The King After God: Perdition and the Law

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When considering Deuteronomy 17:18-19, there seems to be one specific king the events of whose life highlighted the conditions of the passage like fulfillment of a prophecy. Around 638 B.C. an eight-year-old child by the name of Josiah rose into power in the kingdom of Judah. Now someone coming to the throne at this age can give us the impression that the kingdom is at the verge of destruction, finding no one else fit to occupy the throne, desperately holds on to its tradition and gambles its everything on this one in whom is believed to be from the line of its best king. Yet by a slim margin there is that chance that the kingdom may be on a path to glory. Knowing the God whom the Israelites worshiped, Who split the Red Sea and delivered His people from certain slaughter, slim chances were His specialty. And with an eight-year-old Josiah, son and grandson of two of the most evil monarchs Judah has ever had, God was about to turn the tide of corruption upon itself through the relentless fury of this young king.

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Unlike his grandfather King Manasseh who prostituted the Israelite culture to the paganism of its neighbors, and his father King Amon who exceeded his father’s guilt (2 Chronicles 33:23), Josiah was raised in righteousness. In 2 Chronicles 34:2, it says that, “He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and walked in the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left.” And by then he was only eight. At age 16, “he began to seek the God of his father David” (34:3). This became the vital four-year spiritual foundation that would fuel his mission to wage war on the paganism that was corroding the cultural integrity of Judah. At 20, his twelfth year on the throne, “he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of high places, Asherah poles, carved idols and cast images” (Ibid.). With such violence, he “cut to pieces,” “smashed,” “broke,” “scattered” (verse 4), “burned,” “crushed…to powder” and “tore down” (verse 7) every symbol, altar, edifice, and bone of those who served as priests of the Baals and Asheras in his entire kingdom. Six years later, to complete the spiritual purification of his land, he ordered the repair of God’s Temple in Jerusalem. Apparently years of religious-cultural mutation had added a lot of changes in the Temple. The common impression of a reader reading about the Israelite kings, like Manasseh, who “did evil in the eyes of the Lord” is that when they worshiped their false gods in the Temple of God, they merely pushed in a few altars and some variously sized statues, added new draperies and probably decommissioned some menorahs and stuck them in the Temple warehouse. This is not what happened. Manasseh alone ruled a long fifty-five years (2 Chronicles 33:1) and in that period he renovated the Temple to incorporate his pagan pantheon. This required alterations in the original Temple plan to accommodate additions, probably promote and block some “positive” and “negative energies” coming in and going out of the building. You know what I mean. For a total of fifty-eight years, half a century, the Temple of God gained a new look, starkly alien from the Temple King David planned and which his son Solomon built. And it was Josiah’s self-appointed task—as far as he was spiritually concerned, that is—to restore the Temple to its original holiness.

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It could have been that Josiah's grandfather King Manasseh and father King Amon were trying to remodel the Temple of God to resemble a Mesopotamian ziggurat as during their lifetime they tried to identify themselves with their neighbors by adopting their religious culture and push the Jehovah away from Jehovic Israel.

The account is told in 2 Chronicles 34:9 to 13. One of the expressions of faith and rededication to God was the immense unanimous financial support given by the “people of Manasseh, Ephraim and the entire remnant of Israel and from all the people of Judah and Benjamin and the inhabitants of Jerusalem” (2 Chronicles 34:9). Trust was another demonstration of their approval for their king and his mission to restore the Jehovah-centered society of Israel. According to the tenth and eleventh verses of our passage, the people entrusted the money they set aside for Temple restoration “to the men appointed to supervise the work on the Lord’s temple,” who, in turn, “paid the workers who repaired and restored the temple” and those who purchased the replacement stone and the timber. The workers worked in absolute honesty and diligence over the finances and in their specified jobs (verses 12 to 13).

The degradation of the Temple could have been externally as simple as the one on the left, with the Mesopotamian genies drawn at the facade above the door, or as massive as the Assyrian model below. In any case, alterations did take place that new materials needed to be shipped in to replace the old and add what Manasseh and Amon's specifications eliminated.

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The Temple of God had been through massive alteration and corruption that new “dressed stone, and timber for joists and beams” had to be purchased to replace the ones that “the kings of Judah had allowed to fall into ruin” (verse 11). In other words, King Josiah and his team of appointees were to undertake a great extreme makeover, spiritual edition. This was the juncture when God plays the father of the parable who runs to meet his homecoming son whom he thought he had lost forever (Luke 15:20). After an unremitting ten-year campaign that spiritually and socially sterilized Israel for God, He was about to perform His operation through a string of events that led to the rediscovery of an important artifact. Hidden somewhere in a cabinet or a niche or a chamber that had been bricked or boarded up, gathering layers of dust and forgotten in the long backslidden years, “the Book of the Law of the Lord that had been given through Moses” (verse 14) finally surfaces.

