1 Kings 12:28, commentary and pictures

Jeroboam feared that the regular journeys of the ten northern tribes to Jerusalem and its temple would draw them back into allegiance to the ruler in Jerusalem of the house of David, and since God intended such worship at Jerusalem to restore unity toward a united kingdom again, he worked to keep the tribes from going up to Jerusalem. He took counsel and made two calves of gold and set them up at Bethel and Dan as alternative centers of worship, inviting the tribes to gather there instead. He told them it was too much and too difficult to go up to Jerusalem, hailing the calves as the gods that brought Israel up out of the land of Egypt. The calves used a heathen representation familiar from the ancestors' time in Egypt, turning the people away from the true and established worship of God toward idolatry and strange forms of worship.

His altar and its dedication stood in opposition to worship at the temple and should have led him to repent and abandon his plans, but he hardened his heart and chose his own way. A second place of worship divides God's people, so the verse warns against establishing two places for worship and two places for tithe-paying, since medical missionary work and ministry and church work are all one interest laboring to one end with no division or separation. The setting up of the calves began the apostasy and departure of the ten tribes from established worship and became a sin that led to violence and crime under idolatrous priests as leaders in crime. It led on to grosser idolatry, until nearly all the people forgot their Maker, corrupted themselves, and gave themselves to the alluring practices of nature worship, going to Baal-peor and separating themselves unto shame with abominations according as they loved, sacrificing to Baalim and burning incense to graven images and abandoning every uplifting and ennobling principle.

The calves became the religious practices that Ahab continued, while his greater apostasy went beyond them to the worship of Baal. The people later reaped the consequences of that apostasy, for the calf was a human-made idol and not God, and it would be broken and carried away to Assyria as a present to King Jareb, identified as Sennacherib, while the people and the priests who had rejoiced over the calves would mourn. Jeroboam's spirit and plans put into operation led the children of Israel away from God into idolatry and caused them to perform and permit terrible evils, and the Judge of all the earth lays the awful results of his course to his charge. People today are in danger of manifesting the same spirit and doing a work similar in character, and the results of their wrong course will be laid to the charge of those who follow his example.