The House of Jeroboam Cut Off: Nadab and Baasha

Nadab son of Jeroboam came to the throne in the second year of Asa king of Judah and reigned two years. He was besieging Gibbethon, a Philistine town, when Baasha son of Ahijah of the tribe of Issachar conspired against him and struck him down in the camp, in the sight of all Israel.

The new king's first act was to destroy the entire house of Jeroboam: "he left not any that breathed." Scripture does not leave this unexplained—it fulfilled the word spoken through the prophet Ahijah of Shiloh, who had once torn his garment into twelve pieces and given Jeroboam ten, and afterwards foretold the end of his house.

Here the law of the whole Northern Kingdom becomes visible. In Judah the throne passes to a son of David—in three hundred and seventy years no coup ever changed the dynasty there. In Israel a house holds the throne exactly as long as it has the strength: nine dynasties, four of which lasted less than a generation. Baasha, who destroyed the house of Jeroboam, reigned twenty-four years in Tirzah—and his own house would end in precisely the same way.

Academic history dates this event differently. In the age of the kings the divergence is not the one familiar from the Persian period, where Seder Olam runs about a hundred and sixty-five years short. Here academic chronology reckons some reigns as overlapping — father and son on the throne together — so its span from the division of the kingdom to the destruction of the Temple comes out nearly three decades shorter. The gap therefore grows: a hundred and thirty-five years at the division, a hundred and fifty-four at Sennacherib, a hundred and sixty-four at the destruction. The anchors of the academic count are external documents: the battle of Qarqar (853), Jehu's tribute on the Black Obelisk (841), the fall of Samaria (722), Sennacherib's campaign (701), Megiddo and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns in the Babylonian Chronicles (609, 605, 597). Both dates appear on the timeline when the divergence layer is on.