135 2 Chronicles 35-36

  King Josiah, now having the Law of Moses again, gives instructions to have the first proper passover feast since the time of Samuel.  He helps out at the temple constantly to make sure everything is done right and going smoothly and it seems to come off pretty well.  There is basically no cultural tradition left surrounding passover since it has been so long since anyone followed the rules, but just going by what's written in the Law, they seem to do okay.  The text doesn't mention anything about God being especially pleased  by the event, but at least He wasn't angered by anything there.

  13 years later, according to the timelines given, the king of Egypt went up to attack someone around Babylon.  He had no qualm with Israel, but Josiah wanted to attack him for some reason.  The Pharaoh, Neco, told Josiah that not only did he not want to fight him, but God had told him that they weren't supposed to fight.  This is another interesting case of God talking to someone outside the covenant, adding king Neco to the list with Balaam and Melchizedek.  Josiah didn't listen and attacked him anyway so he was killed.

  Recall that God said He was going to destroy Judah after Josiah died, so we can expect something terrible to happen soon.

  Jehoahaz was king for three months before the king of Egypt came and removed him from his throne.  He placed Jehoahaz's brother Eliakim on the throne in stead and took Jehoahaz back to Egypt with him.  Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, came down 11 years later and took away Eliakim, who had his name changed to Jehoiakim when he became king, by the way.  Nebuchadnezzar chained Johoiakim up in Babylon and looted the temple.  Johoiakim was an evil king.

  Just in case you'r not already confused by all these complicated names, the next king after Johoiakim was Johoiachin.  He was another evil king, but he only ruled for three months anyway before Nebuchadnezzar brought him to Babylon and placed his uncle, Zedekiah, on the throne of Judah.  Guess what?  Zedekiah was also an evil king.  He not only rebelled against God though, but Nebuchadnezzar too.  He refused to look to God for help with the problems with Babylon and under his rule the priests and the people all fell back into their old customs and ignored the Law.

  God sent prophets all over the place to try to turn people around, but they kept doing evil things and worshiping other Gods.  Finally, God sent Nebuchadnezzar to destroy Jerusalem and Judah all together.  The Babylonians burned down the temple and looted the city.  Everyone who wasn't killed was taken away to Babylon to serve Nebuchadnezzar and his sons. This lasted for 70 years until Cyrus, the king of Persia, became more powerful than Babylon and took over.  God got him to send all the Judans back home.

132 2 Chronicles 25-27

  Ahaziah was a pretty good king.  Not the best king, he was maybe like a 7 as far as kings go.  He followed the Lord most of the time.  Like, when he bought some soldiers from Israel once, a prophet came and told him that he was acting against God using Israeli soldiers since God did not favor Israel.  Ahaziah paid them what he'd promised and then sent them home unused, even though it was not a popular decision.  When he conquered the Edomites though, he ruined his pious streak by bringing their gods home and consulting them about things.  This seems like a baffling thing to do, seeking the counsil of these, what I assume were some kind of little clay figurines or something, when he had seen first hand what the true God was capable of.

  I guess people thought about gods differently then though.  The only way I can make any sense of it is in thinking about Ahaziah like a rich man.  Jesus says sometime later that *spoiler alert* it will be difficult for a rich man to enter heaven.  This is because (I believe) a rich man accustomed to feeling secure and safe and believes that his own resources can sustain him and protect him.  So it's easy for a rich man to have a little bit of faith because, hey, what's it going to hurt?  Even if he's wrong, he's still got some layers of contingency plans tucked away.  In ancient Judah, you couldn't just buy insurance plans and bullit proof vests and parachuets.  Even rich men had to be a little bit wary of what was happening around them.  So maybe having extra gods around felt for Ahaziah  kind of like having extra money around feels for us, like a harmless back plan.

  Anyway, God killed him for that later on.  His 16 year old son, Uzziah, took over and did what was right in the eyes of the Lord.  At least for a while, until he bacame a little conceited because of his victories and went to go light some incense in the temple.  The priests confronted him and told him that that was not his place, but that just made Uzziah angry.  While he yelled at the priests, leprosy broke out on his forehead and he suffered from leprosy until the day he died.

  Jotham, Uzziah's son, became king next and he walked with the Lord for reals.  Even though the people of Judah were not doing a great job of following the law at that time, Jotham followed the Lord and so he grew powerful and ruled for 16 years.

