Week 19 II Chronicles
I looked at a bible map. It was a nice, tidy map showing the northern kingdom coloured baby-blue and the south imperial-red. The two colours seemed about equal in size, which is deceptive because there wasn’t a 50:50 division by tribes. Israel-North had: Dan, Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar, Zebulun, Asher, Naphtali, Gad, Reuben, and some of Simeon. The south had Judah and Benjamin. A 10:2 split.
The armies weren’t equal either. The numbers show a 2:1 advantage for the north.
So the north was no weakling.
But the bible isn’t that concerned about material advantage. And after chapter ten its interest is: what’s happening to the life-of-faith-and-belief now?
It’s a timely question because Jeroboam decided to set up a new religion in the north. New religious centres, shiny new idols, new practices, a new religious calendar. Some of Moses’ ideas were thrown in to flavour the stew, but there were enough novelties that northerners had a decision to make: do-I-stay-or-go?
Quite a few northern Levites decided to emigrate, and the chronicler says that when priests started leaving: those from all the tribes of Israel who set their hearts on seeking the Lord God of Israel, followed them to Jerusalem. Which means that when members of the ten renegade tribes filtered south they were actually re-constituting Jerusalem as a kind of unofficially reunited-kingdom, but based on faith. So… still red, but tinged with ten shades of blue.
Notes: quote from II Chronicles 11:16; see also 15:9 (NASB version). See military census in 13:3.