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History views this episode as the most crucial point of Josiah’s campaign. There is, however, some controversy concerning how the Mosaic volumes were applied to the cultural revolution. According to 2 Chronicles 34:30, Josiah read the Law to “the men of Judah, the people of Jerusalem, the priests and Levites—all the people from the least to the greatest” and created a wave of reawakening throughout the entire nation. Israelites came from every corner of the kingdom with a compelling heart hunger for the word of God. But the word of God that Josiah read to them, according to some scholars, was actually a new version which he had revised to match the temper of his generation.

It is agreed that the Law of Moses was rediscovered at some secluded part of the Temple. Interpretations will arise, however, in the passage where the king’s secretary Shaphan “read from it in the presence of the king” (verse 18). Here, Josiah, understanding from the original manuscripts, decided to present God’s word and culture that his generation could easily understand. With the expertise of his priests and Scriptural specialists, the endeavor was blessed in the form of a book that later came to be known as the Book of Deuteronomy.

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According to experts in Scripture history, there are four major narratives of the Old Testament; two of these are called the “J” and “E” documents. The “J” document is so named because the name “Jehovah” is used in every appearance of “God.” It is the oldest of all written documents, dating back to the ninth century B.C., during the time of Jeroboam, and was penned in the southern kingdom of Judah.

With the “E” document, God is referred to as “Elohim.” It was written in the eighth century B.C., this time in the northern kingdom of Israel, about a hundred years after the “J.” It is believed that the “E” was produced to rival the “J,” which was housed in the Temple in Jerusalem.

It was these two documents that Josiah saw the need to harmonize. If the “J” called God “Jehovah” and the “E” referred to Him as “Elohim,” Josiah’s new work formulated the new concept of a “Jehovah Elohim” for “Lord God,” thus creating the “JE” document. The king’s team also added their own expert interpretation on some portions of the document which they believed would boost new generation understanding. This may explain the fact that the passage in Deuteronomy 17:18 to 20 makes an uncanny reference to Josiah’s act and fueling principle:

“When [the king] takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law, taken from that of the priests, who are Levites. It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his brothers and turn from the law to the right or to the left.”

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The late great Jewish historian Max I. Dimont noted the “good fortune” that brought the rise of Josiah in the hour of Judah’s most critical crisis [Jews, God and History, p.65]. Before he came into power at the age of eight, Judah had been immersed in fifty-seven straight years of religious apostasy which seemed to be irreversible. The spiritual and cultural amalgamation with its pagan neighbors had buried the Israelite religion deep beneath layers of defiance and corruption. King Manasseh and later his son King Amon had deliberately torn away the Jehovah from the kingdom’s culture and spliced in His place the Baals, Asherahs, “all the starry hosts” (2 Chronicles 33:5), “sorcery, divination and witchcraft” (verse 6). During this period, a generation was born knowing “neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel” (Judges 2:10). In this new age, the god they knew wore a pointy hat holding in one hand a slender tree that ended in a spearhead, a raised club in another, and a man dangling by his hair in another. The god they knew had a female consort who held in her hand a phallic scepter, the symbol of the life that allegedly issued from her, from her breasts where flowed eternal sustenance, and every time the three-armed god goes to bed with her—and every time meant all the time.

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In 722 B.C., Judah watched in silent horror as the Assyrians descended upon Israel and carried away whatever was left of its populace. During that time, the righteous king Hezekiah ruled the southern kingdom. For twenty-nine years, Judah depended on the Lord for protection from the threat and taunts of Sennacherib. It was a time of great fear, great obedience, and great miracles, including how an angel of God armed with a sword descended into the Assyrian siege camp and killed "a hundred and eighty-five thousand" soldiers (2 Kings 19:35), forcing the loud-mouthed Sennacherib to break camp and scamper back to Nineveh (verse 36). The Bible seems to draw some humor in this in that it even notes that he "stayed there." But it was for a reason. In the same way as he drew delight in humiliating God when he tried to bleach Hezekiah and Jerusalem with his murderous intimidations, God took His turn and determined the flow of event of his life:

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"One day, while he (Sennacherib) was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisrok, his sons Adrammelek and Sharezer killed him with the sword" (verse 37).

But after Hezekiah died, his son Manasseh ruled the kingdom for fifty-five years corrupting the land with his idolatry. It could have been worse if his successor Amon was allowed to rule longer than two years; probably God saw how bleak the future was for the kingdom so He took him out.