131 2 Chronicles 21-24

  Jehosephat died and gave his sons all kinds of land and riches, but he made Jehoram king or Judah because Jehoram was the oldest.  Jehoram then turned around and killed all his other brothers as well as anyone else who may have gotten the idea into their heads to challenge the throne and began living like Ahab.  He married a descendant of Ahab and started building high places and did all the things that we're coming to find as stereotypical bad king behaviors.  This included ignoring the warnings and rebukes of the prophet Elijah, which finally landed him in hot water with God, who set some foreign armies on Judah.  The Arabs and the Cushites both decided to invade.  They didn't take over, but just looted the palace and the countryside.  After that Jehoram got sick for a long time and died, largely unmourned by his people.

  Jehoram was succeeded by his youngest son Ahaziah because all the older sons were killed by the Arabs.  Ahaziah wasn't a bad guy, but his mother was from Ahab's family and she gave him bad advice all the time.  He only ruled for a year because he got mixed up with the family of Ahab and sort of got caught in the cross-fire as God was wiping them all out.  Bad luck man.

  After Ahaziah was dead, his mother set to work wiping out his whole line.  I guess this was because of something to do with the family of Ahab again.  Ahaziah had still been carrying the torch for the line of David though so it's no surprise that events conspired to preserve exactly one son of Ahaziah and his nurse.  The boy was hidden away in the temple while the wicked grandmother ruled Judah.  His name was Joash, and when he got a little older, all the priests and Levites and God-fearing men of Judah got together and made him king.  There was no subterfuge this time, no raising an army up in the desert and launching a surprise attack.  They just got together and held a coronation ceremony in the temple.  When the queen heard the commotion and wandered down to see what was happening she shouted and made a big stink about treason, but I guess all her guards must have supported Joash too because she didn't really do anything about it.  Except get killed with a sword.

  Joash worked with the chief priest to rebuild and repair the temple which they funded by building a big wooden chest and setting it outside the front gate.  All the officials in Judah came and put money in the chest as Moses had decreed they should do back when they were still setting up the tabernacle.  The temple repairs went well and all the shrines to foreign gods were removed, but after the priest died, his son, Zachariah, spoke out against the idol worship that was starting to pick back up again and Joash had the people stone him to death.  For killing that good priest, God allowed Aram to invade and wound Joash.  Later the temple officials, still angry about the death of Zachariah, killed him in his bed.

Day 117 2 Kings 23-25

            King Josiah, upon finding the lost book of the law,  desecrated and destroyed every shrine and high place belonging to a foreign god and began following the law again as it was written.  He also got rid of all the priests who had been put in their positions by kings instead of by God and went through a ceremony renewing the covenant with God.  This wasn’t enough in itself to turn God’s rage completely away though.  Egypt comes in and conquers Judah, subjugating Jerusalem and eventually killing Josiah.  God has seen so many times how we can be so devout for a short burst and then so quickly fall back into disobedience. 

            And, sure enough, Josiah’s son falls right back into the old routine of Manasseh and the kings of the past, worshiping other gods and failing to acknowledge the lord.  God allows him to rule for less than a year, and all the while as a vassal of the Pharaoh.

            It seems like a really big deal that Josiah found the book of the law.  It certainly changed the way he saw God.  It’s interesting though that we never heard anything about it having been lost.  How long has it been gone for and exactly what have the priests been doing all this time?

            Judah was then taken from Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon.  He completely destroyed the nation.  He took everyone with him to Babylon except the poorest people around, who he left to work the land some.  There was a little bit of politics among Judahites surrounding who got to be in charge of Judah, but they were ultimately just fighting over Nebucadnezzer’s scraps.  After he laid siege to Jerusalem, the king dismantled the entire temple and carted all the valuable metals off back to Babylon.  Solomon had built the temple during a pretty lush time and there was gold, silver and more bronze than could be measured.

Day 105 1 Kings 12-14

            When Rehoboam goes to be crowned king of Israel the people ask him to reduce their workload.  Solomon used a lot of forced labor for his ambitious building projects and everyone was hoping that Rehoboam would ease off on them now that everything was built and Solomon was dead.  Rehoboam ignored the requests of his people and the advice of his advisors opting in stead to listen to his buddies who told him to snub the people and give them even more work.  For this the people drove him out of Jerusalem and killed the guy he had in charge of the forced labor program.

