Who Tore the Kingdom of David? | The Story of Jeroboam and Rehoboam

The story of Jeroboam and Rehoboam is how one sentence broke the kingdom of Israel forever.

Solomon's son inherited twelve tribes from his grandfather David. By the end of one afternoon at Shechem, he had lost ten of them. A young officer who had run from a death sentence in Egypt came home with a torn cloak in his memory and a kingdom of his own. Two thrones rose where one had stood. A pharaoh stripped Jerusalem of every gold shield Solomon had hammered. A king's hand shriveled at his own altar. The crack these two men made never closed in their lifetimes, and yet the line of David survived inside the smaller half — the line that would one day mend everything they had torn.