best stupid. He could hardly complain when Solomon reads his request as resembling Absalom’s action in sleeping with David’s secondary wives. It is tantamount to an announcement that he still aspires to taking David’s place.

So the way things work out issues from the stupidity of the people around Solomon, but it also issues from Solomon’s own wisdom—at least David urges him to exercise his wisdom in the way he deals with the people David mentions. Solomon needs to be a person who reacts to people’s action with insight and makes events work his way, who seizes the opportunities, makes things happen, knows how to get things done. His doing so issues in the happy result that potential threats for his throne all disappear. Yes, Solomon’s throne was securely established. Further, it happened without Solomon’s own hands getting stained with blood. Other people do his dirty work. Like David, he is Mr. Clean.

How is God involved in all these events? Perhaps God’s providential purpose is at work, but the story’s silence on this question is loud. That is all the more so when the storyteller reports many statements about God that other people make. David himself appeals to Solomon’s wisdom; he does not tell him to do what God says. Adonijah comments that Solomon’s accession to the throne is something that God brought about, but does he mean it? Solomon swears a solemn oath before God that he will have Adonijah executed and asks that God may punish him if he fails to do so; what does God think when listening to the oath? Solomon says that killing Joab as he stands before the altar will be the means of God’s exacting payment for the blood he shed; what does God think? He also prays that God’s peace may rest on David’s successors forever. Does God say yes? When Shimei breaks his parole to pursue two runaway servants who have gone to Gath and Solomon says that his execution will be God’s exacting payment for his wrongdoing (namely, his insulting David), is Solomon right? The nearest the storyteller comes to associating God with what happens is to comment that Solomon’s dismissal of Abiathar fulfilled God’s warning that Eli’s descendants would lose their position as priests (1 Samuel 3).

There is quite a contrast between the main body of this chapter, with its account of David’s reminders concerning action that needs taking and action that gets taken, and the chapter’s opening words (and the earlier portrait of David in his feebleness). David’s opening charge to Solomon is reminiscent of Moses’ charge to Israel just before the end of his life (Deuteronomy 31), God’s charge to Joshua as he becomes leader (Joshua 1), and Joshua’s own charge to Israel just before the end of his life (Joshua 23–24). Once again at this crucial moment of transition for the people and for the leader himself, the leader is given a commission to be strong and confident, an exhortation to stick by Moses’ teaching, and a promise that God will be faithful to him and that he will be successful. The four charges in fact summarize themes that run through the story from Deuteronomy through 2 Kings and provide keys to understanding the story as a whole. In this context, the phrase Moses’ teaching refers in particular to Deuteronomy, which provides the key to understanding the story that unfolds through Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings; hence the story can be called a Deuteronomistic History, a history showing how Deuteronomy’s teaching works itself out.

There was another charge to which Solomon was heir, God’s charge to David in 2 Samuel 7. It put the emphasis more on God’s promises to David and his successor(s) than on God’s challenge to obedience; it did not mention Moses’ teaching. There, while allowing for chastising David’s successor but not for casting him off, God declared that David’s household and monarchy would continue in perpetuity. Here David notes that this continuance will depend on his successors’ walking before God in truth. Leaders and people somehow have to hold onto both those ways of seeing the way God relates to us. God is absolutely committed to us, like a father and mother committed to their children. When their children defy them, the parents do not cast them off. Yet the children’s responsiveness is indispensible to the ongoing relationship. They cannot assume the relationship will continue satisfactorily if they flout their parents’ expectations. They imperil the relationship. The parents and the children live in the tension between these two facts (husbands and wives do the same, but our Western emphasis on the egalitarian nature of the marriage relationship makes marriage a less appropriate image for understanding our relationship with God). That is how the relationship between God and the kings or God and Israel will be.

1 KINGS 3:1–15

What Do You Most Want?

I used to ask a friend of mine from time to time, What would you like to do? The question would usually relate to concerts; I would outline possibilities to her, but she would usually ask me to decide. Just last week she protested that this was because she didn’t know enough to decide; It would be like me telling you something about the Old Testament, she said. I saw what she meant, but her hesitation deprived me of the pleasure of our doing something she wanted. I once heard a preacher declare that Jesus’ question to Bartimaeus in Mark 10:51, What do you want me to do for you, is the most devastatingly challenging question a person can be asked. Bartimaeus could reasonably have asked for some change (which was the reason he was by the roadside, like a beggar in the United States sitting by traffic lights where the cars have to stop), but he dares to ask for his sight, and he gets not only this gift of healing but the gift of following Jesus. Just a few verses previously, Jesus has asked two of his disciples the same question, and they have asked to sit on thrones either side of him in his glory. Disciples can have less insight than new converts.

Solomon gets asked the question What would you like me to do for you? and provides a model answer in the sense that it is the right answer given the situation he is in; the right answer for other peoples in other situations (such as Bartimaeus) might be different.

Yet the account of God’s appearing to Solomon and Solomon’s making this request comes in a context that attaches some irony to it. The very first thing we are told about Solomon once he is secure on his throne is that he made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt. There are several reasons why this is a troublesome statement. In Western culture, with our romantic view of marriage, we will be offended that marriage becomes subordinate to politics in this way, though I doubt if there is