In First Kings, chapter fourteen, verse twenty-two, the tribe of Judah, ruled by Rehoboam, did little better than the ten tribes of Israel. They also followed their leader in forsaking the Lord and gave themselves to terrible sin. Before the fourth year of Rehoboam’s reign, the downfall occurred. However, in the first three years, Israel remained steadfast in its faith, and the kingdom was greatly strengthened and consolidated. The defection commenced when Rehoboam began to feel secure, as in Second Chronicles twelve, verse one.
From the Second Chronicles eleven, verse seventeen, the judgment which had fallen upon the house of David for idolatry, the rallying of the national feeling round the sacredness of the Temple, and the influx from Israel of the priests and Levites, produced a temporary reaction. “For three years, they walked in the way of David and Solomon.” However, the excitement and perhaps the sense of danger in Second Chronicles twelve, verse one, this wholesome reaction passed by and gave way to an extraordinarily reckless plunge into abominations of the worst kind.
These are ascribed not, as in the case of Solomon, and most other kings, to the action of Rehoboam: but to that of the people at large; for the king himself seems to have been weak, unfit for taking the initiative either in good or evil. The apostasy of Judah was evidently the harvest of the deadly seed sown by the commanding influence of Solomon, under whose idolatry the young men had grown up. It is said to have gone beyond “all that their fathers had done,” even in the darkest periods of the age of the Judges: perhaps on the ground that the sins of a more advanced state of knowledge and civilisation are, both in their guilt and in their subtlety, worse than the sins of a semi-barbarous age.