ROBOAM. - King of Judah for 17 years (932-915 B.C.), son and successor of Solomon (v.). At the beginning of his reign occurred the schism of the northern tribes with the founding of the autonomous Kingdom of Israel through the work of Jeroboam I (v.).
To secure the loyalty of the northern tribes, which already from the last years of Solomon harbored hostile prejudices toward the Davidic dynasty, on account of increased taxes, he summoned the representatives of the tribes of Israel to Shechem; to the request for tax relief R. asked for three days to reply; then, on the advice of his inexperienced young contemporaries, he showed intransigent harshness (1 Kings 12:4-14). Then the northerners, repudiating the Davidic dynasty, elected as king the Ephraimite Jeroboam (v.), recalled from Egypt, where he had taken refuge to escape Solomon's persecution. When R. sent to the rebels, to bring them back to obedience, that Adoniram who had been the overseer of the forced-labor works in the last years of David and throughout the reign of Solomon (2 Sam. 20:24; 1 Kings 4:6; 5:13), the royal envoy was stoned by the furious people.
Some time later R. planned an armed reconquest: but he was dissuaded from fratricidal war, by order of God, by the prophet Shemaiah. Thus the Israelite nation remained forever divided into two kingdoms. Only the tribe of Judah remained faithful to R., though it practically incorporated also the tribe of Simeon and part of Benjamin, with a small territory limited to the southern part of Cisjordan; the other ten tribes, under Jeroboam, formed the new Northern Kingdom, also called "of Israel" or "of Ephraim" or "of the house of Joseph."
To the fifth year of R.'s reign is connected the incursion into Palestine of the pharaoh Shishak (Shoshenq), founder of the XXII dynasty (945-924 B.C.), which occurred ca. 926 B.C. (year 18-19 of Shishak). It is remembered also in the inscription on the wall of the temple of Amun at Karnak, ancient Thebes. According to the biblical account the Pharaoh seized the treasures of the Temple of Jerusalem, of the royal house and many other precious objects, among them the golden shields of Solomon, to the point that R. was then forced to replace them with others of copper (1 Kings 12). Following the Egyptian invasion, R. fortified numerous localities of his kingdom, including Lachish and Azekah, and placed his sons at the head of the respective garrisons (2 Chron. 12:5-12; but the sequence of events does not seem to follow the chronological order).
Like Jeroboam I, of whom he always remained an enemy, though to a lesser degree, R. departed from the purity of the Yahwistic religion and permitted "altars and pillars and sacred poles to be erected on every high hill and under every leafy tree" and allowed the qédhēlim (Vulg. effeminati) to hold their abominable rites there (1 Kings 14:22-24).
Bibliography4 works
Gaetano Stano