In a generation that knew not God, a boy king arose who began to seek God in the years when teenage sexual curiosity was supposed to be consuming that stage of his youth. Instead, he thought that if the kingdom kept on going on its religious and cultural course the way it did from the days of his grandfather Manasseh, Judah would end up with the same judgment that befell the northern kingdom of Israel. And if someone like Josiah and any righteous prophet would view Judah by that time, he would doubt whether Israel was really exiled at all, or at least its spirit of uncleanness had spilled itself crazy upon the kingdom. God was gracious to David, to Jerusalem, to Judah that He provided the kingdom with a king like Josiah.

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Josiah, the boy king who changed the course of Judah and provided the a new document for the coming generation of believers would understand and life according to: The Book of Deuteronomy.

[That was fun! All those modeling and remodeling and back to the old model. Well, didn't I tell you there was gonna be more? What disappoints me at this point is this large white space beside the last pic. Hope you don't mind, though. There's more to come, and it's gonna have more King Saul in it! Excited? You know I am! So, till then, stay tuned! Hey, that's new.]

The King After God: All the King's Wives

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In the seventeenth verse of Deuteronomy 17, God’s guidelines for choosing a king, firstly stipulates that the candidate “must not take many wives.” Now, we all know of one king who had failed this law, keeping a total of “seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines” (1 Kings 11:3). King Saul was known to have had one wife, a woman named Ahinoam (1 Samuel 14:50); and a concubine named Rizpah. Back in those days, it was more or less prevalent among kings and nobles to keep at least one partner other than the common-law wife. It was not the rule and much less was it a legal stipulation for a man to have one; but because of society’s permissiveness on the matter, the Law of Moses later regulated the practice by providing certain rights to the concubine, her children, her benefactor, including a certain protocol that must be observed in obtaining a mistress (Deuteronomy 21:10-14). Regardless, however, of the toleration and management imposed by the Law over the custom, a part of the Scriptures spoke against concubinage and it was doubtless that there were those who believed, citing it as a source of trouble based on certain cases in the lives of the patriarchs. It was from this contingent that held the incompatibility of the concubinage part of culture to Christianity.

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An Example from the Life of Abraham. Abraham, for instance, kept several concubines—Genesis 25:6, and had sons by them—but none gave him great deal of complication than Sarah's Egyptian maidservant named Hagar. The first snag that this arrangement is liable to promote is between wife and mistress. Hagar was an Egyptian maidservant who was dragged into the mess spilled by Abraham and Sarah when they attempted to facilitate God’s promise of a son and heir (Genesis 15:40). Knowing the fact that their bodies were “as good as dead” (Romans 4:19), they resorted to the custom of impregnating the Sarah’s slave (Genesis 16:3). And out of that arrangement, Hagar bore Ishmael; a development that changed the attitudes of both Hagar and Sarah toward each other. The fourth verse in Genesis 16 says that Hagar began to despise her mistress. Sarah, armed with her legitimate right as wife and Hagar’s owner, coupled with an embittered soul, it was easy for her to mistreat her and send the slave running away (verse 6). But in a desert road, God meets Hagar and tells her to “go back to [her] mistress and submit to her” (verse 9), with a promise. On account of the respect God had for Abraham, He assured to greatly increase the progeny of Abraham from her body “that they will be too numerous to count” (verse 10).

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Hagar did as the Lord commanded and returned to Sarah. She gave birth to Ishmael while she stayed with her mistress (verse 16). Little more than a decade later, Sarah got pregnant and gave birth to the awaited heir, Isaac (21:1-5). At this point, Sarah compelled Abraham to divorce Hagar and disinherit Ishmael by sending her away (Genesis 21:10). The matter, according to the Scriptures, “distressed Abraham greatly” (verse 11). 

An Example from the Life of Jacob. It distressed the patriarch greatly “because it concerned his son” (Ibid.). One observable problem in ancient concubinage is seen in the conflict among the offspring. In Genesis 21:8 to 10, the sight of Ishmael teasing Isaac infuriated Sarah prompting her to banish the servant child and her mother. And that ended a sibling conflict which could have grown worse in time, such as what happened among Jacob’s eleven sons when their jealousy of Joseph sent him into Egyptian bondage. The passage in Genesis 35:23 to 26 outlines Jacob’s family. In order of marriage, Leah was the first; and from this union brought Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun. From Leah also came Dinah, Jacob’s only daughter (30:21). Rachel, though Jacob loved her first, fell second to give him Joseph and Benjamin. By her maidservant Bilhah came Dan and Naphtali. Leah, too, offered her maidservant Zilpah and from her came Gad and Asher.

