Pharaoh Shishak's Raid
In the fifth year of king Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem with twelve hundred chariots and threescore thousand horsemen, and the people without number that came with him out of Egypt: the…
Biblical Narrative
In the fifth year of king Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem with twelve hundred chariots and threescore thousand horsemen, and the people without number that came with him out of Egypt: the Lubims, the Sukkiims, and the Ethiopians. He took the fenced cities which pertained to Judah and came to Jerusalem. Then Shemaiah the prophet came to Rehoboam and to the princes of Judah that were gathered together to Jerusalem because of Shishak, and said unto them: Thus saith the Lord, Ye have forsaken me, and therefore have I also left you in the hand of Shishak.
The princes of Israel and the king humbled themselves: The Lord is righteous. When the Lord saw that they humbled themselves, the word of the Lord came to Shemaiah saying, They have humbled themselves; therefore I will not destroy them, but I will grant them some deliverance, and my wrath shall not be poured out upon Jerusalem by the hand of Shishak. Nevertheless they shall be his servants, that they may know my service, and the service of the kingdoms of the countries.
So Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem and took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king's house. He took all: he carried away also the shields of gold which Solomon had made. King Rehoboam made in their stead shields of brass, and committed them to the hands of the chiefs of the guard, that kept the entrance of the king's house. And it came to pass, when the king entered into the house of the Lord, the guard came and fetched them, and brought them again into the guard chamber. The wealth of Solomon, gathered over forty years from the four corners of the world, departed back to Egypt in a single season.
He took away the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house; he took all: he carried away also all the shields of gold which Solomon had made.1 Kings 14:26
Archaeology · History · Genetics
Shishak is the biblical rendering of the Egyptian Sheshonq I, founder of the Twenty-second (Libyan) Dynasty, who reigned approximately 943–922 BCE. His invasion of Palestine in 925 BCE — independently dated by the Egyptian regnal sequence — is the single most synchronous tie-point between biblical and Egyptian chronology, and one of the cornerstones on which the absolute dating of the divided monarchy rests. Sheshonq's campaign is recorded on the Bubastite Portal at the temple of Karnak, where a long topographical list names roughly 150 captured towns of the Levant — fragmented, but reconstructible.
The Karnak list mentions sites in both the kingdom of Judah and the kingdom of Israel — including Megiddo, Beth-Shean, Taanach, Aijalon, Gibeon, and (probably) Arad. Curiously, Jerusalem is not named on the surviving fragments; whether the city's name was on a damaged section, or whether the biblical account exaggerates the scope of the attack on the capital itself, is debated. A sandstone fragment of a Sheshonq stele found at Megiddo in the 1925 Oriental Institute excavations (registered as Pratt Stele) physically anchors the campaign at one of the named cities, providing direct archaeological corroboration unique among biblical events of the early monarchy.
The campaign's strategic logic was Levantine resource control, not theological punishment. After the long Twentieth Dynasty decline, Sheshonq sought to reassert Egyptian power in Palestine and southern Syria — restoring the Bronze Age pattern of Egyptian suzerainty over the southern Levant. The destruction layers Israel Finkelstein and his colleagues identify in the late tenth century at Megiddo VA-IVB, Tel Rehov, and elsewhere have been variously assigned to Sheshonq's campaign or to internal northern-southern conflict; the chronological resolution depends on whether one accepts the high or low chronology, but the destruction reality is undisputed.
Sheshonq's campaign of 925 BCE is the firmest synchronism between Egyptian and biblical chronology — a single year in which two records, written 600 miles apart, anchor each other.Kitchen, paraphrased from The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt (3rd ed., 1996)