The season-opening episode of the Retelling the Bible Podcast is posted today (April 25, 2018). You can listen to the episode and subscribe to the podcast by following one of these links or by searching for the podcast on your favourite platform:

Show Notes

This episode is a retelling of the story that is told in 1 Kings 13 in the Old Testament of the Bible. (Click the reference to read the original story). Any direct biblical quotations in the episode are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Here are a few of my thoughts about the episode.

Bethel

Bethel means “House of God” or “House of El.” The word El is sometimes used in the Bible as a generic name for any God or as the name of a specific God. It was an ancient holy site. A story in Genesis 28:10-22 attests to the respect that the Ancient Israelites held for the place for it tells of how the patriarch, Jacob, discovered that it was a place of connection between heaven and earth when he had a dream in which the messengers of God ascended and descended from heaven to this place to go out into all the world.

Jeroboam and his Religious Reforms

Following the reign of King Solomon, the kingdom Solomon had ruled split in two. The Southern Kingdom, Judah, stayed under the rule of Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, while the rebel, Jeroboam, took power in the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

Solomon had instituted a number of religious initiatives, the most significant of which was the construction of an impressive temple dedicated to the worship of Yahweh. It was only natural that Jeroboam, seeking to establish a strong and independent kingdom, would have wanted to promote holy places within his own territories. There would have been several of these, but the Bible particularly highlights the work that he did in Dan, near his northern borders, and at Bethel near the southern.

The Golden Calves

The Bible specifically tells of Jeroboam setting up golden calves at these sites and says that the people worshiped the calves.

This is a bit of religious propaganda. If you asked the ancient worshipers who came to these sanctuaries if these calves were gods to them, they would have denied it. They would have said that the God that they worshipped was invisible and that the calf was only the representation of God’s conveyance; it served as a throne for El.

And really how different was that from the situation in Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. There you would also find an image of an animal, a heavenly beast called a cherub. In the centre of the Temple of Solomon there was a golden box, called the Ark of the Covenant, and on top of the box were two golden cherubim. The God, Yahweh, was said to be invisibly enthroned above the cherubim (Psalm 99:1).

So you might say that the only religious difference between the theology of the sanctuary at Bethel and the sanctuary at Jerusalem was the question of what kind of animal God was enthroned upon. That doesn’t seem like a whole lot to build a religious war on.

The Story

Scholars agree that the Book of Kings (it was originally only one volume) was written in the Southern Kingdom of Judah and was likely only written sometime after the Northern Kingdom had been destroyed. This is a classic case of history being told by the victors.

By the time this story was written, the temple at Jerusalem had emerged as the most important religious site in the region and was being proclaimed as the only legitimate place where sacrifices to Yahweh could be carried out. But the story is set at a time long before those kinds of religious questions were settled, at a time when it was taken for granted that God could be worshipped in many places.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the compilers of the Book of Kings based this story on genuine traditions that had originated in the region around Bethel. The original story would have been a story about rivalries between different sanctuaries — a fairly common occurrence in the ancient world.

In the story as it is told in Kings, the young prophet, the one who comes from the south, is supposed to be the hero. But, as a hero, he is somewhat disappointing. He fails to follow through on his vows and ends up dying because of it. He doesn’t change anything in Bethel despite his pronouncements and his prophecies are not fulfilled for many generations after everyone present would have been long dead.

I suspect that, if there was an original story told at Bethel, the young prophet would have been seen as a bit of a buffoon and that the real hero of the story would have been the successful trickster, the old prophet. (Ancient Israelites had great admiration for tricksters). So I have tried to tell the story in such a way as to help people understand that there are two sides to every story and especially to every religious dispute. I hope you liked it.

What this Retelling Teaches me

For me, this retelling teaches me about the tolerance of religious differences. Where there genuine religious differences between their understanding of God at Bethel and at Jerusalem? Yes, absolutely. But, looking back at them after so much time, how much do they matter? Does it really matter whether God rides a calf or a cherub?

Indeed we realize that the root of religious disagreement was really about other things than the surface issues. They were about economics — about the business that priests and prophets could do. They were about privilege and the loss of it and they were about local civic pride. How many of our religious disputes to this very day are actually about such things?

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Tune in next week for our next episode: Bridegoom of Blood!