Shishak

SHISHAK (Heb. Šīšaq, Septuagint Σονοχίμ). - Pharaoh of Egypt (Šešonq I), founder of the XXII dynasty (934-913 B.C.), who moved its capital to Bubastis in the Delta, rather than to Tanis.

He installed a nephew at Thebes as high priest, and there, in front of the hypostyle hall of the temple of Amun at Karnak, he built a great court with porticoes, richly adorned with bas-reliefs and an inscription in which he records his military exploits and enumerates, among other things, the cities of the Kingdom of Judah and 50 of the Kingdom of Israel that he conquered. There is here an allusion to his campaign against Rehoboam king of Judah, in the 5th year of that sovereign's reign, recalled in I Kings 14:25-26 and II Chron. 12:2-9.

Since Solomon had persecuted Jeroboam, the latter took refuge with S. and remained there until the death of Solomon (I Kings 11:40), so that the hypothesis was formed that Jeroboam himself was the instigator of S.'s invasion of Palestine; but the Pharaoh, after invading the Kingdom of Judah, also plundered a considerable part of the Kingdom of Israel, over which in the meantime Jeroboam himself had risen as its first dissident king. Nothing prevents us from believing that S., with the intention of carrying out reprisals against those who had been friends of the preceding XXI dynasty (Solomon was related by marriage to the king of the XXI dynasty overthrown by S.), had encouraged the troubles that arose at the death of Solomon, which led to the division of Palestine into two mutually hostile kingdoms, and then had wished, in order to increase his prestige and to make a great booty, to attack Rehoboam, Solomon's successor. S.'s incursion into Palestine, accompanied, as II Chron. 12:3 says, by 1,200 war chariots and 60,000 horsemen, besides a crowd of Lydians, of Sukhijilm (Vulg. "Troglodytae") and of Ethiopians, led him to the sack of Jerusalem, from which he carried off the treasures of the Temple and of the palace, and in particular the golden shields that Solomon had had made for the "house of the forest of Lebanon").