Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Kings 4-6.

I noticed that today’s passage clearly delineated aspects of Solomon’s governance over Israel.  I think the point of most of this passage is to lay out how Solomon changed Israel from a tribal alliance into a nation.  Saul and David had ruled over Israel by getting the various tribal leaders to support them, and using the support of one group of leaders to force those who opposed them to stay in line.  Perhaps, the difference in Solomon’s approach explains why Joab and Abiathar supported Adonijah, while the other leaders supported Solomon.  Perhaps Joab and Abiathar saw Adonijah as a better player of the sorts of control games which David and Saul had used to control the kingdom, while the others recognized that Solomon had a new, and better, way to govern.  In any case, all of that is a prelude to what I really noticed today.  Actually, there is a bit more to the prelude.  I haven’t really talked about it, but I have noticed that the way the tribes settled in the land did not really make for a clean divide of two and ten that is recounted when the kingdom divided under Rehoboam: Simeon had settled interspersed with Judah.  So, what I noticed today was that Solomon divided Israel into twelve districts.  Five of those districts are distinctly identified by tribal name: Ephraim, Naphtali, Asher, Issachar, and Benjamin.  That leads me to think that when the kingdom later divided it divided along these district lines, with ten of them following Jeroboam and two remaining loyal to the House of David.  It also leads me to believe that all twelve of Solomon’s districts were partially associated with the tribal divisions of Israel, but only in five of them did the people more closely associate their identity with their ancestral tribe than with their geographic location.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.