Man of God and Old Prophet in
Bethel (1 Kings 13:11–32)
My first example of prophetic
conflict is from 1 Kings, part of the so-called Deuteronomic History. The death
of Solomon (ca. 922 BCE) and the subsequent struggle for succession, a struggle
that rekindles divisions between Judah and the northern tribes of Israel, are
the backdrop for one of the earliest stories about prophets in the Hebrew
Bible. This particular disagreement between prophets results in the death of
one of them. Religious cult sites are at the center of this conflict. Solomon
had centralized the cult in Jerusalem, along with other political and military
functions. His taxation and labor policies aggravated tensions between Judah
and the northern tribes; his son, Rehoboam, adopts an even harder-line policy
(1 Kings 12:1–15). Jeroboam, who was in political exile in Egypt, returned to
lead the northern tribes against Rehoboam. But prophets had already acted as
agents in these political conflicts. Ahijah, a prophet of the northern
Israelite cult site of Shiloh, urged Jeroboam, then an official overseeing the
corvée for Solomon’s kingdom, to break off the northern tribes as punishment
for Solomon’s religious practices, which could be characterized as polytheistic
or not exclusively Yahwistic (1 Kings 11:26–40). Jeroboam then re-established
shrines in Bethel and Dan as part of separating the northern kingdom of Israel
from the hegemony claimed by Judah (1 Kings 12:25–33).
The conflict between north and
south plays out in the narrative of 1 Kings 13 as conflict between northern and
southern prophets. While Jeroboam was offering incense at the altar in Bethel,
a “man of God” (ʼîš ʼĕlōhîm) from Judah proclaimed against the altar “by the
word of YHWH” (bîdĕbar YHWH). Jeroboam answers the threat by trying to seize
the Judean, but the king’s hand is withered and the altar is destroyed.
Jeroboam entreats the southerner’s favor; the “man of God” heals the withered
hand but has taken a vow not to eat or drink until he has returned to Judah and
attempts to leave Bethel. This ironically foreshadows the next scene, in which
an old prophet (nābî zāqēn) in Bethel tricks the “man of God” into eating and
drinking with him:
Then the other said to him: “I
also am a prophet as you are, and an angel spoke to me by the word of the LORD:
Bring him back with you into your house so that he may eat food and drink
water.” But he was deceiving him. (1 Kings 13:18)
As soon as the “man of God” sits
and eats at Bethel, the “word of the LORD” comes to the northern prophet again,
who condemns the Judean to die away from his ancestral home. The Bethel prophet
and his sons send the “man of God” back south on a donkey, where he is killed
by a lion, confirming the prophecy of the northern prophet as well as the
original commandment to the “man of God” not to honor the Bethel cult by eating
or drinking outside of Judah.
Both prophets cite the “word of
the LORD,” the same Hebrew phrase in 1 Kings 13:9 and 13:18, to explain why the
“man of God” should or should not eat in Bethel. The northern prophet utters
what turns out to be false prophecy that ensnares the man from Judah to stay
and eat, while the prophecy and vow of the man from Judah, a vow that kills
him, turn out to be true. The division between the prophets is harsh; the old
prophet of Bethel effectively assassinates the southern “man of God” by
deceiving him with “the word of the LORD.” But this conflict also shows the
ideology of prophetic unity in Israel. While the old prophet of Bethel
ostensibly supports the independence of the northern kingdom and the legitimacy
of its cult, his deception of the “man of God” from Judah confirms the prophecy
originally given to the Judean (1 Kings 13:9) and thus de-legitimates the
Samarian cult site. The scene of reconciliation in 1 Kings 13:26–32 then
subverts the division between the prophets as well as the authority of the northern
prophet. He saddles his donkey to recover the body of the man of God, laments
the death of his “brother,” (ʼāhî) and asks to be buried next to him,
confirming that the “man of God” spoke the actual word of God against the
shrine of Bethel and Jeroboam’s kingdom. The two prophets were not enemies but
brothers after all. The conflict ends in reconciliation.
The ideology of Judean hegemony
over all Israel underlies this story. The conflict centers on the altar of
Bethel, a cult site that challenged the power of Jerusalem, a power we might
label both religious and political in contemporary terms but which was unified
in ancient Israel. The theological question of where to worship, and what to
worship—since Jeroboam had labeled the golden calves the “gods, O Israel, who
brought you out of the land of Egypt” (1 Kings 12:28)—is a political conflict
between north and south; “prophet” is a synecdoche for the kingdom. The story
includes a second layer of political discourse. The “man of God” invokes the
future king Josiah, inscribing the reforms of this later Davidic king onto
these divisions between ancient Israel and Judah. Read at this level, the story
of prophetic conflict and reconciliation expresses the ideology of a unified
“Israel” under Judean control. (Robert M. Royalty, Jr., The Origin of Heresy:
A History of Discourse in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity [Routledge
Studies in Religion 18; New York: Routledge, 2013], 31-32)
