128 2 Chronicles 10-12

  The story of Rehoboam, the son and heir of Solomon.  Again, one perspective on this story was covered in 2 Kings, but the account in 2 Chronicles has a little different pacing.  Major themes are common to both stories.  King Rehoboam took over after Solomon died (I forgot to mention Solomon died at the end of chapter 9) and the people petitioned him to lighten their workload some.  Solomon's huge building projects were neat and all, but the people were tired of the constant labor.  Rehoboam came back and told them that his little finger was thicker than his father's waist and that he would work them even hard so shut up.  The people did not react well to that and they ran the king out of town.  Jeroboam led the angry people back to their homes and started a new kingdom in the north.  This was the split between Judah and Israel.

  Now this part is a little different than in Kings.  Before, there was no mention that I recall of the Levites in Israel.  I remember specifically pondering what happened to them in this split since they're spread through all the tribes of Israel and would have trouble picking their allegiance.  Since they're exempt from military service anyway though, it doesn't really matter.  In this new version though, the Levites, as well as everyone in Israel who wanted to continue to worship the Lord up and moved south to Judah.  In their eyes Rehoboam was the heir of David's line which was anointed by God, so they had no choice but to follow Rehoboam.  Jeroboam in this story immediately erects pagan shrines all across the country and starts ignoring God.
  Rehoboam still seems to have a functioning relationship with God in this section, at least by way of the prophet  Shemaiah.  Rehoboam comes home and starts getting ready for a big battle with Judah but God tells him not to.    While Rehoboam does not seem like a great king as far has his leadership abilities go, he seems at least receptive to what God tells him and that puts him ahead of the average.  Eventually he slips though, because being king seems to make it pretty difficult to be properly in tune with what God wants, and God has Egypt ally with a few other nations and come in to conquer them.  They're all set to wipe out Israel but at the last second the leaders of Israel realize that the reason God's turned on them is because of their pride and them humble themselves.  God is impressed by the display and decides to let them keep their country.  The Egyptian king just loots the gold shields that Solomon put in the temple and lets them go.

  This story doesn't differ really from the version in 2 Kings I don't think, but I feel like reading it yields different themes and gives a different impression of the major players.  Reading two different historical accounts of anything I would expect there to be differences, but one of the things I'm trying to keep in the back of my head through this whole program is the idea that the Bible is completely literal without any metaphor, embellishment or inaccuracy.  I naturally balk at this interpretation of the bible because I think it undermines the necessity to learn anything about the cultural context of these records.  It seems to be pretty popular though so I'm interested in whether it's really feasible.  It seems possible so far, although it yields some strange things in Genesis.

127 2 Chronicles 6-9

  Kind of a late post for the holiday week, but that's okay because you can pretty much just look at my previous posts from 1 Kings, like this one.  King Solomon has a lot of really ambitious building projects all over the country and people come from all over the world just to listen to him say brilliant things, most notably the queen of Sheba who brought him extravagant gifts of precious metals and gushed about how lucky his attendants were to get to bask in his wisdom all the time.

126 2 Chronicles 3-5

  2 Chronicles is boooorrrriiing.
  I was just rereading some of my older posts from Genesis when everything was all about God walking around telling people off and angels doing stuff.  2 Chronicles is about Solomon building the temple to God in Jerusalem.  Specifically, it's about Solomon negotiating a trade contract with a foreign king for some lumber and craftsmen, then overseeing, in minute detail, the dimension and decoration of the temple.  To summerize: it was really big and pretty much everything was covered in gold.

  For me, the real take-away message is about how our deeds are so different in their scope to God's deeds.  My problem reading 2 Chronicles today was really that I was trying to compare Solomon's administration of the temple building project to God literally creating the universe from nothing.  I'm not saying that the Israelites lost sight of that difference when they were building the temple, but I know how easy it can be to be wowed by a big building project.  It would probably seem quaint to us today if we saw the first temple, since we would try to compare it to the great wall of China for size, the taj mahal for majesty and the white house or Versailles for opulence, and it would probably come up with three strikes.  So it seems silly to us to see something like Solomon's temple and compare it to the majesty of God himself, but we still do the same kind of thing constantly today, just with bigger and better buildings.
  We do this with the things we learn about how the universe works.  And don't get me wrong, I am absolutely all for scientific exploration and advancement, but anyone who gets up in arms about some struggle between science and religion must have some serious misconceptions about one or the other.  Our learning and understanding has increased a thousand fold over the last few hundred years, but it's still not that significant when you start looking at it as a percentage of the whole, of all the learning and understanding there is to be had.

  Of course, in the story of the Tower of Babel God looked at the big tower that was going up and said that He couldn't allow men to work together in such a way because then nothing would be impossible for them, and he confused all their language and made them split up into different nations.  So maybe the things we accomplish are really profoundly important on a Godly scale.  Who knows?  The book of Genesis was weird.


  The ark of the covenant is placed inside the temple once it's complete.  The text says that the only things inside are the stone tablets with the law given to Moses, but wasn't there other stuff in there too before?  Yes, I've found some other mentions of Aaron's staff from that time it grew and budded and a pot of manna from when Moses led everyone through the desert.  I wonder what happened to them.

125- 2 Chronicles 1 and my triumphant return

  Things have been very busy the last few months, with drastically, rapidly changing plans and developments in various ministries and what have you, but those are all stories for other blogs.  I'm going to try to get back into a regular posting schedule here and someday maybe even finish this giant book that's been keeping both my soul and my coffee table so stable all these years.

  There will be a few changes from the last round of posts though.  For starters, no more of this trying to post every day.  The reading schedule is doable, but trying to summarize and comment on another passage every day can quickly get really shallow or really sloppy, and sometimes both.  With everything else I'm working on, I think it will be very doable to shoot for one post per week, maybe two when I'm overcome with the spirit.
  Posting less often means that my system of numbering posts according to how many days it's been from the begining almost completely meaningless, so that's going to have to change.  Call me obsessive, but I just like it when things are numbered, so I'm still going to keep posting a number before each post, but they're not going to mean quite the same thing.  Actually I guess the only difference is that I'm just not going to write the word day in front of them anymore.  That should be pretty easy to get used to.


  In the first chapter of 2 Chronicles, David is dead and Solomon is the new king of Israel.  He goes to the tent of meeting and makes a huge sacrifice to the Lord.  When God appears to him that night and asks him what he wants, Solomon requests the knowledge and wisdom to  rule well.  God considers this a very classy request since Solomon could have used this opportunity to increase his own holdings, which is the sort of request we've seen from most people to date.  God grants Solomon's wish and also grants him all the riches and power that he could have asked for but didn't.  Afterword, Solomon had a lot of nice things imported from other places and the economy of Jerusalem thrived.

  This is more or less unrelated, but bear with me.  We always write the titles of books like 1 and 2 Kings and Chronicals and John and so forth with numerals in the titles, but when we say them out loud, we say first and second.  So how would these books be alphabetized?  Is 1 Kings under F or in that weird section off to the side where you find books that start with numbers and symbols?  Most lists of Bible books just omit the numbers and treat the sets as complete books just broken into parts, like the last two Harry Potter Movies, which I suppose is exactly what they are.  I suppose it doesn't matter much either way, but this is just a warm-up question anyway.  We'll get into some more controversial stuff later.  Promise.