13In the eighteenth year of king Jeroboam began Abijah to reign over Judah. 2Three years reigned he in Jerusalem: and his mother's name was Micaiah the daughter of Uriel of Gibeah. And there was war between Abijah and Jeroboam.
Ch. XIII. 1, 2 (= 1 Kin. xv. 1, 2). Abijah succeeds.
1. Abijah] Called Abijam in 1 Kin. (LXX. Ἀβιού, i.e. Abijahu).
2. Micaiah] Read with LXX., Maacah; cp. note on xi. 20. Torrey, however, (Ezra Studies, p. 217) suggests that some words have fallen out of the text through similarity of ending. He would read "And his mother's name was Maacah <the daughter of Absalom, and he took to wife> Maacah the daughter of Uriel of Gibeah": the inconsistency as to Maacah's parentage between this verse and xi. 20 would disappear, and the suggestion that Maacah was grand-daughter of Absalom (see xi. 20, note) would be unnecessary.
3—20 (no parallel in 1 Kin.). The Battle of Zemaraim.
The account of Abijah's astonishing triumph over the host of Jeroboam should be compared with xiv. 9—15 (Asa's victory) and xx. 1—30 (Jehoshaphat's victory; see Introd. pp. xlix f.), passages which like the present are nowhere else recorded, and are essentially unhistorical. No reliance can be placed on the high numbers of the opposing armies (ver. 3), on the pious speech ascribed to king Abijah which neatly and forcibly expresses the ecclesiastical view of schismatic Israel held by the Chronicler and his school (vv. 4—12), or on the appalling carnage wrought in the Israelite army (ver. 17). The tale, in fact, is of a markedly midrashic character, i.e. a narrative intended to edify and not to be treated as serious history. But in all such cases it is fair to distinguish between the form and the substance: at least the bare substance of the tale. Thus in the present instance the judgement stated above does not preclude the possibility that war took place between Abijah and Jeroboam, and that the former gained a useful success over the more powerful Northern Kingdom. The absence from Kings of any mention of such victory is a serious objection; but it is not fatal, unless we take the view—objected to in the Introd. § 5—that the Chronicler had absolutely no sources, oral or written, of the faintest value for pre-exilic days apart from the canonical writings. Yet it must be admitted that it would be not unnatural to the workings of the Chronicler's mind to infer that some signal success must have rewarded so near a descendant of David if only to compensate in part for Rehoboam's disastrous reign and at any rate to punish the glaring iniquity of a schismatic and idolatrous Israel. Judging from the brief account of Abijah in 1 Kin. xv. 1—7, we may conclude that the continued hostility between North and South was a fact, but that it is extremely improbable there was a reliable tradition (if any at all) regarding a great Judean victory in his reign: see note on Zemaraim below.
