Day 111 2 Kings 6-8

            Aram has been stirring up trouble with Israel for some time now, but God is angry with Israel so basically both sides are losing the fight.  Aram’s army will be run off by a miracle, but only after really ruining Israel’s day.  In a siege on the city of Samaria, the food shortages were so bad that people were eating their kids.  This was something that Moses prophesied would happen to Israel when they angered God enough to make Him turn on them back in his last speech at the end of Deutoronomy.  In the end though, God makes the Aramian army run away and leave their camp and all their supplies, so the city isn’t taken or destroyed.

            The king of Aram got sick and sent an officer to inquire of Elisha whether he would get better or die of the sickness.  That seems like an odd move sine Elisha lives in Israel, but maybe it’s public knowledge that he’s not very patriotic.  The officer, a man named Hazael, asks Elisha about the king’s health and Elisha gives him a very strange answer, explaining that the king will die, but that the officer should go tell him that he will recover.  Then he stares the officer down until things get awkward, and starts crying.  When the officer, Hazael, asks him what is going on, Elisha says that he, Hazael, is going to kill tons of Israelites.  He will accomplish this because he’s going to be king of Aram.

            All this borderline gibberish is apparently exactly what Hazael needs to hear though to go back home and kill the king.  This reads different to me than most prophecies in the past.  Before, the prophecies we heard about sort of described things from a distance, either reffering to things happening generations into the future or about other people unaware of the prophecy or something like that.  This prophecy seems to be one of the major causes of the event being prophecied.  The text seems to imply that Hazael would not have killed the king if Elisha had not said that he was going to kill the king.

            I know that God tends to use people to fulfil prophecies anyway, but it’s interesting that this prophecy was the motivation for the fulfillment of itself.  It’s like a trick-shot.

Day 106 1 Kings 15-17

            Rehoboam’s son Abijah takes over Judah and there is a lot of tension along the border with Israel.  Abijah committed all the same sins his father and grandfather had before him, but God didn’t strike him down because of how great David was.  The family finally turns itself around after Abijah is succeeded by Asa, who does follow the Lord.  He tears down almost all of the totems and shrines and puts all the treasure back in the temple that his forbearers had spread around Judah.  He sends most of that treasure to a foreign king though to try to reestablish a treaty that David had created back in the day.  With the foreign king backing Judah now in stead of Israel, Israel is forced to back off a little and quit skirmishing along the border.

            These kings and the Israelite kings up north did a lot more than what’s covered in this book, but apparently all their other adventures were recorded in other books that we don’t have.

            In Israel, Jeroboam’s son rules for a little while, but then Basha, the son of the very same prophet who told Jeroboam he and his family would be killed, kills Jeroboam and his family.  Of course, Basha committed all the same sins as Jeroboam once he became king.  This scene pretty much just repeats itself for a few generations until finally Ahab becomes king of Israel and sins more than any of the kings before him.  He actually served another God and put a shrine to it in the temple.

            Ahab’s rebellion was met with an equal and opposite series of acts by a prophet named Elijah.  Elijah decreed that there would be no rain in Israel except on his word, and then he promptly ran away and hid from a nation of angry and hungry farmers and shepherds.  God took care of Elijah on the banks of a small stream in the wilderness for a while, and then sent him to live with a foreign widow once his stream dried up.