            Only the tribe of Judah stayed loyal to Rehoboam.  He was going to mount an offensive to take back the rest of Israel by force, but God told a nearby prophet that this was His doing, and they should just let it be.  That must have been pretty disappointing for Rehoboam to hear.

            I wonder what the tribe of Levi does here.  They still seem to have priests in Judah so I don’t imagine all the Levites just ran away when the tribes finally split for good.  I guess Levites are exempt from military sevice anyway so it probably doesn’t much matter where their political loyalties lie.

            While Rehoboam may not have been as bright as his father, down in Israel Jeroboam was proving that he wasn’t a great king either.  Not satisfied that God had given him the throne of Israel, he started getting paranoid about losing it.  He worried that people would go through the cycle of holy days and celebrations and they would remember that David’s line is God’s line of kings.  Then they would rebel against him and try to reinstate Rehoboam.  To prevent this, he set p a bunch of local altars and shrines and some new holidays to distract people from interacting with anyone from Judah or from going to Jerusalem.  It seems like kind of a lame plan, but it seemed to work, and Israel plunged into idolatry as it seemed inclined to do at the slightest provocation.  The ancient Israelites are developing a habit of being led astray by empty religious pageantry and showy approximations of the kind of worship God actually gave them.

            Oh, that reminds me.  Happy Easter everyone.

            Anyway, Jeroboam is not glorifying God and a prophet comes down from Judah to tell him as much.   That prophet actually got kind of screwed in this story.  On his way back home to Judah he was met by another, older prophet who I guess maybe thought he was doing this guy a favor by telling him that and angel of the Lord had told him to bring the foreign prophet home with him and feed him.  This, if it were true, would have overridden the earlier command that he not eat or drink anything until he was back home.

            As soon as the foreign prophet ate though, the older prophet actually did prophesy that since he had broken God’s command, and eaten in Israel, he would be punished and not buried with his people.  After what I’m sure was a very awkward goodbye, he started back home again and was killed by a lion.  So it’s not a good enough excuse to claim to have been misled I guess.  When it comes to what God tells you to do, don’t trust anybody.

            Jeroboam’s son gets sick and dies.  The prophet Ahijah, who first told Rehoboam that he would get to be king, tells his wife that God is super-pissed about all the ashera poles and shrines to foreign Gods and that Israel is going to be cast out of this good land and scattered beyond the Euphrates river.  Also, Jeroboam’s family is going to be completely destroyed.  This must be the fulfillment of the prophecy from Deuteronomy about how God new that the Israelites were going to screw up so bad that God was going to unleash horrible curses upon them until they straightened out.

            Those curses were pretty awful so the next couple of books might get pretty rocky.

Day 98 2 Samuel 19-21

            David mourns the loss of his son, but his army is disheartened by his sadness.  One of his generals chews him out for it, telling him it’s obvious to the men that David would rather all of them had died and they’d lost the battle.  He told David he loves those who hate him and hates those who love him, and that if he doesn’t go out and act thankful and happy in front of the men, he’s not going to have any men left by morning.

            Obviously there’s a whole lot of “Oh, I knew you were going to come back the whole time my lord.  I always said you were the true king of Israel, of course” on David’s trip back to Jerusalem.  Escorting him back through the land, the armies of Judea and the combined armies of the rest of Israel are practically fighting over who gets to carry David’s tent poles for him.  Even Mephibosheth shows up again, claiming that his servant had lied and that he wanted to come out and meet David to support him earlier but his wicked servant stopped him.  David, gentle soul that he is, accepts pretty much everyone back into the fold and stops his men from killing those suspected of disloyalty.  He didn’t restore all of Mephibosheth’s lands, which he had given to his servant before, but he splits them and lets each keep half.

            There was one guy that David had to kill.  A man named Sheba was stirring up trouble and trying to incite rebellion.  David said that this guy would be even more trouble than Absolom had been and ordered his men to chase him down.  He holed up in a city, but when David’s army laid siege to them they quickly killed Sheba and threw his head out to David’s men.

            There was a famine for three years, so David asked the Lord about it and He said that it was because of the way that Saul had tried to wipe out the Gibeonites, who were descended from the Ammorites, whom the Israelites had sworn to spare back when they had first arrived.  David went to make amends with them, and they were cool about it.  They said they didn’t want riches or land or war or anything, they said they would call it even if they were given seven males from Saul’s line to kill.  David didn’t send Meshibopheth because of his oath to Jonathan, but he found seven other descendents of Saul’s and sent them.

