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46-484: William F. Albright has dated his reign from 922 to 901 BC, while Edwin R. Thiele offers the dates 931 to 910 BC. The name Yārŏḇ‘ām יָרָבְעָם ‎ is commonly held to have been derived from rīḇ רִיב ‎ and ʿam עַם ‎, signifying "the people contend" or "he pleads the people's cause". It is alternatively translated to mean "his people are many" or "he increases the people" (from רבב ‎ rbb , meaning "to increase"), or even "he that opposes

92-541: A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1956. After his death on September 19, 1971, his legacy continued through the many scholars inspired by his work, who specialized in the fields pioneered by Albright. The American School of Oriental Research, Jerusalem , was renamed the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research , in honor of Albright's archeological achievements. From

138-498: A broad swath of American higher education from the 1940s through the 1970s, after which revisionist scholars such as T. L. Thompson , John Van Seters , Niels Peter Lemche , and Philip R. Davies developed and advanced a minimalist critique of Albright's view that archaeology supports the broad outlines of the history of Israel as presented in the Bible. Like other academic polymaths ( Edmund Husserl in phenomenology and Max Weber in

184-406: A delegation sent to ask the new king Rehoboam to reduce taxes. After Rehoboam rejected their petition, ten of the tribes withdrew their allegiance to the house of David and proclaimed Jeroboam their king, forming the northern kingdom of Israel (Samaria). Only the tribes of Judah and Benjamin remained to form the rump kingdom of Judah, loyal to Rehoboam. Jeroboam rebuilt and fortified Shechem as

230-436: A divine message inducing him to establish his idolatrous kingdom is explained by the rabbis in the following manner: They say that he was entrapped by a ruse of Jeroboam's idolatrous friends, who circulated a document requesting Jeroboam to become king and stipulating that, if he were elected, he set up a golden calf at Dan and Beth-El. Ahijah signed this document, believing firmly that Jeroboam would not belie his trust. Herein he

276-494: A phrase which has since become famous: "God is with us as our leader". The biblical account states that his elite warriors fended off a pincer movement and rout Jeroboam's troops, killing 500,000 of them. Jeroboam was crippled by this severe defeat to Abijah and posed little threat to the Kingdom of Judah for the rest of his reign. He also lost the towns of Bethel, Jeshanah , and Ephron , with their surrounding villages. Bethel

322-607: A pilgrimage." According to the Hebrew Bible, Jeroboam was in "constant war with the house of Judah". While the southern kingdom made no serious effort militarily to regain power over the north, there was a long-lasting boundary dispute, fighting over which lasted during the reigns of several kings on both sides before being finally settled. In the eighteenth year of Jeroboam's reign, Abijah (also known as Abijam), Rehoboam's son, became king of Judah. During his short reign of three years, Abijah went to considerable lengths to bring

368-471: A whole ("For the Lord shall smite Israel..., and he shall root up Israel out of this good land, which he gave to their fathers, and shall scatter them beyond the river", might have been composed retroactively, after the events described had already come to pass. Alternatively, the prophecy could have been a logical deduction. Judah had just been conquered and turned into a vassal of Egypt, while Israel stood between

414-677: Is a 1953 paper, "New Light from Egypt on the Chronology and History of Israel and Judah", in which he established that Egyptian pharaoh Shoshenq I—the Biblical Shishaq —came to power somewhere between 945 and 940 BC. A prolific author, his works in addition to Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan , include The Archaeology of Palestine: From the Stone Age to Christianity , and The Biblical Period from Abraham to Ezra . He also edited

460-585: Is a character in the Hebrew Bible . Though unnamed in the Masoretic text , she appears in the Septuagint as an Egyptian princess called Ano: In 1 Kings, Jeroboam's son Abijah falls ill, and Jeroboam sends his wife to the prophet Ahijah. Ahijah's message, however, is that Abijah will die, which he does. According to The Jewish Encyclopedia , the good that Abijah did for which he would be laid in

506-516: Is hardly representative, which ignores the enormous lack of data for the history of the early second millennium, and which wilfully establishes hypotheses on the basis of unexamined biblical texts, to be proven by such (for this period) meaningless mathematical criteria as the "balance of probability" ... Abijah Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include

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552-486: Is portrayed by Nickolas Grace in Solomon & Sheba (1995) and by Richard Dillane in Solomon (1997). Both of these are television films. Within the range of standard liquor bottle sizes, a Jeroboam (also called a Double Magnum) contains 3 liters (101.4 fluid ounces). A Rehoboam contains 4.5 liters (152.2 fluid ounces). William F. Albright William Foxwell Albright (May 24, 1891– September 19, 1971)

