Allied With Israel

 People who have read the historical books of the Bible know how the northern tribes broke away from King Rehoboam, and how the two tribes fought against each other. 

Most people, however, do not realize that, after years of war, King Jehoshaphat made peace with the northern kingdom and even entered into an alliance with King Ahab.  The reason that most people do not realize this happened is because the historical books do not come out and explicitly say that such an alliance had been made.  But it’s there.   

The only hint that the Bible gives of such an alliance is the story of King Jehoshaphat meeting with King Ahab and offering to fight against Ahab’s enemies (1 Kings 22, 2 Chronicles 18).  The story takes place just before the battle where King Ahab was killed (in 853 BCE, give or take a few years), but the alliance between the two kings started long before this battle.   

The Bible does not say that King Jehoshaphat made an alliance with King Ahab.  The Bible does say, however, that the daughter of King Ahab was the mother of King Jehoshaphat’s grandson (see 2 Kings 8:18; the version in Chronicles says only that she was the daughter of Omri, who was King Ahab’s father).  The Bible tells us the ages of these kings so we can work back.  The Bible tells us that King Ahaziah’s mother was Athaliah, and that he was born in 863 BCE (give or take a few years), about five years after the death of King Asa.  So it was sometime before that when Athaliah, the daughter of King Ahab, was given in marriage to Jehoram, the son of King Jehoshaphat.  I don’t have the space to go into all the details here, but it seems that King Jehoshaphat started on making peace with the northern kingdom shortly after he was crowned king.   

During the long reign of King Asa (41 years), the kingdom of Judah fought against the northern kingdom of Israel.  This continual warfare may have taken a toll on the ordinary people.  We don’t know how the ordinary people dealt with the wars, but that’s the reason for this blog.  I have made up a fictional family so I could follow them through the generations and see how they might have reacted to the actions of the kings as depicted in the historical books of the Bible.  This fictional family operated a little shop on the Mount of Olives, looking down on Jerusalem, and the business was handed down from father to son.  I refer to the men in this family by letter rather than by name, to keep track of the different generations.  The family business started with A, who moved to Jerusalem and started the business in the days of King David, who captured the Jebusite city and made it into the capital of the kingdom of Israel. 

In the days of King Asa, F ran the family business on the Mount of Olives, the great-great-grandson of the man who moved to Jerusalem.  The little store had been in operation for over a hundred years by this time.  F was just a boy when the northern tribes of Israel broke away and formed a new kingdom.  Just a few years later, the Egyptians invaded and came to Jerusalem.  F didn’t see the Egyptians, though- he and his younger brothers and sisters had been taken away to stay with relatives in the south.  They stayed in the hills for their safety, until the Egyptians left and his father sent word for them to return.  For the rest of his life, F believed that King Asa did the right thing by going to war.  He didn’t want to send his children away like his father.  For a long time, F thought that his father felt guilty for the Egyptian invasion.   

The way that I have this story set up is that each of the men in this family dies at the age of sixty years old.  Each one is born in his father’s twentieth year, then they grow up, marry and have a son born when they turn twenty.  For the next twenty years, they each work in the family business, gradually taking over responsibilities as the father grows old.  When they reach the age of forty, their fathers turn sixty and die.  For they last twenty years of their lives, each of these men take complete control of the store and gradually give responsibilities to their sons.   

In 893 BCE (give or take a few years), F’s father died, about a year following King Asa’s victory over the northern kingdom of Israel.  At that point, F took over the family business and kept it running through the rest of King Asa’s reign.  As F grew older and weaker, he gave more responsibilities to his son.  In 873, F died at the age of sixty years.  Four years later, in 869 BCE (give or take a few years), King Asa finally died. 

So G was about forty-four years old when King Jehoshaphat took over the throne of Judah, and perhaps began to talk about making peace with the northern kingdom.  To G, this was good news.  Throughout his entire life, his country had always been at war.  Or so it seemed.  He was in his twenties when all the people went up to dismantle the Israelite fort at Ramah (you can read more about that in my hub, “War With Israel”).  He thought it had been fun to take part in that raid, but the wars in the following years were just tiresome.  He watched the armies march off, but they never came back with much treasure, and they never seemed to resolve any disputes (by the way, that’s my own thought- the Bible says nothing about the wars at the end of King Asa’s reign).  Some of his friends, and later some of his friends’ sons, went off with the army (either as soldiers, wagon-drivers, or servants), but some of them never came back.   

G was excited about King Jehoshaphat’s treaty with the northern kingdom.  He had never said anything about in previous years, because his father had been excited about King Asa’s wars, and because King Asa had imprisoned people who spoke out against him (see 2 Chronicles 16:10).  But his father and King Asa were both gone, and G spoke well about King Jehoshaphat to everybody who came to his shop.  Some people might have grumbled about the king’s peace treaty- after all, the people of Judah had been fighting against the northern kingdom for almost eighty years- but G argued against those people. 

We don’t know where the wedding of Athaliah and Jehoram took place, but there may have been a magnificent procession in Jerusalem to celebrate the entrance of the Israelite princess.  Perhaps even King Ahab and Queen Jezebel visited Jerusalem.  This sight may have been painful to some of the older people, because Jezebel promoted the worship of Baal in Israel, and King Asa had worked hard to stop the worship of foreign idols in Judah.  Some of the older people may have said, “this woman will undo everything that King Asa accomplished.” 

King Jehoshaphat followed in the ways of his father- he suppressed the worship of foreign idols and encouraged his people to worship only the Lord.  The book of 2 Chronicles says that King Jehoshaphat took away the idols, and he even sent out Levites to teach the Law of the Lord.  Judah prospered under King Jehoshaphat’s reign, and the surrounding nations made peace.  There were some desperate times later on, but we’ll get to that in another hub.   

The years that G owned the family business, when he doted on his little grandchildren, were years of peace and prosperity.  They may have been years of some controversy where some people couldn’t figure out how a godly man like King Jehoshaphat could make an alliance with idolaters like Ahab and Jezebel.  They were also the years of Elijah the Prophet in the northern kingdom.