Examples from the Life of the Israelite Kings

The first three Israelite kings were not from this contingent. King Saul was known to have kept a wife and a concubine, a fact we either know little or care little about. Saul’s wife was Ahinoam (1 Samuel 14:50), from whom came Jonathan, Ish-Bosheth (who went by the names Ishvi, Esh-Baal, and possibly Abinadab, 31:2), and Malki-Shua (verse 49); and the daughters Merab and Michal, the princess whom Saul gave to David as wife at the cost of two hundred Philistine foreskins (1 Samuel 18:27). The concubine was Rizpah (2 Samuel 3:7,21:8,10,11).While the trouble that the women entangled in concubinage could churn out is well established in the consciousness of the Israelite, Saul’s disobedience had instead created for his partners the lifelong pain of losing their sons in tragic deaths that could have well been avoided from the start. We have already known how in 1 Samuel 31, Ahinoam lost her three sons in a battle against the Philistines on Mount Gilboa. Rizpah lost her two sons, Armoni and Mephibosheth (2 Samuel 21:8), to the Gibeonites who had them immolated for a mandate defied by—you guessed it—Saul.

Rizpah, Saul's Concubine, in the Middle of Saul's Transgression with the Gibeonites

The story in 2 Samuel 21:1 to 14 tells that Saul, “in his zeal of Israel and Judah” (verse 2) attempted to do what Joshua centuries before him would not: “annihilate the Gibeonites.”

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The Gibeonites, according to 2 Samuel 21:2, were an ancient race of Amorites who, in Joshua 9, extracted Israelite protection through a cunning ruse. In verses 4 to 6 and 9 to 14, they successfully deceived the Israelites into believing that they were worn and vulnerable travelers from some far distant land drawn to where the Israelites were “because of the fame of the Lord” (verse 9). Flattered it seemed by the testimony posed by the Gibeonites that Joshua and the Israelites forgot the fundamental procedure of inquiring of the Lord (verses 14 and 15) and on went the decision to establish a treaty of peace with these people , unwittingly disobeying God’s mandate never to make any covenant with them (Exodus 23:32).

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The sanctity of their survival sealed by an oath invoking the Name of the Lord demanded the lives of seven of Saul’s male descendants with their bodies left unburied and exposed “before the Lord” (verse 6). David had five sons of Saul’s daughter Merab, along with the two sons of Rizpah, delivered to the Gibeonites and immolated (2 Samuel 21:8 to 9). When the Gibeonites were done with them, Rizpah came and stood by the bodies of her two sons, spread sackcloth on a rock, and, enduring night and day and the pouring rain, scared away scavenging birds and other wild animals that tried to approach the corpses. This prompted King David to have the remains of Rizpah and Merab’s sons gathered and given a proper burial. Along with this, he claimed from the people of Jabesh Gilead the bones of Saul and Jonathan and buried them in the tomb of Saul’s father Kish in Benjamin (verses 12 to 14).

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Her name appears four times in the Bible. In 2 Samuel 3:7, her name gets dragged into a scandal cooked up by Ish-Bosheth in an attempt to derail the growing influence exerted by Abner, the king’s general and uncle, in their clan. As we already know, King Saul by this time was already unfit to rule. His obsession to murder David through the influence of intermittent demonic oppression and possession and the Prophet Samuel’s public declaration that God had rejected him as king (1 Samuel 15:23,26,28) were factors enough for many to seek other leaders in place of Saul. One of these was David. Another was Abner, at least in Ish-Bosheth’s interpretation of how Abner had been flexing his influence in Saul’s clan. It could have been that Abner had been trying to gain the clan’s support to install him as king and thereby keep the supremacy over all Israel. Ish-Bosheth’s scandalous accusation, however, may have irredeemably shattered Abner’s delicate prospects to gain the major trust of the clan, so he opts for the next best thing: a defection over to David’s side. 

Saul was a normal reflection of his society as he escaped the technicality of taking “many wives” (Deuteronomy 17:17). He had one wife and one other wife, and that was it. But how many is “many”? When God transferred the anointing as king, He was risking landing it on someone who had a starkly illicit control over his raging hormones. 

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David's Life with his Wives

As we read of David’s story, we can notice that the stages of his life were landmarked by the women he loved. Michal, King Saul’s princess, would cover David’s early rise to popularity; Abigail would be during the stage when he was eluding Saul’s murderous pursuit; Bathsheba, who would mark the zenith of David’s life as by then the undisputed king of Israel; and Abishag, a Shunammite girl given to him by his servants during the twilight years of his life to attend and take care of him (1 Kings 1:2), since by then his senility had robbed him of the ability to basically care for himself (verse 1).