598-413: Is represented as a disreputable woman. The name is explained as (= "one that caused strife among the people," or "one that caused strife between the people and their Heavenly Father"; Sanh. 108b). The name (Nebat) of his father is construed as implying some defect in his progenitor. Jeroboam is excluded from the world to come (Yalḳ., Kings, 196). Although he reached the throne because he reproved Solomon, he

644-500: Is said to have invented one hundred and three interpretations of the law in reference to the priests to justify his course. At first God was pleased with him and his sacrifice because he was pious, and in order to prevent his going astray proposed to His council of angels to remove him from earth, but He was prevailed upon to let him live; and then Jeroboam, while still a lad, turned to wickedness. God had offered to raise him into Gan 'Eden; but when Jeroboam heard that Jesse's son would enjoy

690-554: The Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research from 1931 to 1968, Albright influenced biblical scholarship and Palestinian archaeology . Albright advocated "biblical archaeology" in which the archaeologist's task, according to fellow biblical archaeologist William G. Dever , is "to illuminate, to understand, and, in their greatest excesses, to 'prove' the Bible." Here, Albright's American Methodist upbringing

736-672: The Anchor Bible volumes on Jeremiah , Matthew , and Revelation . Throughout his life Albright was honored with awards, honorary doctorates, and medals, and was proclaimed " Yakir Yerushalayim " (Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem)—the first time that title had been awarded to a non-Jew. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1929. He was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1955 and

782-531: The Kingdom of Israel back under his control. He waged a major battle against Jeroboam in the mountains of Ephraim . According to the Book of Chronicles Abijah had a force of 400,000 and Jeroboam 800,000. The Biblical sources mention that Abijah addressed the armies of Israel, urging them to submit and to let the Kingdom of Israel be whole again, but his plea fell on deaf ears. Abijah then rallied his own troops with

828-564: The 1930s until his death, he was the dean of biblical archaeologists and the acknowledged founder of the biblical archaeology movement. Coming from his background in German biblical criticism of the historicity of the biblical accounts, Albright, through his seminal work in archaeology (and his development of the standard pottery typology for Palestine and the Holy Land) concluded that the biblical accounts of Israelite history were, contrary to

874-498: The Bible." Albright was not, however, a biblical literalist ; in his Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan , for example, he argued that Yahwism and ancient Caananite religion had a reciprocal relationship, in which "both gained much in the exchange which set in about the tenth century and continued until the fifth century B.C". Although primarily a biblical archaeologist, Albright was a polymath who made contributions in almost every field of Near Eastern studies: an example of his range

920-527: The Egyptian and Mesopotamian empires. It is likely that the story of the golden calf in the wilderness was composed as a polemic against Jeroboam's cultic restoration by claiming that its origins were inconsistent with worship of YHWH. Thomas Römer has argued that Jeroboam I may not have existed and that Deuteronomistic redactors transferred data from the reign of Jeroboam II to Jeroboam I, although Lester L. Grabbe finds this theory unlikely. Jeroboam

966-516: The Kings of Israel ", likely compiled by or derived from these kings' own scribes, is likely the source for the basic facts of Jeroboam's life and reign, though the compiler(s) of the extant Book of Kings clearly made selective use of it and added hostile commentaries. His family was eventually wiped out. The prophecies of doom concerning the fall of both the House of Jeroboam and the northern kingdom as

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1012-484: The World to Come, will nevertheless arise when the time of resurrection arrives. Why? Because many years after he died his remains were ignominiously burned in fire." The account of Jeroboam's life, like that of all his successors, ends with the formula "And the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, how he warred, and how he reigned, behold, they are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel". "The Chronicles of

1058-732: The capital of the northern kingdom, and fearing that pilgrimages to the temple in Jerusalem prescribed by the Law might provide an occasion for his people to go back to their old allegiance, he built two state temples with golden calves , one in Bethel and the other in Dan . This act is condemned by an unnamed prophet in 1 Kings 14, where the LORD declares that Jeroboam has cast YHWH behind his back. Jeroboam further deviated from normative Torah law by moving

