Though I’ve been proposing that God intervened in Israel’s history to divide the kingdom of Israel, his primary method seems to have been nonintervention.  God allowed people who rebelled against him by seeking a king in the first place to continue on that same trajectory for about four generations.  He didn’t send a prophet with an astute hypothetical, adroit questions, or revelations that might have enlightened and turned them from a self-destructive course.  He did not grant them the insight that Solomon’s reign was, in fact, as good as their current course could get, or the wisdom to reason that their continued dissatisfaction might require a change of course.  To simply change kings was to simply miss the point.

Now how can I speak of Israelite history as if it had a point?  This is absurd to the in-the-box thinking of the historical critic and his fellow travelers.  But I believe I have been granted the wisdom not merely to perceive a point but to know precisely what it is.

When Nicodemus was slow to understand Jesus’ statement about the necessity of being born from above, Jesus responded incredulously, Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you don’t understand these things?¹  Now I need to confess that I have gone through many changes in my response to Jesus as revealed in the Scriptures.  My first response as I already mentioned was that He was just about the rudest person I had ever met.  It was best just to keep my mouth shut around Him because He would take anything I said and berate and ridicule me for it.  As I began to know Him better and came to realize that He wasn’t as mean as I made Him out to be, I changed my tone.  I assumed then that Jesus had a flare for dramatic exaggeration.  He knew that Nicodemus didn’t understand.  How could He expect anyone to understand so novel a concept as being born from above or again?  But these days I believe that Jesus was expressing a sincere surprise and maybe even a hint of frustration that a man so admirable and so well educated as Nicodemus did not grasp this most basic point of the Hebrew Scriptures:  I tell you the solemn truth, unless a person is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.²

So the change of course the Israelites needed to make was to be born from above, just like Jesus told Nicodemus.  That is the point of Israelite history as revealed in the Bible, according to Jesus.  Of course, I didn’t get it either, not until I read about Jesus and Nicodemus, over and over and over again, and then returned to the Old Testament with Jesus’ conclusion already in mind.

I realize how far it seems I have come from the simple goodness of, God said it; I believe it; that settles it.  I’ve put words in God’s mouth, suggesting that He might have comforted Solomon and Rehoboam with the same comfort He gave Samuel.  I’ve denied that the words spoken by the Israelite rebels recorded in the Bible actually reflected their real motives.  An interpretation like this might have alarmed me when I was a philosophical and legalistic young man fighting his way back from atheism.  But these days I see some faith in it.

Solomon’s wealth and wisdom fit into a context that starts, for the sake of this discussion, with the rejection of God in the person of Samuel the last judge of Israel, and the desire for a new leader like all the other nations; and it ends with the continued rejection of God in the person of that new leader—King Rehoboam.  And all of this nestles in the context of the point of the Old Testament proclaimed by Jesus, You must all be born from above.  God said it—For it is not you that they have rejected, but it is me that they have rejected as their king.  I believe that dynamic continued to hold sway not only thus far in the Old Testament narrative but beyond.  And for the moment I’m fairly content with the truth of that interpretation, especially if I compare it to the alternative.

I just can’t bring myself to start with the rebels’ pronouncement—Your father made us work too hard—and then try to mold and cajole the Bible into something that supports that contention, especially when that molding and cajoling is actually a process of ripping out and throwing away large portions of the testimony that is in fact included there.  And why should I rip them out?

Well, because they don’t belong, according to Nietzsche:  God could not inspire ancient Israelite writers to speak and write his words truthfully because God doesn’t exist.  The illusion of God speaking, that I am so enamored with in the Bible, was created much later by—still relatively ancient people, completely unknown to history, yet oddly familiar as perennial scapegoats—a conspiracy of lying Jews.  This theory of Bible interpretation held a lot of sway in mainline American churches in the early decades of the twentieth century.  Today it seems important to acknowledge that its ultimate contriver is the arch-enemy, not only of the Jews, but of us all.

Addendum: December 12, 2018
A table comparing John 3:10 in the NET and KJV follows.