I gotta have my orange juice.

Jeroboam famously reinstitutes golden calf worship (1 Kings 12) and names his sons after the sons of Aaron who had offered strange fire (1 Kings 14; Abijah and Nadab). James Jordan hypothesizes that Jeroboam was cleverly inventing a pretext to draw Israel away from worshipping in Jerusalem:

Now, what’s Jeroboam doing? He is returning back to the situation before Moses and Aaron set up the Levites, isn’t he? He says, “No more tabernacle, we’re going to go back to the golden calf. No more Levites, we’re going to go back to the nobility of Israel and make them priests.” What’s he saying? He’s saying basically the kind of thing that Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses say today when they say, “We don’t want this Trinitarian Christianity that was invented in the 4th century at the Council of Chalcedon in Nicaea. We want to go back to the early church before this doctrine of the Trinity was invented because the early church was not Trinitarian.” Of course, that’s wrong, but that’s their myth.

Now, that’s the same kind of thing Jeroboam is doing, I believe. He’s saying, “We want to go back before Moses and Aaron took charge and made themselves dictators and set up this tabernacle stuff and took the priesthood away from the people and gave it to the Levites. And we’re going to go back.” And he says, “Look, you’ve probably heard that Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, were killed by God, but they weren’t. Remember Leviticus says that Nadab and Abihu offered strange fire, and fire came out from God and burned them up. Remember that story?” Now Jeroboam is trying to tell the people, “Well, that’s what your Bible says, but that was written by them Levite priests, and the real historical facts are probably that Moses and Aaron killed them because they wanted to perpetuate the good old true religion of the golden calf.” And so Jeroboam names his sons Nadab and Abihu.

Now what I just said about his theology is something of a guess, but there’s no doubt that he named his sons Nadab and Abihu, and I can’t figure out any other reason why he would. If you look in chapter 14, verse 1, it says, “At that time, Abijah, the son of Jeroboam, became sick.” Now, Abijah is the same as the word Abihu. It’s just a different spelling of the same name. And if you look in verse 20, you’ll find, “And the time that Jeroboam reigned was twenty-two years, and he slept with his fathers, and Nadab his son reigned in his place.” So he names his sons Nadab and Abihu, after the two sons of Aaron that were burned up for blasphemy.

So I think Jeroboam took counsel with people and invented a theology and decided he would go back to supposedly what the true worship had been before it was corrupted by Moses and Aaron. He takes the side of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram who say all the people are holy, not just the Levites. That’s the kind of thing he’s doing. Now, of course, it’s politically expedient to do this. When he rejects the Levites from being priests, it says he appointed other people to be priests. Who do you suppose became the priests? Well, probably not necessarily the firstborn. Let’s say that you were Jeroboam and you were trying to consolidate power. Who would you make as priests? Yeah, your friends, members of the nobility. Because you want to tie them into you, you see. You want to make them vassals, make them indebted to you. You want to centralize authority. Up in this time, you have church and state separate. Levites are over here with their own government. Nobody can be a priest except a Levite, which means they are free from political control. But when you get the golden calf situation, then the Levites and the church officers are all appointed by the king, by the state. And you have one government, centralized authority, centralized control.

One other thing we see here is this feast in the eighth month. It says, like the feast that’s in Judah. What’s the feast that it’s talking about in Judah? Was there a feast in the eighth month in Judah? No. What’s the nearest feast? The feast in the seventh month. Now, what was the feast in the seventh month? It’s the biggie. The biggest of all the feasts. Tabernacles. Tabernacles. That’s where everybody comes and builds a little booth made of palm branches and other branches and lives in Jerusalem and celebrates a festival. And the Feast of Tabernacles became—there’s evidence that indicates this, although it’s never explicitly said—it became a feast that celebrated the kingship of the Lord in Israel. At any rate, Jeroboam puts up a feast that’s just like that, a big eight-day feast, but he does it in the eighth month.

Now, why do you suppose he would do it in the eighth month instead of the seventh? Remember, we’ve got to think like shrewd politicians here. In the first place, you want to have a feast so that your people have an alternative and they’re not attracted to go to Jerusalem. Yeah, you don’t want them to have to choose. And do you want your feast before or after? After. That’s right, so the people come home from Jerusalem and then there’s another feast and what’s left in their mind is the second feast, your feast, the feast of the eighth month.

So that’s all the shrewd kinds of things he’s doing here. He’s counterfeiting the feast of tabernacles, counterfeiting the tabernacle as we’ll see, counterfeiting the cherubim, setting up false gods.

One other thing he does, once the temple was set up, were the people supposed to worship on high places anymore? No, there was only supposed to be one place for festival worship. Now, they had synagogue worship everywhere, in all the towns and cities and everywhere, on Sabbath days and new moons and other occasions. But as far as the festival worship or sacrifices took place, that was only supposed to be one place. Now, Jeroboam, he sets up many places because that’s what the people really wanted. They’d gotten used to having a lot of high places during the hundred years between the tearing down of the tabernacle and the building of the temple. And so he just plays up to them by saying, “Yeah, well, we can. I mean, God is omnipresent, isn’t he? We can worship him anywhere. This is nothing but a priestly innovation made up by Levites that we can only have one place. It’s part of Solomon’s attempt to centralize the nation to have a temple here. Don’t believe them when they tell you that God told them to do this stuff. They just say that. No, in reality, they set up this one temple in order to centralize all the power in themselves.” That’s the way he argued, and of course, he found a lot of people who wanted to believe that. So he sets up two sanctuaries, one in Bethlehem and one in Dan.

Jordan’s take seems compelling to me. What I find especially interesting is that he has Jeroboam resurrecting an old false religion, a sort of zombie religion. This provokes a few thoughts. First, this zombie religion is a new creation, an eclectic smorgasbord rather then a genuine return to an older way. It is an amalgam of high-place worship and firstborn-son priesthood with golden-calf worship and strange fire, as well as a variety of innovations. Second, this zombie religion is brought to life by coming into contact with true worship. If Jeroboam had not needed to draw people away from and to undermine the worship of the living God, he would not have had to invent a false religion. Satan is lazy; he only goes to work when he is at risk of losing ground. Third, this has direct applicability to modern false religions. In reality, they are boutique religions; none of them are old, because none of them have inherent life to perpetuate themselves. The more Christianity spreads, the more false religions draw life from an adversarial and parasitic relationship to Christianity. They must reconstitute themselves every few generations, partly because God judicially tears them down, and partly as a reactive response to the growth and maturation of Christianity. Girard observed, for example, that the more society’s scapegoating mechanisms are exposed, the more society repositions itself as a victim, creating a subtle new form of scapegoating.

Finally, there is no such thing as rewinding the clock, going back. Jeroboam’s false religion does not erase Israel’s obligation to serve the true and living God. The time of the divided kingdom, I think, serves as a prototype for the relation between the nations and the church; you must go up to the new Jerusalem to worship. Decades later, God chastises wicked Ahab for not conducting holy warfare (1 Kings 20:42)! Centuries later, God’s prophets are still dealing with the kings of Israel. And these later prophets often chastise other nations that have also been exposed to faithful worship.