Old Testament undesigned coincidences: The loss of Gibbethon
(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)
In I Kings 15:25-27 we learn that, in the time of Nadab, the son of Jeroboam, the Israelite city of Gibbethon belonged to the Philistines. Nadab was besieging Gibbethon, trying to get it back, when he was attacked and killed by another Israelite named Baasha, who then reigned in his stead.
J. J. Blunt, from whom I borrowed this coincidence, raises the question as to why Gibbethon had fallen to the Philistines in the first place. He admits, of course, that it may be impossible to find out. There were Philistines around. They probably sometimes took cities. Maybe that's the end of the story as far as we know here about three thousand years later. But Blunt has an idea worth considering.
In the immediately preceding generation, the kingdom of Israel (ten tribes) had split from the kingdom of Judah. Jeroboam, who was not in the Davidic line, was chosen as king over the kingdom of Israel because of the people's dissatisfaction with the harsh rule of Rehoboam, the son of Solomon. I Kings 12:26ff tells how Jeroboam set up the fake religion of worshiping golden calves in Bethel and Dan in order to prevent the people from going to Jerusalem in the kingdom of Judah to worship God. He set up his own calf-worshiping priests and urged the people to follow this phony cult.
In 2 Chronicles 11:13-17, we are told that the priests and Levites, as well as other worshipers of the true God, left Israel in large numbers and moved to Judah, where they "strengthened the kingdom of Judah, and made Rehoboam the son of Solomon strong..." 2 Chronicles 11:13-15 specifically says that there was such an emigration of the priestly class from their designated cities:
And the priests and the Levites that were in all Israel resorted to him out of all their coasts. For the Levites left their suburbs and their possession, and came to Judah and Jerusalem: for Jeroboam and his sons had cast them off from executing the priest's office unto the Lord: And he ordained him priests for the high places, and for the devils, and for the calves which he had made.
To make the final connection in the puzzle, Blunt notes that Joshua 21:23 says that Gibbethon in the tribe of Dan, with its surrounding area, was a designated Levitical city.
A reasonable conjecture, then, is that Gibbethon was in large measure deserted when the Levites and their families emigrated to Judah, leaving their lands behind. Nor need this have been entirely a matter of religious outrage. If Jeroboam cut off the worship of the true God, the Levites wouldn't have received the tithes and offerings from the people previously prescribed in the law of Moses, so their material situation and perhaps even their safety would have been shaky, especially since their towns were scattered throughout the tribes of Israel.
Levites and Israelite priests could be fighting men. They took no vow to forswear arms and could certainly have defended their city if it were attacked by the Philistines. But once they were gone, their cities would not immediately have been repopulated and properly defended. Says Blunt,
[W]hat, then, can be more probable, than that Gibbethon, being thus suddenly evacuated, the Philistines, a remnant of the old enemy, still lurking in the country, and ever ready to rush in wherever there was a breach, should have spied an opportunity in the defenceless state of Gibbethon, and claimed it as their own? (p. 181)Blunt then gives a lot of references showing that the Philistines were still around and about at this time, a point that has been noted by more recent commentators as well.
This is of course a conjecture regarding the loss of Gibbethon. But it is a plausible and interesting conjecture, one that makes sense of the evidence. I appreciate it as an undesigned coincidence in particular because it brings together works that are undeniably by different authors. Whoever wrote or compiled I Kings (very likely it was compiled from various chronicles), it wasn't the same person who wrote or compiled 2 Chronicles. (Independence between Chronicles and Kings is, one might say, notorious, given various putative contradictions between them.) And both of those were certainly different from whoever wrote Joshua.
As usual, some of the authors might have known of the other works, Joshua in particular being much earlier. But it is absurd to suppose that the author of 1 Kings casually mentioned that Gibbethon "belonged to the Philistines" because he was trying to connect it in his readers' minds with the far-flung fact from Joshua that Gibbethon had previously been a city of the Levites, with the fact from his own book that Jeroboam had started a new religious cult, and with the fact from some other source that many Levites had moved to Judah in consequence of losing their jobs.
I find that skeptics (and philosophers, sometimes the same people) treat every author as some kind of Cartesian demon who makes up all sorts of nearly-invisible marks of truth in his work, marks that most people don't even notice. One would like to think that this one is sufficiently far-fetched that no one would seriously propose that the author of I Kings did any such thing. It is possible, of course, that the whole thing is a coincidence and that Gibbethon had fallen to the Philistines for some completely different reason. That's the way to go if you don't think this coincidence actually supports the truth of the mundane narrative of conspiracy and usurpation in I Kings together with the statements about Gibbethon and the Levites in other books. I'm inclined to think, however, that it's a genuine connection explained by truth in the various narratives in I Kings and elsewhere.
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