One key question that all this raises is how did the biblical compilers in 7th century B.C.E Jerusalem know so much about the reign of an Israelite king who had lived more than a century earlier.
This is part of a larger mystery: it is unclear how the Bible manages to be so precise when chronicling the names and dates of the kings of Israel and Judah, even going back to the 9th century B.C.E., to the point that this information can be successfully cross-referenced with
Assyrian texts, which mention some Israelite rulers.
The likely solution is that the chronicles of Jeroboam II and other northern kings reached Jerusalem in written form, possibly together with refugees who fled to Judah when the Assyrians conquered Israel around 720 B.C.E., Finkelstein says.
Before that destruction, the kingdom of Israel definitely had the ability and resources to produce poetic and religious texts, as evidenced by the Ajrud invocations and other finds, such as the
Balaam inscription, a prophecy by the Moabite prophet Balaam, which also dates to the 8th century B.C.E. Judah reached this level of literacy only much later.
Already in 2012,
Jonathan Robker, a biblical scholar from the University of Muenster in Germany, identified an older layer of text within the Book of Kings that represents a possible chronicle of the kings of Israel in the north, from Jeroboam I to Jeroboam II, which became incorporated into the Bible.
This would not be the only case of a
northern text or tradition being included in the Bible.
Scholars have long recognized that the Old Testament is a compilation of different – and often contradictory – sources. Some of these can be positively identified as narratives that originated in Israel, either because they
take place in the north or have northern protagonists. These include key biblical chapters such as the story of the patriarch Jacob (who, unlike Abraham and Isaac, roams the regions to the north of Jerusalem), most of the tales of the Judges, and parts of King Saul’s story, Finkelstein says.
The biblical scribes of Judah had multiple reasons to incorporate these traditions into their own rather than forget about the entire lot, Finkelstein says. In addition to justifying their own territorial ambitions, preserving northern stories would have helped unify the Judahites and the Israelite refugees into one people.
Theologically, the appropriately edited texts would also have served to explain the fall of Israel as the result of the evil-doing of its kings, while also establishing Jerusalem as the only legitimate center of cult and the capital of a more pious kingdom.
It was likely for these reasons that, to this day, Jeroboam II is mostly remembered not as the greatest ruler in ancient Hebrew history – but as just another wicked king in the north who “did evil in the sight of the Lord.”