1104-588: The dominant German biblical criticism of the day, largely accurate. This area remains widely contested among scholars. Albright's student George Ernest Wright inherited his leadership of the biblical archaeology movement, contributing definitive work at Shechem and Gezer . Albright inspired, trained and worked with the first generation of world-class Israeli archaeologists, who have carried on his work, and maintained his perspective. Other students such as Joseph Fitzmyer , Frank Moore Cross , Raymond E. Brown , and David Noel Freedman , became international leaders in

1150-569: The fields of Near Eastern studies , biblical archaeology , and ceramic typology, and his work has had a lasting impact on the understanding of ancient Near Eastern history and the historicity of the Bible. Albright was born on May 24, 1891, in Coquimbo , Chile, the eldest of six children of the American Evangelical Methodist missionaries Wilbur Finley Albright and Cornish-American Zephine Viola Foxwell. Albright

1196-546: The fields of sociology and the sociology of religion ), Albright created and advanced the discipline of biblical archaeology, which is now taught at universities worldwide and has exponents across national, cultural, and religious lines. Albright's publication in the Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research , 1932, of his excavations of Tell Beit Mirsim, and descriptions of the Bronze Age and Iron Age layers at

1242-464: The grave ("Rabbinical Literature: The passage, I Kings, xiv. 13, in which there is a reference to "some good thing [found in him] toward the Lord God of Israel") is interpreted (M. Ḳ. 28b) as an allusion to Abijah's courageous and pious act in removing the sentinels placed by his father on the frontier between Israel and Judah to prevent pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Some assert that Abijah himself undertook

1288-497: The highest honors there, he refused. Jeroboam had even learned the "mysteries of the chariot" (Midr. Teh.; see "Sefer Midrash Abot," Warsaw, 1896)."...If the person suffers indignities after his death, this too, can atone for his sins, and gain him a share in the World to Come. For example, the Talmud says that King Jeroboam, a brazen idolater who incited the population to follow his G‑dless ways, and certainly deserved to be excluded from

1334-541: The holiday of Sukkot to eighth month instead of the seventh month (perhaps by adding a leap month in Elul ). According to Rabbinic literature , Gehazi possessed a magnet by which he lifted up the idol made by Jeroboam, so that it was seen between heaven and earth; he had "Yhwh" engraved on it, and in consequence the idol (a calf) pronounced the first two words of the Decalogue (ib.). According to 1 Kings, while Jeroboam

1380-438: The long run, it will have been the newer 'secular' archaeology that contributed the most to Biblical studies, not 'Biblical archaeology.' Biblical scholar Thomas L. Thompson wrote that by 2002 the methods of "biblical archaeology" had also become outmoded: [ Wright and Albright's] historical interpretation can make no claim to be objective, proceeding as it does from a methodology which distorts its data by selectivity which

1426-533: The people". In the Septuagint he is called Hieroboam (Ἱεροβοάμ). Jeroboam was the son of Nebat , an Ephraimite of Zereda . His mother, named Zeruah (צרוע "leprous") was a widow. He had at least two sons, Abijah and Nadab ; Nadab succeeded Jeroboam on the throne. King Solomon made the young Jeroboam a superintendent over his tribesmen in the building of the fortress Millo in Jerusalem and of other public works, and he naturally became conversant with

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1472-481: The public in 1948 for his role in the authentication of the Dead Sea Scrolls , but made his scholarly reputation as the leading theorist and practitioner of biblical archaeology , "that branch of archaeology that sheds light upon 'the social and political structure, the religious concepts and practices and other human activities and relationships that are found in the Bible or pertain to peoples mentioned in

1518-414: The site in 1938 and 1943, marked a major contribution to the dating of sites based on ceramic typologies, which is still in use. "With this work, Albright made Israeli archaeology into a science, instead of what it had formerly been: a digging in which the details are more or less well-described in an indifferent chronological framework which is as general as possible and often wildly wrong". As editor of

1564-712: The study of the Bible and the ancient Near East, including Northwest Semitic epigraphy and paleography. John Bright , Cyrus H. McCormick Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Interpretation at Union Seminary in Richmond (PhD, Johns Hopkins, 1940), went on to become "the first distinguished American historian of the Old Testament" and "arguably the most influential scholar of the Albright school", owing to his "distinctly American commonsense flavor, similar to that of W[illiam] James ". Thus Albright and his students influenced

1610-419: The widespread discontent caused by the extravagances which marked the reign of Solomon. Influenced by the words of the prophet Ahijah , he began to form conspiracies with the view of becoming king of the ten northern tribes; but these were discovered, and he fled to Egypt , where he remained under the protection of Pharaoh Shishak until the death of Solomon. After this event, he returned and participated in

