Shishak Came for a Widow's Settlement and Took the Throne

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The Father-in-Law at the Gate

The Egyptian came to Jerusalem to collect a debt from a dead man.

Shishak did not need to break the walls. He arrived in the fifth year of Rehoboam with scribes, pack animals, and a claim written out in advance, and the claim was a family matter. His daughter had been given in marriage to Solomon. Solomon was in the ground now, and a widow is owed her ketubah (כתובה), the settlement written into the contract on the day of the wedding and payable out of her husband's estate.

Rehoboam held the estate. He also held a kingdom that had cracked down the middle when ten tribes walked away from him, and he had no army worth marching out of the gate.

"My daughter is owed what her husband promised her," Shishak said. "Open the storehouses."

They opened them. Out came the gold shields Solomon had hammered for his guard, and the vessels of the house of God, and the plate of the king's own table. The men of Egypt walked past all of it and went on into the judgment hall, because Shishak had come for one particular piece of furniture.

Egyptian Gold Goes Home

The throne stood at the top of its steps with the golden lions ranked along them, the machine Solomon had built to make a foreign king feel small while he climbed toward the man he had come to petition. Getting it down took a crew, rollers, and most of a day. Shishak stood in the hall while the lions came off the steps one at a time and went into the straw.

Then the rest was loaded. Among the treasure rolling out of the storehouses that afternoon was silver and gold that had crossed the border once before, going the other way, carried in the arms of slaves on the night Israel walked out of Egypt. It had sat in Jerusalem through the wilderness, the judges, the wars of David, and the building of the Temple. Now it went back down the same road under Egyptian guard.

The money of Egypt returned to Egypt. Shishak had come for a widow's settlement and left with everything Israel had ever taken out of his country.

The Seat Sennacherib Could Not Carry Home

Egypt kept it a long time and then lost it the way Jerusalem had lost it. Sennacherib of Assyria came down on the Nile, broke what he found there, and had the throne loaded among his spoil to bring home to Nineveh.

He never brought it home. He turned aside to Jerusalem first and camped, and his messengers stood under the wall making speeches about which gods had saved which cities and which had not. Inside, Hezekiah spread the Assyrian letter open in the Temple and prayed over the parchment. In the morning the camp outside was full of dead men. What was left of the army went back the way it had come, and the throne did not go with it. Sennacherib handed it over and rode north without it.

So the chair came back into Jerusalem, and for a while it stood again in the city that had built it.

The Lion That Made Necho Limp

It did not stay. In the days of Jehoash, Necho of Egypt hauled it back to the Nile, and there Necho made the mistake Shishak had been careful enough, or lucky enough, to avoid. He decided to sit on it.

The court assembled to watch. Necho set his foot on the first step, then the second, and whatever was under the gold woke up. One of the lions swung around and took him in the side. The sound in that hall was a Pharaoh going down on the stairs of a chair.

He lived. He never walked straight again. Egypt called him Necho the hobbler, behind his back at first and then to his face, and the name outlasted whatever he had wanted the throne to say about him.

Nebuchadnezzar Stands Beside What He Owns

Nebuchadnezzar took Egypt, and the throne came to Babylon with the rest of the plunder. He had heard about Necho. He climbed anyway.

The lion caught him with the same blow in the same place. He got himself up off the steps of the throne of Solomon and he did not go up them again, not that season, not ever. For the rest of his reign the most famous seat in the world stood in his hall with nobody in it, and the king of Babylon gave his judgments standing beside a chair he owned and could not use.

The Copy That Would Not Come Right

After Babylon fell, Darius had it carried to Elam. He had heard the stories too, and he left it alone. Ahasuerus inherited it and left it alone as well, and then, being the kind of king who liked a thing to be his, he sent for craftsmen and ordered a second one built. Same steps. Same lions. Same gold, and as much of it as they wanted.

They worked a long time. What they produced was a chair with animals on it. The weight was wrong somewhere, or the hinges, or whatever Solomon's builders had known had gone into the ground with them. Nothing on the copy moved.

From Elam the throne passed to the kings of Media, and from the Medes to the Greeks, and from the Greeks to Rome. There the record of it stops. Nobody wrote down what became of a golden chair with a lion in it that had broken two kings on its steps and refused every man alive who was not Solomon.