The House for the Name of God

All the years the people had been in the land, God had never had a house. He had a tent — the same tent they had carried through the wilderness — and the golden chest still lived under curtains, the way it had when everybody was still walking. David had wanted to build something better, and God had told him no: your son will build it. So Solomon built it. It took seven years. The cedar wood came floating down the coast in rafts from Lebanon, and the stone was cut and finished at the quarry — so that at the building site itself, all those years, you never once heard a hammer or an axe or any iron tool. The house went up in silence. It was not enormous, as buildings go. But it was covered inside with cedar and overlaid with gold, and carved all over with palm trees and open flowers and winged creatures, and it had two great bronze pillars in front of it, and a bronze basin as big as a pond standing on twelve bronze oxen. And when it was finished, the priests carried the golden chest up into the innermost room and set it down under the wings of the carved creatures, in the dark, where nobody went — and when they came out again, a cloud filled the house, so that the priests could not even stand up to do their work, because the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord.

And Solomon stood up in front of the whole nation and spread out his hands and prayed. And in the middle of the prayer he said the wisest thing he ever said: “But will God really live with people on the earth? If heaven, and the heaven of heavens, cannot hold you — how much less this house that I have built!” He had just spent seven years building the most beautiful thing in the country, and he knew perfectly well that God did not fit in it. He asked instead that God would listen toward that house — when his people prayed there, and when they were far away and in trouble and turned toward it, and even when a foreigner came from a distant country because he had heard of the name of the Lord. And then there was a feast for fourteen days, and everybody went home glad.

And Solomon became famous. People came from every country just to hear him talk. He spoke three thousand proverbs, and wrote a thousand and five songs, and he could tell you about trees, from the great cedar down to the little weed that grows out of a wall, and about animals and birds and creeping things and fish. Away in the south there was a queen — the queen of Sheba — who heard about him, and did not believe a word of it. So she came all that way with a great train of camels loaded with spices and gold and precious stones, to test him with hard questions. And she asked him everything that was in her heart, and there was nothing he could not explain to her. And she saw the house he had built, and the food on his table, and his servants in their places, and their clothes, and the offerings he made at the house of the Lord — and it took her breath away. And she said to him, “It was a true report I heard in my own country. And I did not believe it until I came and saw it with my own eyes — and they did not tell me the half of it.” So Solomon became greater than all the kings of the earth, in riches and in wisdom.

And then it went wrong, and it did not happen all at once. Solomon married hundreds of wives from all the countries around — Moab and Ammon and Edom and Sidon and the rest — the very nations God had said his people were not to marry into, and he had said why: they will turn your heart aside after their gods. And that is exactly what happened. Not when he was young; when he was old. Little by little his heart was not whole toward the Lord his God the way his father David’s had been. He built high places for Chemosh, the idol of Moab, and for Molech, the idol of Ammon, and for Astarte of the Sidonians, right outside Jerusalem, so that his wives could burn incense to them — and in the end he went to them himself. The wisest man in the world. And he did what the shepherd boy his father would never have done. And the Lord said to Solomon, “Because you have done this, and have not kept my covenant and my decrees, I will surely tear the kingdom away from you and give it to your servant. Only, not in your own days, for the sake of David your father — I will tear it out of the hand of your son. And I will not take the whole of it: one tribe I will leave to him, for the sake of my servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem, the city I chose.” And there was a young man in the building works, one of Solomon’s own foremen, named Jeroboam. And one day out on the road a prophet called Ahijah met him wearing a new cloak, and took the cloak off his own back and tore it into twelve pieces, and said, “Take ten pieces for yourself. For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I am tearing the kingdom out of Solomon’s hand and giving you ten tribes.” And Solomon heard about it and tried to have him killed, and Jeroboam ran away to Egypt and waited there. And after forty years as king, Solomon died, and his son Rehoboam sat on the throne.

And it all came apart in a single afternoon, over one bad answer. All Israel came up to Shechem to make Rehoboam king, and Jeroboam came back from Egypt and came with them. And the people said to the new king, “Your father put a heavy load on us. Make it lighter — make his hard work and his heavy load easier — and we will serve you.” It was a fair request. All those cedar rafts and gold walls had been paid for by somebody, and the somebody was them. And the king said, come back in three days. And he asked the old men who had served his father, and they said, “If you will be a servant to this people today, and serve them, and give them a kind answer, then they will be your servants for the rest of your life.” And he did not like that answer. So he asked the young men he had grown up with, and they told him what he wanted to hear: “Tell them this: My little finger is thicker than my father’s waist! My father put a heavy load on you — I will make it heavier. My father beat you with whips — I will beat you with scorpions.” And on the third day the king stood up in front of the whole nation and said exactly that. And Israel turned round and walked out on the house of David. They shouted, “What share do we have in David? We have nothing in the son of Jesse. Away to your tents, Israel! Look after your own house now, David!” And when Rehoboam sent out the man in charge of the work gangs to make them come back, they stoned him to death, and the king ran for his chariot and did not stop until he was inside Jerusalem.

And that was the end of one country. From that day there were two: ten tribes in the north, who made Jeroboam their king and called themselves Israel; and in the south, Jerusalem and the house of David, with the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. Rehoboam gathered an army to go and force them back, and God sent a prophet to stop him — ‘Do not go up and fight your brothers; this thing has come from me’ — and, to his credit, he listened, and everybody went home. But Jeroboam in the north was frightened of something. The house of the Lord was in Jerusalem, in the other kingdom — and if his people kept going down there to worship, sooner or later their hearts would go back to the son of David too. So he made two golden calves, and set one up at Bethel in the south of his kingdom and one at Dan in the north, so that nobody would have to travel far. And he said to the people, “You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Here are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” It is the very sentence Aaron’s calf had been given at the foot of the mountain, hundreds of years before. And it became a sin, and the people went after them; and from Jeroboam onward, king after king in the north walked in the way of Jeroboam son of Nebat, who made Israel sin.