Troublesome Topic: WHY WAS REHOBOAM THE ONE TO SUCCEED SOLOMON AS KING?

Of all Solomon’s children, we are only given the name of three of them; two of them are girls and the other is the son that followed Solomon as king. The name of that son is not mentioned until he became king.

I believe that if the Shulammite had given birth to a son, he would have been the next king. I also think that the two daughters that are mentioned by name were most likely the children of the Shulammite. Therefore, I am convinced that Solomon and Shuly only had two children, both of them were girls.

In the end, it was Rehoboam, Solomon’s first son, and the son of the Ammonite princess, Naamah, who succeeded Solomon as king (I Kings 12:14). I think Solomon did this in an effort to get back at God for taking away his favorite wife. The inspired writer of the biblical text knew this choice would be a problem and wanted the reader to see it as a problem. It is significant that the I Kings passage mentions the foreign mother of King Rehoboam twice.

Right after Rehoboam became king, most of the tribes of Israel formed their own country under the leadership of Jeroboam.

The biblical text tells us that Rehoboam, son of Solomon, and the people of Judah “walked in the ways of David and Solomon for three years” (II Chron 11:17). Notice that this casts Solomon in a positive light, meaning that his apostacy only characterized the last few years of his life. Then we read this in II Chron 12:1 “It happened that when the kingdom had been established and Rehoboam had become strong, he forsook the law of YHVH and all Israel with him.”

Why the change?

When Jeroboam took the northern tribes and made his own country, he quickly realized that he needed to do something to keep his people from being dependent on the temple in Jerusalem for all aspects of their religion. So he set up two idols, one in the south and one in the north of his country, and told the people to worship them and not go down to the temple in Jerusalem. He also established a priesthood for those idols, leaving the priests of God out in the cold.

According to II Chronicles 11:13-16, seeing what was going on, the Priests of God, the Levites who took their turns serving in the temple, and lots of God-fearing people, moved from the northern 10 tribes to the southern tribes to be close to the temple. It was the influx of these righteous people that caused things to go in a positive direction for about 3 years (II Chron 11:17). However, was this a spiritual revival or just political positioning and economic maneuvering on the part of Rehoboam? I think it was politically motivated. As long as it was politically advantageous in order to keep drawing people from the north to the south, Rehoboam pretended to follow YHVH, but once everyone who was inclined to move to his kingdom had done so, he showed his true colors and made an abrupt change to following idols. It is the abruptness of his change that makes me think those were his true colors and the first three years he was just doing what was necessary in order to firmly establish himself as the unquestioned leader of his kingdom.

Therefore, it almost seems like Solomon purposefully put a son on the throne who would predictably lead the nation to self-destruction, through tribal division, heavy taxation, and idolatry.

It seems like Solomon was saying: “If God can hurt me so deeply, I will hurt God back. I’m so angry at God I’ll purposefully send the children of Israel into idolatry.” He thought he could threaten God by shaking his shriveled fist in God’s face.

 Although sending the Israelites into idolatry was the primary way, I think there were a few other ways Solomon thought he was hurting God:

1) the child (Rehoboam) was illegitimate, having been produced by a sexual relationship which did not honor God, and making him king would legitimize and promote sexual promiscuity among the general population,

2) he was born to a foreign woman, who, at the time of sexual intercourse, was not an Israelite, nor a follower of God,

3) he was raised by a mother who (in my opinion) had been forced to convert to Judaism but who had never been changed on the inside; she never stopped believing in the gods of her childhood, 4) making Rehoboam king was a tribute to evil itself, represented in the name Naamah, just like the daughter of wicked Lamech in Genesis 4; evil always promises to be “pleasant” (which is what Naamah means) but turns out to be “bitter.”

In my theory, I find it interesting that Solomon ended up honoring the one whose seduction he had called “more bitter than death” (Ecc 7:26) In an attempt to hurt God, he was willing to honor the woman who had hurt him the most.