1656-506: The words, "Ahijah could not see, for his eyes were set by reason of his age" (I Kings, xiv. 4), imply spiritual blindness on the part of Ahijah, who favored a wicked pupil and set him up as ruler (Gen. R. lxv.). For this reason Ahijah was stricken with the plague (Gen. R. lxv., Yer. Yeb. xvi. 15c and parallels). Jeroboam became for the rabbinical writers a typical evil-doer. This appears in the Septuagint (2d recension), where even his mother

1702-463: The years since his death, Albright's methods and conclusions have been increasingly questioned. In 1993, William G. Dever wrote that: [Albright's] central theses have all been overturned, partly by further advances in Biblical criticism , but mostly by the continuing archaeological research of younger Americans and Israelis to whom he himself gave encouragement and momentum... The irony is that, in

1748-528: Was a leading theorist and practitioner of biblical archaeology , and is regarded as the founder of the biblical archaeology movement. He served as the W. W. Spence Professor of Semitic Languages at Johns Hopkins University from 1930 to 1958 and was the Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem for several terms between 1922 and 1936. Albright made significant contributions to

1794-402: Was an American archaeologist , biblical scholar , philologist , and expert on ceramics . He is considered "one of the twentieth century's most influential American biblical scholars", having become known to the public in 1948 for his role in the authentication of the Dead Sea Scrolls . His scholarly reputation arose as a leading theorist and practitioner of biblical archaeology . Albright

1840-774: Was an alumnus of Upper Iowa University . He married Ruth Norton (1892–1979) in 1921 and had four sons. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland , in 1916 and accepted a professorship there in 1927. Albright was W. W. Spence Professor of Semitic Languages from 1930 until his retirement in 1958. He was the Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem from 1922–1929, and 1933–1936, and did important archaeological work at sites in Palestine such as Gibeah (Tell el-Fûl, 1922) and Tell Beit Mirsim (1926, 1928, 1930, and 1932). Albright became known to

1886-591: Was an important centre for Jeroboam's Golden Calf cult (which used non-Levites as priests), located on Israel's southern border, which had been allocated to the Tribe of Benjamin by Joshua , as was Ephron, which is believed to be the Ophrah that was allocated to the Tribe of Benjamin by Joshua. Jeroboam died soon after Abijam. That Ahijah, though one of the pillars of righteousness, should have been sent to Jeroboam with

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1932-527: Was clearly apparent. He insisted, for example, that "as a whole, the picture in Genesis is historical, and there is no reason to doubt the general accuracy of the biographical details" (i.e., of figures such as Abraham ). Similarly he claimed that archaeology had proved the essential historicity of the Book of Exodus , and the conquest of Canaan as described in the Book of Joshua and the Book of Judges . In

1978-407: Was engaged in offering incense at Bethel , a "man of God" warned him that "a son named Josiah will be born to the house of David", who would destroy the altar (referring to King Josiah of Judah who would rule approximately three hundred years later). When Jeroboam attempted to have the prophet arrested for his bold words of defiance, the king's hand was "dried up", and the altar before which he stood

2024-522: Was mistaken in his pupil. Jeroboam had shown great wisdom and learning, and appeared to Ahijah "as pure as the new garment" he wore when Ahijah saw him coming out of Jerusalem (I Kings, xi. 29). Moreover, as he excelled all the rest of the pupils, he had been initiated by Ahijah into the innermost secrets of the Law (Sanh. 101b et seq.). Just as the words said of Isaac, "his eyes were dim, so that he could not see" (Gen. xxvii. 1), are taken to refer to spiritual blindness, because he favored his wicked son Esau, so

2070-512: Was nevertheless punished for doing so publicly (ib.). In the meeting between Jeroboam and the Shilonite the Rabbis detect indications of Jeroboam's presumption, his zeal for impious innovations (ib.). His arrogance brought about his doom (Sanh. 101b). His political reasons for introducing idolatry are condemned (Sanh.90). As one that led many into sin, the sins of many cling to him (Abot v. 18). He

2116-429: Was rent asunder. At the entreaty of the man of God, his hand was restored to him again, but the miracle made no abiding impression on him. Jeroboam offered hospitality to the man of God but this was declined, not out of contempt but in obedience to the command of God. The prophecy is fulfilled in 2 Kings. Josephus and Jerome identify the "man of God" who warned Jeroboam as the seer named Iddo . The wife of Jeroboam

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