John Kitto Morning Bible Devotions: October 23

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John Kitto Morning Bible Devotions: October 23

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Outer Troublers

1Ki_11:21-25

The sin of one so gifted and favored as Solomon, required such punishment as should remain to all generations a monument of the Lord’s displeasure. He was that servant who, knowing his Lord’s will and doing it not, required to be beaten with many stripes: and if judgment be required according to what a man hath, an awful severity of judgment was needed here; for to whom had more of light and knowledge been given than to Solomon? Yet, in judgment the Lord remembered mercy. Solomon had sinned; but David could not be forgotten; and to him a sure house had been promised. But for that, doubtless, the house of David had been, like that of Saul, utterly cast down. But this extremity of judgment, this utter degree of forfeiture, was not exacted. Still the house should reign—but reign only over one part of a divided realm; and even this mitigated doom was, with paternal tenderness in punishment, spared the aged king in person. It was announced to him, but was not to be executed while he lived; yet his last years were not suffered to pass without heavy troubles, which must have brought down his kingly pride very low.

Enemies one after another appeared, who had in his early years been kept down by the memory of David’s victories, and by the show of substantial strength which the government of his son presented. At length, however, they ventured to try its texture, and finding it more vulnerable than even they had suspected—that there was nothing very terrible to resolute men in its showy greatness; and having found that the king had really no power to make any effectual opposition to their assaults, far less to put them down, they became emboldened to further measures, until some established their independence, while others offered the passive resistance of withholding their tributes—so that his power became shorn at the borders, and eventually shaken at home, where the discontinuance of many outer supplies of revenue, and probably the interruption of his various lines of trade—no longer in his undisputed possession—urged him, not to economy and retrenchment, but to make good the deficiency by the taxation of his subjects.

The principal foreign disturbers of Solomon’s repose were Hadad, prince of Edom, and Rezon, king of Damascene Syria. Of Hadad, and his escape in childhood into Egypt, when his country was ravaged by Joab, we have already had occasion to speak. Note: See Thirty-Seventh Week—Saturday. When he reached to riper years, the keen remembrance of his native land, his lost kingdom, and the slaughter of all his house, gathered strength within him; and all the ease and princely honor which he enjoyed in Egypt, availed not against the claims of ambition, vengeance and patriotism. He dreamed of recovering the throne of his fathers; he dreamed of wresting the hard yoke of Jacob from Esau’s neck; he dreamed of exacting stern vengeance for the blood of his kin and country; he dreamed of making to himself a name, like unto the names of the great ones that were upon the earth. These things he dreamed and

“Dreams grow realities to earnest men.”

And he was earnest. It was not without difficulty that he obtained leave of the Egyptian king, by whom he had been so generously entertained, to take his departure. It does not appear that he ventured fully to disclose his real objects—for which a reason may be found in the fact that this king was in amicable relations with Solomon, and the same, apparently, whose daughter had been espoused to the Hebrew king.

Proceeding to Edom, the attempts which Hadad made to recover his kingdom seem to have given considerable trouble to the Hebrew government; but the strong garrisons which David had left in the land, and which Solomon maintained there, prevented them from being successful. Seeing that his case was for the time hopeless in that quarter, Hadad, instead of returning to Egypt, determined to push his fortunes in another direction .He therefore went and joined himself to Rezon, who had already given considerable disturbance to Solomon’s power in Syria.

This Rezon had some command under that great Hadadezer, king of Zobah, whose overthrow formed one of the most renowned military acts of David’s reign. Note: See Thirty-Seventh Week—Friday. It seems that, on the defeat of the Syrian host, Rezon succeeded in drawing off the force under his command, and directed the power thus acquired to the advancement of his own ambitious views. At first the wilderness afforded shelter to his troop, which there subsisted for a time by that wild life of predatory warfare, of which, in the like cases, there are many examples in Scripture—and which seems, indeed, to have been the usual resource of fugitive military chiefs in that age and region—on the borders of the Syrian and Arabian deserts. Gradually, however, he acquired a sort of fixed power over a portion of Syria nearest to the desert, and eventually established a kingdom, of which Damascus became the capital. All this could not have been effected without much loss and disadvantage to the Hebrew king—especially by interrupting his communication with Tadmor and the Euphrates, and by harassing, if not destroying, the important trade established on that line of route.

It was to this prince that Hadad carried his sword, when he found that he could not employ it with any advantage in Edom. Hadad seems to have been a very engaging or very plausible person, for he is well received and wins high favor wherever he goes. Rezon gave him and his followers a most encouraging reception, and afforded them assistance in establishing themselves in another and neighboring portion of Syria, where Hadad seems to have had ample opportunities of disturbing the peace of Solomon. Nor is this all: for when Rezon died, Hadad added his dominions to his own; and thus became the virtual founder of that important kingdom of Damascene-Syria, which we afterwards find in powerful and often successful warfare with the Israelites. Hadad was, on account of his success and his royal qualities, so much honored by his successors, that Ben-Hadad, “son of Hadad,” became a common name among them, if, indeed, it was not made an official title, like that of Pharaoh in Egypt.

The reader must not expect to find all this in Scripture. The intimations respecting Hadad and Rezon, and, in particular, respecting the connection between them, are brief and—seeing that they refer to historical circumstances of no common interest—tantalizing. That which we have given is the most consistent and intelligible account we are able to collect from the intimations in Scripture and in Josephus. These intimations, so far as Hadad is concerned, afford glimpses of what would probably be a most instructive and interesting story, were all its particulars fully understood.