Rabbi Yudan opened his teaching on Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 2:6 with a verse from Proverbs: "Choice silver is the tongue of the righteous; the heart of evildoers is worth little" (Proverbs 10:20). The silver tongue, he said, belongs to the prophet. The worthless heart belongs to Jeroboam, the first king of the breakaway northern kingdom, who set up golden calves at Beth El and Dan to keep his subjects from making pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
The scene the midrash retells is one of the strangest in the book of Kings. An unnamed "man of God" walks out of Judah into the northern kingdom while Jeroboam is standing at his altar in Beth El, incense smoking in his hand. The prophet does not address the king. He addresses the altar itself. "Altar! O altar!" he cries (1 Kings 13:2). Why twice? Rabbi Abba bar Kahana explains: the prophet was speaking simultaneously to the altar at Beth El and the altar at Dan (1 Kings 12:29), condemning both shrines in one breath.
A name spoken three centuries too early
What the prophet calls out is astonishing. "Behold, a son is born to the House of David, Josiah is his name. Upon you he shall slaughter the priests of the high places" (1 Kings 13:2). He names Josiah -- the reformer king who would smash the idolatrous altars -- roughly three centuries before Josiah was born. The midrash notes a delicate detail: the verse does not say "the bones of Jeroboam will be burned upon you," which it could have said. It says "the bones of a man." Out of respect for the kingship, the prophecy softens the target. Even in rebuke, Scripture honors the throne.
Jeroboam does not take the rebuke well. He stretches out his arm over the altar and shouts, "Seize him!" (1 Kings 13:4). And his hand withers. Rabbi Huna, in the name of Rabbi Idi, draws out the scandal that hides inside this miracle: the Place -- a name for God -- takes greater pity on the honor of the righteous than on His own honor. Jeroboam was already standing there, offering sacrifices to an idol, and his hand had not withered for that. Only when he stretched it against a prophet did it freeze. God tolerated the insult to His altar longer than He tolerated the insult to His servant.
Your God, not mine
Jeroboam, panicking, turns to the prophet: "Entreat please to the face of Hashem your God, and pray for me" (1 Kings 13:6). Two amoraim sit with that phrasing. One says: notice he said "your God" and not "my God." The other says: how could he have said "my God"? He was standing at that very moment before his idol, calling it "my god." He did not even have the vocabulary for sincere teshuvah.
The prophet prays anyway, and the king's hand is restored "as it was before" (1 Kings 13:6). Rabbi Berachya, in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, asks what "as it was before" really means, and quotes Proverbs: "Though you grind a fool in a mortar among crushed grain with a pestle, yet his foolishness will not depart from him" (Proverbs 27:22). Just as before the miracle Jeroboam stood and sacrificed to an idol, so afterwards he went right back to standing and sacrificing to the same idol. A withered hand and a divine healing -- and he learned nothing.
The silver tongue belongs to God
The midrash then turns the verse one last time. "Choice silver is the tongue of the righteous" -- that is also the Holy One Himself, who chose the tongue of Moses and said through it, "When you take a census of the Children of Israel" (Exodus 30:12). Jeroboam's altar could not silence the prophet, and the golden calf could not silence Moses. The true silver, Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 2:6 insists, is not what smokes on a shrine. It is the word that names the future three centuries in advance and still comes true.