            Israel fought some more wars with the Philistines.  David got old and can’t go fight with the men anymore.

Day 92 I Samuel 28-31

            Now that Samuel’s dead, the Philistines are going to come square off against Saul and his army.  Achish, the king where David’s staying, makes David his personal bodyguard for life.

            Without Samuel to talk to God for him, Saul is really nervous about this fight.  Even though he had expelled all the media from the land, he sets his men to work finding one for him.  That’s medium like someone who talks to the dead that he’s looking for, not like music and movies.

            They find a medium on the forest moon of Endor, I mean in the town of Endor, and she summons Samuel for Saul to question.  Samuel says that Saul is an idiot for even asking, and his nation will be taken from him and given to David.

            Once Achish meets up with the other Philistine leaders, they all kind of flip out about David and his men being there.  They insist that Achish send them back home because they might turn on them in the battle.  It’s a good thing they did too because David returned home just in time to find the whole place plundered and burned to the ground.  Some Amalikite raiders had come through and taken all the goods and the women.  Fortunately they left an ephod, which David was able to use to consult with the Lord.  God told him to pursue the raiders and they got all of their gold and livestock and wives and other valuables back.  They also killed all but a couple hundred of the Amalekites.

            Meanwhile, back at the war, Israel was losing badly.  Saul’s three sons were all killed and on that same day Saul jumped on his own sword when his armor-bearer refused to kill him.  He was hoping to escape the abuse of the Philistines when they caught him.  Once they found his body they took it back to Beth Shan and hung it on a wall.  Some soldiers mounted an expedition to go retrieve it later on, but, more importantly, the Philistines occupied a big chunk of Israel now.

Day 87 I Samuel 13-14

            Saul was king for 42 years.  During that time the Philistines were a big problem.  Fearing an Israelite rebellion, they barred any Israelite from becoming a blacksmith so they had no weapons.  Anyone who wanted to get their metal tools sharpened had to have it done by philistines out of town.  With God on their side though, it doesn’t matter much what they have for weapons so Saul went to war anyway.

            They had things set up so Samuel would come in and petition God for victory before the battle, but he was late so Saul gave an offering in his place.  When Samuel arrived, he was angry at Saul for doing that and told him that his line could have ruled forever, but now it was going to end with him.  As far as punishments go for offering improper sacrifices though, saul seems like he got of kind of easy.  The last people to screw up the burnt offering were killed with fire from God on the spot.

            The battle looks bleak.  Saul’s army is outnumbered, but his son Jonathan crept around to a Philistine outpost and killed about 20 men, throwing the Philistines into a panic.  They ran away, and Saul was going to pursue them, but some divinations revealed that Jonathan was a little bit cursed, so they shouldn’t go.  His faith was exemplary and he hadn’t broken any commands, but Saul had made some vow on behalf of the rest of the army saying that cursed is anyone who eats before they win the fight.  Jonathan hadn’t heard that vow so he ate some honey off the ground on the walk back.  So, the Philistines live to fight another day.

Day 80 Judges 10-12

            A couple more judges came and went apparently without doing very much.  Jael’s three-verse story sounds like a nursery rhyme.  It seems like the average reign these days is only around 20-30 years as opposed to some of the older heroes of the faith who were the heads of their clans for a hundred years or more.  I wonder is people are still dying younger or if there’s a lot of political turmoil.

            Israel angered God again by worshipping other gods and the Lord again delivered them into the hands of their neighbors.  They cried and apologized and threw out their idols though, and eventually God said He would fix things for them.  Again.

            Jephthah takes the job leading Israel against the Ammonites, who are trying to reclaim the land the Israelites took from them back when the Israelites were conquering everybody.  Jephthah is told that he will be king after he rids the land of Ammonites.

            He delivers a pretty eloquent rebuttal to the Ammonite king’s claim to the land, explaining that they were given that land by their God, which is different than just taking it form the Ammonites.  Also, that happened like 300 years ago so the statute of limitations is up on this land.  The Ammonite king is not surprisingly resistant to this line of logic so Jephthah goes and kills him.

            He gets a little too excited about it though and promises to sacrifice the first thing he sees of his to the Lord as soon as he gets back home.  That thing turns out to be his young daughter.  She’s surprisingly accepting of her own sacrifice, although she does ask to go into the hills for a couple months to weep with her friends first.

