discontent, and ultimately provoked the people to demand a monarchy. A descendant of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, a chief of the eighth of the twenty-four orders into which the priesthood was divided by David and an ancestor of Zechariah, the priest who was the father of John the Baptist. The order of Abijah is listed with the priests and Levites who returned with Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel and with Joshua. A son of Jeroboam, the first king of Israel. On account of his severe illness when a youth, his father sent his wife to consult the prophet Ahijah regarding his recovery. The prophet, though blind with old age, knew the wife of Jeroboam as soon as she approached, and under a divine impulse he announced to her that inasmuch as in Abijah alone of all the house of Jeroboam there was found "some good thing toward the Lord", he only would come to his grave in peace. As his mother crossed the threshold of the door on her return, the youth died, and "all Israel mourned for him". According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the good that he did "Rabbinical Literature:The passage, I Kings, xiv. 13, in which there is a reference to "some good thing [found in him] toward the Lord God of Israel," is interpreted as an allusion to Abijah's courageous and pious act in removing the sentinels placed by his father on the frontier between Israel and Judah to prevent pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Some assert that he himself undertook a pilgrimage." This name (possibly) appeared on the Gezer Calendar, a Paleo-Hebrew inscription dating to the 9th or 10th Century BC, making it one of the earliest if not the earliest Yahwistic theophoric names outside the Bible. Abinadab Abinadab (Hebrew אֲבִינָדָב "my father apportions" or "the father [i.e. god of the clan] is munificent") refers to four biblical characters. Where the Hebrew text reads Avinadav, Greek manuscripts of the Septuagint read Am(e)inadab or Abin. but Brenton's translation of the Septuagint reads "Abinadab". A man of Kiriath-Jearim, in whose house on a hill the Ark of the Covenant was deposited after having been brought back from the land of the Philistines. "It is most likely that this Abinadab was a Levite". The ark remained in his care for twenty years, guarded by his son Eleazar (not to be confused with Eleazar, the son of Aaron), until it was at