Shishak Invades Judah
about 925 BC, estimated dateEstimated date
In Rehoboam’s fifth year the Egyptian king Shishak marches on Jerusalem and carries off the treasures of the temple and the palace. Shoshenq I’s relief at Karnak lists towns he claimed in Judah, Israel and the Negev.
Shishak first appears in Kings as the king of Egypt who sheltered Jeroboam I when he fled from Solomon (1 Kings 11:40). He is generally identified with the pharaoh whom Egyptian inscriptions call Shoshenq I, the founder of Egypt’s Twenty-second Dynasty.
In the fifth year of Rehoboam, Kings says, Shishak came up against Jerusalem and took away the treasures of the temple and of the palace, including the gold shields that Solomon had made. Rehoboam replaced them with shields of bronze (1 Kings 14:25–28). Chronicles tells more. Shishak came with 1,200 chariots, 60,000 horsemen and a host of Libyans, Sukkiim and Cushites, and took the fortified cities of Judah. The prophet Shemaiah told the king and his officers that they had abandoned the Lord and were now abandoned to Shishak. They humbled themselves, and Jerusalem was not destroyed, but it lost its treasures and became subject to Egypt (2 Chronicles 12:1–12). Neither book says that the city was stormed.
Shoshenq left his own record on a wall of the temple of Amun at Karnak, in Thebes. The god hands him rows of bound figures, each labelled with the name of a town (Bubastite Portal relief the scene (Breasted §718)). Those that have been read include Megiddo, Taanach, Shunem, Beth-shean and Rehob in the north, Mahanaim east of the Jordan, Gibeon, Beth-horon and Aijalon in the hills north-west of Jerusalem (Bubastite Portal relief town list, nos. 14–27 (Breasted §712)), and Arad in the south (Bubastite Portal relief town list, nos. 108 and 110 (Breasted §716)). The speech of Amun beside the scene praises the king’s victories over the Asiatics in general terms and tells no story of the campaign (Bubastite Portal relief speech of Amun (Breasted §§720–722)). A stone fragment with Shoshenq’s name, published as part of a stela, was found at Megiddo itself (Megiddo stela fragment of Shoshenq I Fisher, pp. 12–13 and 60–61).
The two records overlap without matching. Kings and Chronicles speak only of Judah and Jerusalem. The relief lists many towns in the northern kingdom (Bubastite Portal relief town list, nos. 14–27 (Breasted §712)), where his former guest Jeroboam now ruled, and Jerusalem is not among the names that survive (Bubastite Portal relief town list, nos. 108 and 110 (Breasted §716)), though two of the ten rows are almost wholly destroyed and other names are lost (Bubastite Portal relief the scene (Breasted §718)). The relief does not mention Rehoboam, Jeroboam, tribute or the temple of Jerusalem (Bubastite Portal relief speech of Amun (Breasted §§720–722)).
This is the first event in the books of Kings that can be set beside a foreign king’s own monument. For Judah it meant the loss of Solomon’s gold within five years of the division. Chronicles draws the lesson that the kingdom survived because its king humbled himself (2 Chronicles 12:12).
How this is dated
Estimated date. A scholarly estimate from primary evidence, with a margin of years.
Kings and Chronicles date the invasion to the fifth year of Rehoboam (1 Kings 14:25; 2 Chronicles 12:2). The Karnak relief carries no date (Bubastite Portal relief speech of Amun (Breasted §§720–722)). The Egyptian text that gives a date is the quarry stela of Shoshenq’s twenty-first year, which orders the stone for the court where the relief stands (Silsila quarry stela of Shoshenq I Breasted §§706–707). The campaign was therefore over before the end of his reign, but no Egyptian record says in which of his years it fell.
The calendar year depends on the chronology of the kings of Judah. Edwin R. Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (1951), puts Rehoboam’s fifth year in 926/925 BC; W. F. Albright, “The Chronology of the Divided Monarchy of Israel”, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 100 (1945), puts it about 918 BC. George R. Hughes, in the preface to the Epigraphic Survey’s Reliefs and Inscriptions at Karnak III: The Bubastite Portal (1954), pp. vii–viii, notes that the dates of Shoshenq’s own dynasty are too uncertain to settle the matter from the Egyptian side.
Primary sources
In context
Grows out of
- about 930 BC, estimated date