1. At that time. This particular temporal reference is a generalized formulaic phrase that does not indicate that what follows happened precisely at the same time as the preceding events in the narrative.

3. ten loaves of bread and cakes and a jar of honey. It was customary to bring gifts to a prophet or seer when seeking oracular counsel from him. These in effect constituted his professional income.

4. but Ahijah could not see. This is the first indication that Jeroboam’s plan has gone awry. He has instructed his wife to go in disguise, but the disguise proves to be pointless because the prophet is blind. In any case, God will expose the disguise in speaking to the blind prophet. The blindness, a consequence of old age, is also an indication that a good deal of time has passed since Ahijah’s fateful encounter on the road with Jeroboam.

5. thus and so shall you speak to her. This convention of using a phrase like this of summary without stipulation of the actual words is not infrequent in biblical dialogue and reflects its formal bias of stylization. In this case, it is a means of postponing the revelation of the prophecy of doom that Ahijah will pronounce against the house of Jeroboam.

6. when Ahijah heard the sound of her footsteps. This detail nicely captures the perspective of the blind man, who has to depend on his acute sense of hearing. Though sightless, he of course knows who has come, why she has come, and the fact that she is disguised, because God has told him all this.

7. prince. In God’s words, the term melekh, “king,” is avoided, and the vaguer term nagid, “prince” (etymologically, he who takes the place in front of others), is used instead for Jeroboam.

8. My servant David, who kept My commands. As before, this is an idealized image of David that does not square with the narrative in 1 and 2 Samuel.

9. and you have done evil more than all who were before you. In light of the fact that there is only one king between Jeroboam and David, the reference here is probably to all the bad behavior of the people of Israel from the backslidings in the Wilderness stories onward.

10. I will cut off from Jeroboam every pisser against the wall. This coarse epithet for males, which David uses in vowing to destroy Nabal and all the males of his household (1 Samuel 25:22), may well have been formulaic in pronouncing resolutions of total destruction, so that even God uses it.

bondsman and freeborn. The meaning of these two Hebrew terms is much in dispute.

as one burns dung. The Hebrew verb can mean “root out,” “eradicate,” but since pieces of dried dung were used as fuel, it is fairly likely that the sense of burning is activated here, or that there is a punning relationship between rooting out the house of Jeroboam and burning dung. The simile of dung obviously conveys a withering sense of the value of the house of Jeroboam.

11. Jeroboam’s dead in the town the dogs will eat. As in the Greek world, leaving a corpse to the degradation of scavengers was conceived as a fundamental violation of the sanctity of the human body.

12. As your feet come into the town. This slightly odd phrase for arrival picks up the sound of the woman’s feet that the blind prophet heard as she came into his house.

13. a good thing is found before the LORD. The virtue in the sick child that earns him a proper burial is left unspecified.

14. this day and, indeed, even now. The Hebrew words—each of them perfectly ordinary—sound a little peculiar, but the gist seems to be that the end of the house of Jeroboam is very imminent.

15. beyond the River. The Euphrates.

19. the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Israel. As with the Book of the Acts of Solomon, this appears to be some sort of royal annals that was probably drawn on as a source by the author of our narrative.

20. And he lay with his fathers. Since, according to the terms of the curse on the house of Jeroboam, he was not supposed to come to a proper burial, this must be taken as a general idiom for dying.

21. And Rehoboam son of Solomon king of Judah. From this point onward, the narrative will switch back and forth between the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah.

22. And Judah did. In contrast to Jeroboam, Rehoboam is not said to be directly responsible, so he may have been seen as merely permissive about pagan practice.

23. on every high hill and under every lush tree. This is a formulaic phrase, obviously reflecting the writer’s view that the only legitimate place for the cult was in the Jerusalem temple. But the phrase also marks what is seen as a dangerous intertwining between worship and nature: “high places” or shrines on hilltops, rituals under sacred trees, in some instances may have been associated with a fertility cult. There is an easy segue from the lush trees of this verse to the male cult-harlots in the next verse.

25. Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem. Finally, the biblical text gives us a Pharaoh with a name. An inscription at one entrance of a sanctuary at Karnak in fact offers a list of towns in Judah and Israel that Shishak attacked in the course of a sweeping military campaign in 926 B.C.E. Jerusalem, however, does not appear in the list. The language of the biblical text here is a little vague: Shishak “came up against Jerusalem” and “took the treasures.” This leaves open the possibility that he besieged the city without conquering it and that he extorted the treasures from Rehoboam in return for lifting the siege.

27. the royal sentries. The Hebrew ratsim means “runners,” but men put in charge of palace treasures would scarcely be couriers, and it is immediately stated that they served as guards. Perhaps the Hebrew term was used because they also had some function of running before the king’s chariots in royal processions.

29. the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Judah. See the comment on verse 19.

30. And there was constant war between Rehoboam and Jeroboam. This brief notice suggests how selective the narratives of the kings are. Nothing is reported of the course of war between the two kingdoms. For Jeroboam, we get only his backsliding into idolatry and the consequent prophecies of doom for his house. For the shorter narrative about Rehoboam, again we are told of the spread of pagan worship, and of the surrender of the treasures to Shishak—nothing more. The story of the kings, in keeping with the Deuteronomistic perspective, is more focused on cultic dereliction, always seen as the cause of historical disaster, than on political history.

31. and was buried with his fathers. Pointedly, this phrase is absent from the report of Jeroboam’s death in verse 20.

And his mother’s name was Naamah the Ammonite. This verbatim repetition of the identification of Rehoboam’s mother from verse 21 may seem a bit odd, and could be the result of an editorial glitch, though perhaps the writer meant to underscore both at the beginning and the end of Rehoboam’s story the link of this king with the world of idolatry.