What’s Missing?

So the king consulted, and he made two golden calves; and he said to the people, “It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem; behold your gods, Israel, that brought you up from the land of Egypt.” And he set up one in Bethel, and the other he put in Dan. Now this thing became a sin, for the people went to worship before the one as far as Dan.  1 Kings 12:28-30  NASB

As far as – Jeroboam had a problem.  It wasn’t a religious one.  It was an economic one.  Three times a year people made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, following the instructions given by Moses.  Three times a year they spent their money in the South.  They saved and saved so that they could afford these journeys.  All that money ended up in the southern Kingdom.  Jeroboam didn’t get a cent.  His solution:  Let’s make a worship site here, in the North.  Of course, he doesn’t tell the people it’s about money.  He claims to be relieving them of the “burden” of traveling to Jerusalem.  But the real result was an idolatrous site.  Economics was more important than God’s instructions at Sinai.  If you’ve visited the area, you probably went to the very place where he built an altar.  Jeroboam’s actions had serious consequences.  As Robert Alter notes:

“It is important for the Deuteronomistic writer to establish that the first king of Israel, despite the admonition of Ahijah, initiated idolatry in his realm, thus setting the stage for the eventual destruction of the northern kingdom.”[1]

What’s missing?  Well, you might suggest that obedience to Torah was missing, and you’d be correct.  But in these verses, there’s another missing piece that has to do with the text and the translation.  Alter translates the final verse here as:

“and the people marched before the one in Bethel and the other in Dan.”

What’s missing in the NASB is “the one in Bethel.”  Why isn’t it in the NASB translation?  Because it’s not in the Masoretic text.  Apparently it was left out (by mistake? Or intentionally?).  As a result, the NASB and other English Bibles are forced to fiddle with the translation in order to make sense in English.  Without “the one in Bethel” the text literally reads “went the people before as far as Dan,” with no mention of Bethel.  But since the writer has previously mentioned both locations, and the double conjunction “before” “as far as” seems disjointed, it certainly appears that the MT is incomplete.  Nevertheless, every English Bible (with the exception of the parenthetical addition in the Amplified Bible) follows the MT and massages the text to make some reasonable sense of it.  Considering what we have learned about the integrity of the scrolls and the fluidity of Second Temple period texts, blind adherence to the MT seems to create more problems than it solves.  Of course, this is just one example.

So, what’s really missing?  Not just Jeroboam’s obedience.  Not just a few words in the MT.  What’s really missing is an understanding of ancient literature.  By forcing biblical texts into a mold set up thousands of years later, and slavishly following that standardization for another thousand years, we’ve come to expect the Bible to be “without error,” a dogma that affects our imaginative ability to understand God’s communication.  What’s missing is our minds.

Topical Index:  Bethel, Jeroboam, translation, Masoretic text, 1 Kings 12:28-30

[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: Volume 2 Prophets, p. 487, fn. 30.