The "Abigail Age of David's Life": “This part of my life is called, ‘Running.’ And I wanna thank my wife Abigail for all of the support and prayer; and, of course, God without whose blessing and guidance my head would be stuck at the edge of a royal spear right now!”

But even aside from these ladies, David was known to have married some lesser known wives like Ahinoam of Jezreel (2 Samuel 3:2), Maacah daughter of Talmai king of Geshur (verse 3), Haggith (verse 4), Abital, and Eglah (verse 5). He was also known to have kept a harem of concubines. In 2 Samuel 15:16, he was known to have left ten of them to take care of the palace when he escaped Jerusalem before his usurping son Absalom could take over the city.

"This part of my life is called, ‘Being Stupid’!” It was the day the king came to his rooftop, saw the bathing Bathsheba, and was conquered. But to what price?

The number of the partners David kept was not exactly the direct answer to our question as to how many did Deuteronomy 17:17 mean by “many wives.” After Saul’s death, David’s life changed. The ease, popularity, and prosperity facilitated the growth of his family in a way that he added more wives who bore more children, sadly, beyond his ability to discipline. As a result, the privileged royal lifestyle and the unchecked excesses of unrestraint swelled into a deposit that encrusted their God consciousness, like what led to the chain of events involving Amnon, Tamar, and Absalom (2 Samuel 13). According to the chart provided in 2 Samuel 3:2-5, Amnon, David’s “firstborn” was born of Ahinoam of Jezreel (verse 2); Tamar and Absalom were siblings from Maacah, the Geshurite princess (verse 3). 

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One of the great scandals of David’s life began with his desire for Bathsheba. The lust of a night as he watched the woman bathing turned into fornication, which resulted into her getting pregnant. In his attempt to cover up his blunder, he recalled Bathsheba’s husband Uriah from the battlefield and tried to get him to sleep with her, which even in his most inebriated state would not violate the code of a soldier in a time of battle, which ignites the frustration of the king, which leads him to pen a directive to his general Joab to march Uriah into the part of the battlefield where the fighting is thickest and to abandon him there. Uriah successfully hand-carried the sealed letter to Joab and with great regret, the latter obeys. The battle ended with Uriah as casualty, a victim not of war but of a carefully meditated plot to murder him.

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It could be considered, therefore, that the “many” expressed in Deuteronomy 17:17 is the point that goes beyond a man’s ability to control his dependents and keep them from self-destructing. In the example that involved Amnon, Tamar, and Absalom, it presented David’s family self-destructing immorally.

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Abishag was one described in 1 Kings 1:4 as “very beautiful,” the result of a nationwide search for “a young virgin to attend the king and take care of him,” who “can lie beside him” to keep the king warm (verse 1). The “beauty search” proved to be a great success in Abishag as she was faithful in her task and even maintained her virginity throughout the period she took care and waited on the king (verse 4). If she had ever served a master younger and other than David at another time, that master would call that point of his life, “Being Happy.”

Solomon's Polygamy and its Possible Egyptian Origin

The penchant for the lovely ladies passed on from David to his son Solomon whose fame was built, among others, on the plain fact that he loved “seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines” (1 Kings 11:3), maintaining an unbroken violation of God’s condition in Deuteronomy 17:17. Yet if there were any value to virtue in this aspect of his life, it was the fulfillment of the second part of the passage: “…or his heart will be led astray” (Ibid.). And true enough, “his wives led him astray” (1 Kings 11:3).

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In our recent article, The King After God: All the King's Horses, we have suspected that King Solomon amassed a great number of horses and chariots in emulating the Pharaoh of Egypt, whose collection was renown for its quantity and quality throughout the region. War horses and chariots, however, were not the only array he wanted in his treasure trove. The kings of Egypt were known to have loved multiple wives and concubines. Ramses II, said to be Moses' contemporary, was reported to have kept as many as fifty wives, and from them the famed Nefertari was chosen to become his queen, the chief of all his female consorts. With the record we have available today, we may well say that Solomon surpassed Ramses II in this respect, by a great measure—try lining up fifty against a thousand wives and concubines! One comparable element the Israelite king did not adopt was the Egyptian custom of marrying the immediate family member.


