Shishak Came for a Widow's Settlement and Took the Throne
He did not bring engines against the walls. He brought scribes and a paper. Solomon was dead, and a widow in Egypt was owed her marriage money.
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A Widow's Paper at the Gate
Scribes reached Jerusalem before the rams did.
Shishak came in the fifth year of Rehoboam with pack animals, clerks, and a claim already written. He did not bother the walls. His daughter had married Solomon, and Solomon was in the ground, and a widow is owed her ketubah (כתובה), the settlement named on the wedding day and payable from the husband's estate. Rehoboam held that estate. He also held a kingdom that had split when ten tribes walked away, and he had no army worth sending out the gate.
"My daughter is owed what her husband promised her," Shishak said. "Open the storehouses."
They opened them. Gold shields Solomon had hammered for his guard came out first, then the vessels of the house of God, then the plate from the king's own table. The Egyptians walked past the pile and kept going, because Shishak had come for one piece of furniture in the judgment hall.
Gold Walking Back to Egypt
The throne stood at the top of its steps with golden lions ranked along them. Solomon had built the climb to make a foreign king feel small on the way up. Getting it down took a crew, rollers, and most of a day. Shishak stood in the hall and watched the lions come off one at a time and go into the straw.
The rest of the treasure followed. Mixed in with it was silver and gold that had crossed this same road once before, going the other way, carried in the arms of slaves the night Israel left 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 under Egyptian guard.
Egypt's money returned to Egypt. Shishak had come for a widow's settlement. He left with the throne and with everything Israel had ever taken out of his country.
Sennacherib Lost It at the Wall
Egypt kept the chair a long time. Then Sennacherib of Assyria came down on the Nile, broke what he found, and loaded the throne among his spoil for Nineveh.
He never got it home. He turned aside to Jerusalem first and camped. His messengers stood under the wall and made 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. The remnant marched north. The throne did not go with them. Sennacherib handed it over and rode away poorer than he had planned.
The chair stood again in the city that had built it. Not for long.
The Lion on the Stairs
In the days of Jehoash, Necho of Egypt hauled it back to the Nile. Shishak had been careful, or lucky. Necho sat down.
The court assembled. He set his foot on the first step, then the second, and whatever lived under the gold woke. One of the lions swung and took him in the side. A Pharaoh went down on the stairs of a chair.
He lived. He never walked straight again. Egypt called him Necho the hobbler, first behind his back, then to his face. The name outlasted whatever he had wanted the throne to say about him.
Nebuchadnezzar took Egypt and took the throne with the rest of the plunder. He had heard about Necho. He climbed anyway. The lion caught him in the same place. He got up off the steps and he did not climb them again, not that season, not ever. For the rest of his reign the most famous seat in the world stood empty in his hall, and the king of Babylon gave judgment standing beside a chair he owned and could not use.
The Copy That Would Not Move
After Babylon fell, Darius had the throne carried to Elam. He had heard the stories. He left it alone. Ahasuerus inherited it and left it alone too, until he decided a king should have a thing of his own. He sent for craftsmen and ordered a second chair. Same steps. Same lions. As much gold as they wanted.
They worked a long time. What they made was a chair with animals on it. The weight was wrong, or the hinges, or the knowledge Solomon's builders had taken into the ground. 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 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.
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