Monarchy and Religious Institution in Israel Under Jeroboam I.

• Author: Hurowitz, Victor Avigdor

Jeroboam I ranks among the arch-villains of the Bible. The Deuteronomic History (hereafter DtrH) portrays him as a divisive, rebellious idolater, blamed for the downfall and eventual destruction of the Kingdom of Israel over which he was divinely appointed to rule. Wesley I. Toews, in a revised Princeton Theological Seminary dissertation, pleads Jeroboam's cause, claiming that he was an innocent victim, maligned by an anachronistic, revisionist historian. According to Toews, Jeroboam was not even a religious reformer, let alone rebel, but a conservative restorer and preserver of ancient beliefs and practices. Religion among the northern tribes was traditionally focused on El, a deity depicted in taurine imagery, worshipped through taurine images indicating the god's presence, and revered as the God of the Exodus. Jeroboam did no more than extend royal patronage to a venerated and legitimate cult. During his lifetime and for two centuries afterward he went uncensured for his actions, for there was nothing to condemn. The oldest recoverable accounts of his reign do not denigrate him, and even such fervent YHWH activists as Jehu and Elijah spared his calves. It was the prophet Hosea who started the diatribe against the cult he nurtured, and this because of his own associations of the calf worship with other types of cultic, social, and political misconduct. What Hosea started, DtrH finished, being responsible for the extant form of the account of Jeroboam's reign as well as for charges leveled against the king throughout Kings. Later biblical and post-biblical historians simply followed DtrH in perpetuating the anti-Jeroboam line.

The thesis and major thrust of this monograph are not particularly innovative or surprising. The contribution lies, rather, in a sustained evaluation of all the relevant textual evidence and a systematic attempt to trace the process by which a benign cultic program developed and then fell out of favor. Toews musters an impressive array of biblical, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence for the prominence of El (and absence of Baal) in the religion of pre-monarchic Israel. He also shows convincingly that the complex of stories relating to Jeroboam (1 Kings 1318) was, in its pristine form, uncritical of him. Biblical materials relevant to the temples of Bethel and Dan (Exodus 32; Judges 17-18) are shown to be late and not indicative of contemporary attitudes. As an advocate, Toews has defended his client admirably.

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