After Nefertari, Ramses was known to have loved their daughter Isetnofret. From this union came her successor Bintanath. After Bintanath, the Pharaoh chose another daughter he had by Nefertari, Meritamen. Her sister by the same mother, Nebettawy, took her place. Nearing the end of his life, seeming to have run out of daughters to desire after, he chose Maathorneferure who, scholars suspect, had been either another daughter or his sister.

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It is called incest, and the Israelite law which the king and his people were to equally obey severely prohibited such a practice. Leviticus 20:17 called it "a disgrace" if a man marries a sister, "the daughter of either his father or his mother." The law prescribed banishment to anyone guilty of this "disgrace," as the commission of the act discriminated the offender from his God-authored culture. If there was a law that Solomon was not as desperate to violate as gaining for himself a thousand wives, it was experimenting with incest.

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But Solomon went for the foreign gals, specifically from the very nations God warned the Israelites never to intermarry with (1 Kings 11:2). And in this matter, he not only modeled after the king of Egypt but even perfected this aspect of his foreign hero.

Unlike his father David and King Saul before him, Solomon was not known for his prowess in the battlefield. But it was during his time when the kingdom of Israel experienced great peace "on all sides" (1 Kings 4:24). Countries as far as the Euphrates River to the borders of Egypt brought tribute to Solomon and were his subjects all his life.

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Though God never sanctioned its arrangement, polygamy and polygyny were acts that had been with man from the dateless past. Solomon's tremendous numerical buildup of wives can be understood from the diplomatic relationship he established and maintained with the nations around him. One can deduce that the peace that marked his reign, described in 1 Kings 4:23–25, may have resulted from accepting wives customarily offered by the kings who negotiated for peace. The arrangement of marriage, therefore, was a significant motion to bind an alliance between parties involved, a mutual sincere reciprocation of goodwill. 

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Even as late as the Colonial history, the marriage of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile in A.D. 1469 united their two of their Spanish kingdoms and established their government as a world power.

The Bible's First Bigamist and his Role in Advancing the Cainite Culture

That was for peace. But the role of marriage serves more than peace. In Genesis 4:19 a man by the name of Lamech expanded the influence of the house of Cain, Adam's cursed firstborn and the Bible's first murderer, by rapidly populating the vast stretches of wild lands untamed by the people of his time. How he facilitated this was through the expedience of a bigamous marriage.
 
Lamech was the first known bigamist in the Bible. It was his expression of the loose sexual element that marked the Cainite culture that lured the young restless men of Adam's house, the "sons of God" of Genesis 6:2. It was also the best way to promote a counter culture. In the time of Adam, it was his house that dominated the planet. The culture which he promoted and which the world almost automatically embraced was the Godly lifestyle authored by God Himself. Except by Cain, however. 

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The blessings that came with a righteous life refused to apply to Cain after he murdered his brother Abel. In Genesis 4:11 to 12, his ability to tame crops was nullified by a curse that God slapped on his life. In spite of this, God continued to be gracious by allowing him to live, though wandering the face of the earth (Genesis 4:12 and 14). It did not mean that Cain gained immortal life, impervious to hunger, thirst, exhaustion or pain. He still had to contend with these but without his talent to farm the earth. He needed a new way of living, and in the ensuing verses, it becomes apparent that he did find a way, a compromise that worked around the loss of his talent. In the sixteenth verse, he lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden. The birth of his firstborn Enoch is the first evidence that the new lifestyle he adopted was working. In the seventeenth verse, he gains a following, a considerable one as he establishes the first known city in the Bible. At this point, his pattern of survival was getting noticed and gaining the respect and renown as a workable alternative to the Adamic culture, though at this point it was not seen as an alternative but as an enhancer of certain aspects of life. Four generations later, the Cainite culture explodes from being a minor global player to end the Adamic age and the Godliness it upheld.

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The greatest exponent of the Cainite culture, next to Cain, was Lamech. The passage in Genesis 4:19 says that he was married to two women: Adah and Zillah. This multiple marriage was not only responsible for enlarging the increments of population, but out of it came the three fathers of invention that changed the way people lived forever.

"Adah gave birth to Jabal; he was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all who play stringed instruments and pipes. Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of  bronze and iron" (Genesis 4:20-22).  

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In Psalm 127:3, it says, "Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him." In the next verse it explains one benefit: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in court" (verse 4 to 5).

Without the Lord, however, to bless with a quiver full children to contend with their opponents, it seemed like Cain's house was bound nowhere but oblivion. Cain himself took only one wife. It was Lamech who conceived of the daring experiment and accomplished by the flesh what the hand of God could grant.

