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[246]
Now I cannot but think that the greatness of a kingdom, and its change
into prosperity, often become the occasion of mischief and of transgression
to men; for when Rehoboam saw that his kingdom was so much increased, he
went out of the right way unto unrighteous and irreligious practices, and
he despised the worship of God, till the people themselves imitated his
wicked actions: for so it usually happens, that the manners of subjects
are corrupted at the same time with those of their governors, which subjects
then lay aside their own sober way of living, as a reproof of their governors'
intemperate courses, and follow their wickedness as if it were virtue;
for it is not possible to show that men approve of the actions of their
kings, unless they do the same actions with them. Agreeable whereto it
now happened to the subjects of Rehoboam; for when he was grown impious,
and a transgressor himself, they endeavored not to offend him by resolving
still to be righteous. But God sent Shishak, king of Egypt, to punish them
for their unjust behavior towards him, concerning whom Herodotus was mistaken,
and applied his actions to Sesostris; for this Shishak, 1
in the fifth year of the reign of Rehoboam, made an expedition [into Judea]
with many ten thousand men; for he had one thousand two hundred chariots
in number that followed him, and threescore thousand horsemen, and four
hundred thousand footmen. These he brought with him, and they were the
greatest part of them Libyans and Ethiopians. Now therefore when he fell
upon the country of the Hebrews, he took the strongest cities of Rehoboam's
kingdom without fighting; and when he had put garrisons in them, he came
last of all to Jerusalem.
1 That this Shishak was not the same person with the famous Sesostris, as some have very lately, in contradiction to all antiquity, supposed, and that our Josephus did not take him to be the same, as they pretend, but that Sesostris was many centuries earlier than Shishak, see Authent. Records, part II. page 1024.
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