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The psalmist disclosed one benefit of having a large number of offspring in your family. In ancient times, a large family meant power. Children did not survive the starvation that followed a poor man's austere condition; those, however, of a lavishly wealthy family not only did but had more to give and help their neighbor. A wealth of strong male children was a family's insurance that secured its wealth in good hands.

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Rehoboam, the First Non-Israelite King?

If David's polygamous marriage wrought shocking scandals and disasters in his life, Solomon’s wives and concubines produced an array of interesting contenders to the throne after him, including a half-Israelite, half-Ammonite forty-one-year-old by the name of Rehoboam. It was through Rehoboam that the Israelite kingdom, which kings Saul, David, and Solomon, took painstaking care in establishing all their lives, split into two with the Northern part made up of ten tribes unilaterally slipping into apostasy, and the Southern part preserved for the descendants of David to rule.

Rehoboam too took for himself wives and concubines. But unlike the complicated marriages of his immediate two predecessors, the Bible attributes no problems stemming from his eighteen wives and sixty concubines (2 Chronicles 11:21). He did not love them equally, though, for there was one whom he treated with greater favor: Absalom’s daughter Maacah, who must have been specially beautiful if she took after her father who in his time was the most flawlessly handsome man in all Israel (2 Samuel 14:25). From his union with Maacah came Abijah, a favorite he personally groomed above all his other twenty-eight sons (2 Chronicles 11:21). Out of all the disasters that occurred during his reign, Abijah proved to be Rehoboam’s greatest success.

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There may be, however, some discrepancy concerning the Abijah of 2 Chronicles 11:20 and 22 from the Abijah of 13:2. Although extra-Biblical references make no difference between the two, a reader trekking the abovementioned passages may readily differentiate the first Abijah being the son of “Maacah daughter of Absalom” (verse 20) from the second Maacah of 13:2, “a daughter of Uriel of Gibeah.” The dilemma here would therefore concern Abijah’s mother Maacah. Other reliable translations render the word “daughter” of 13:2 as “granddaughter” instead. The man Uriel of Gibeah may have been Maacah’s maternal grandfather. But without looking any further than 1 Kings 15:2, Maacah was identified as the “daughter of Abishalom,” "Abishalom" a variant of “Absalom,” meaning “father of peace.” Later in the tenth verse, Maacah daughter of Abishalom became  grandmother to Abijah’s successor, Asa.

But while Asa turned out to be a righteous man of God, Maacah found her niche later in life as a pagan “queen mother” (verse 13) for the goddess Ashera. In accordance to the cultural reform instituted by Asa, the king “deposed his grandmother Maacah from her position as queen mother” (2 Chronicles 15:16).

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Abijah, the Only Righteousness from Rehoboam's Multitude of Wrong

Rehoboam first placed Abijah in a prominent position as “chief prince” (2 Chronicles 11:22). It was not a bad decision, in fact, verse 23 says that “he acted wisely.” He spread out his sons to settle various districts of Judah and Benjamin and provided for them lavishly. Among the commodities he provided were wives: “He gave them abundant provisions and took many wives for them.”

The love Rehoboam devoted to Maacah radiated to Abijah who honored that love with a towering respect for his father. In 2 Chronicles 13:7, he defended his father’s honor when he faced Rehoboam’s archenemy, Jeroboam king of Israel:

“Some worthless scoundrels gathered around him and opposed Rehoboam son of Solomon when he was young and indecisive and not strong enough to resist him.”

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Abijah turned out to be a God-fearing king with an impregnable faith that held God as his leader (verse 12). He came up to Jeroboam with an army of 400,000 against the latter’s 800,000, which got subdued “because (Abijah) relied on the Lord, the God of their fathers” (verse 18). In the verses that followed it is said that Abijah wrested some important towns and villages from Jeroboam’s control and that Jeroboam, after this event, never regained power again during the time of Abijah (verse 19 to 20). The king of Judah, however, “grew in strength” and acquired for himself fourteen wives and by them had twenty-two sons and sixteen daughters (verse 21). In our explanation of “many wives,” we can have some liberty in saying that Abijah’s—and Rehoboam’s—polygamy was within the limits of his ability to control. From the family line touched by Maacah, daughter of Absalom, son of David, Abijah chose Asa, whose great reforms in Judah brought peace throughout the kingdom for three decades (2 Chronicles 11:5 to 6).

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The King After God: All the King's Horses

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In Deuteronomy 17:16, God warned the future king against setting his heart in amassing a great number of horses for himself. Apparently, horses had been a great obsession among ancient royalty. As history will testify, the horse by this time had just been added to military science and, oh, how it revolutionized the way man made war. It was therefore easy for a king to lose sight of God as the Source of his victory and focus instead on his array of war horses and get self-deceived and call himself invincible.

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Of all the countries singled out for Israel never to establish any trade agreement in exchange for its horses, God zeroed in on Egypt. He cautioned, “The king…must not…make the people return to Egypt to get more of them (great numbers of horses), for the Lord has told you, ‘You are not to go back that way again’” (Deuteronomy 17:16). In principle, an ancient king owned everything within the limits of his realm. But while he would dismissively allow his subjects to claim property of items within and surrounding their households, only he had the right to assert ownership of the military. And the item closest to his heart was the horses of his cavalry.

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The king of Egypt owned a cavalry so celebrated of the terror it brought in the battlefield to its breathtaking beauty that captures the fancy of romantic splendor, as sung in Songs of Solomon 1:9: “I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots” (King James Version). Because it owned the greatest army of fighting horses in the Near East, many nations chose to ally themselves with Egypt, among which later included Israel. Around 600 B.C. the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah decided it had enough of Babylonian dominance and sent envoys to Egypt “to get horses and a large army” (Ezekiel 17:15). In other words, Judah turned to Egypt to help trounce the proud Babylonian rising tide. Centuries before this, King David made his decision to “trust in the name of our God” than to trust in “chariots and…in horses” (Psalm 20:7). In 586 B.C. the battle-tested horses of Egypt did not prevail against the lightning hooves of the Babylonian steeds, and the kingdom of Judah came to an end.

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The best chariots and the most powerful horses in ancient Egypt belonged to the Pharaoh. The Pharaoh was a steed collector, the kind of king God told the future Israelite monarch never to become. King Saul fulfilled this principle and so did his successor David. Solomon, however, was known to have “accumulated chariots and horses” (1 Kings 10:26). The account was that “he had fourteen hundred chariots and twelve thousand horses which he kept in the chariot cities and also with him in Jerusalem.” And where did all these horses come from? Scholars are divided on whether the king imported them from Cilicia up north or from Egypt (verse 28). Solomon not only assembled a great cavalry at peacetime (for his reign was marked with peace, 1 Kings 4:24), and not only did he probably disobey the mandate never to turn to Egypt for its horses, but like Egypt Solomon entered the international chariot-making and -exporting industry and chose the Hittites and the Arameans as trade partners. This began when he approved the importation of an impressive Egyptian chariot worth (verse 29).

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During the Second Intermediate Period of the early sixteenth century B.C., a subtly invading group of Semitic people called the Hyksos introduced into Egypt the use of the horse, along with the chariot. It was not until the Empire Period (1600-1100 B.C.), however, when the horse exploded in popularity across the realm. Rameses II, one of the kingdom’s most powerful pharaohs, was known to have kept a massive herd in an elaborate complex of stables he had constructed in the northeast of Cairo, by the Nile Delta (http://www.thekeep.org/~kunoichi/kunoichi/themestream/egypt_animals.html).

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Biblical references indicate that King Solomon, despite all his God-given and innate splendor, seemed to fashion himself like an Egyptian pharaoh and even endeavored to seek the esteem of his Egyptian counterpart. In 1 Kings 3:1 it is clear that “Solomon made an alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt and married his daughter,” whom he honored by constructing for her a precious cedar palace (7:8), similar in beauty as Solomon’s “throne hall, the Hall of Justice, where he was to judge” (verse 7). It seems like whatever the pharaoh had, Solomon wanted the same, whether it was herds and herds of war horses and magnificent chariots (1 Kings 10:26), a holy Temple (Chapter 6), a splendid royal palace (7:1-12), an unspeakable annual net worth measured in gold (10:14), golden shields (verses 16 to 17), a throne so great “inlaid with ivory and overlaid with fine gold” (verse 18 and subsequent specifics from verse 19 to 20), wives and concubines (11:1), and a subtle buildup of a pagan pantheon (verse 2 to 7). It was an ambitious and nauseating attempt identical to nothing more than a former slave seeking the respect of an equal in the eyes of its former master. This was the mortification, among others, that God wanted to save Israel from. God wanted to establish Israel’s dignity apart from the shame of its Egyptian slavery. The miracles and the fear He promised to inspire upon every nation that hears about the Israelites (Exodus 23:27) were to eradicate the slave in anything Israelite. But because of Solomon’s admiration for the Egyptian pharaoh, the period of Israel’s greatest glory was also an ironic re-association with her old slave master.

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An ancient Egyptian on horseback was not really the standard. As shown from historical finds, the most common use of the beast was to pull chariots. From the military cavalry to royal pageants and parades, Egypt followed the two-horse chariot as standard.

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