            The Ephraimites were upset that they weren’t included in the fight with the Ammonites, but Jephthah kind of blows them off.  Actually Jephthah conquers the place where Ephraimites cross the Jordan river and starts killing every Ephraimite that tries to cross it.  In the 6 years he rules, 42000 Ephraimites are killed trying to cross.  That’s about 20 a day.

            The rulers stay in power for even less time now.  There’s a series of judges who all stay less than ten years.  The book is not forthcoming on how they really served the Lord, if at all, but they had lots of sons, and owned lots of donkeys.  So that’s something I guess.

Day 79 Judges 8-9

            Gideon passed through a couple towns while pursuing the last leaders of the army of eastern peoples.  In them, he asked for bread for his tired men, but the leaders of the towns mocked him and refused to help.  Once Gideon captured everyone God told him to capture then, he returned to these towns and whipped their elders with thorn bushes and tore down a tower as an example to the people there.

            After the battle, everyone wanted Gideon to rule, but he told them that God was to rule.  That was a good thing he did, but it’s pretty much the last good thing that anyone does in this story.

            With a collection of gold earrings Gideon made an ephod, which I think, is kind of like a tabard or a sort of holy sandwich board.  He displayed it in his hometown and people worshipped it.  It was a snare to Gideon and his family.

            If there were only one human habit chosen to embody all of our sinful nature and our broken relationship with God it would be our sense of entitlement.  Even when we do something good, we love to allow it to lead to something awful.  Gideon did a good thing by refusing to take leadership over the land, and he knew it.  Because he did this great thing, right after being a part of the great battle that God had won just before no less, he felt he could indulge a little and make a small monument.  It was a monument to God sure, but it was also just a little bit a monument to how awesome Gideon is.

            When people would show up in town and see this neat altar made of Gideon’s ephod, they would say “Hey, what’s this altar for?” and someone would reply, “Well, listen to this great thing that the Lord did with Gideon.”  “Listen to the amazing things that Gideon and the Lord did.”

            It’s kind of like if someone had carved his own initials into the standing stones on the bank of the Jordan back at the beginning of the book of Joshua.

            So Gideon’s family has this alter to themselves and eventually Gideon dies, but he leaves 70 sons with his many wives.  Abimalek goes off to a neighboring town where his mother is from and tells them that they should support his claim to the throne (this is the throne that Gideon had previously refused and left open for God).  The people of the town give him enough money to go buy some thugs to kill the rest of his brothers and then I guess he informs the people in the area that he is now king.

            The youngest brother escapes after delivering a parable about trees electing a king, but he runs off into exile and we don’t hear from him again.  It is important though that he takes off because I guess now we know that Gideon’s line isn’t broken by the horrible thing that you know is going to happen to Abimelek soon.

            I mean he claimed a throne for himself that was held by God.

            Abimelek eventually loses the people’s favor so when a city gets unruly he rolls in with his army and not only defeats them, but then sets fir to the tower where all the non-combatants were hiding.  He does this once in a town that’s about to rebel, and then when he hears of another town rebelling, he goes to do it again, but a lady on the roof of the tower throws a millstone at him and cracks his skull.  He tells one of his men to stab him so no one will say he was killed by a girl.

            And that’s the story of the line of Gideon.  Nobody wins, everyone’s wrong.

            The end.

Day 19 Exodus 7-10

Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh and turn Aaron’s staff into a snake again, but the Egyptians can do that trick too so they’re not very impressed. God tells Moses what to say and do and we finally start to see some real Charlton Heston plagues. First, Moses turns the water of the Nile into blood and then fills the land with frogs, which I guess isn’t really harmful to anything, but just gross.

Pharaoh is suitably impressed and agrees to let the Israelites go out into the desert to worship God. It is mentioned repeatedly that God is going to harden Pharaoh’s heart and make him refuse Moses’s demands, so now we’re now starting to see God being in charge of every part of the universe. In stead of merely influencing livestock and occasionally coming to Earth to talk to someone or destroy a city, God is reaching right into Pharaoh’s head and pulling his strings on camera. It seems clear that God could have just made Pharaoh wake up one day and think “I should let the Israelites go.” But, not only does God make Moses do the leg work, He doesn’t even have Moses tell Pharaoh the truth about what’s happening. Moses is still peddling this story about going out to worship in the desert for a couple days and then coming back.

It seems to me like God really wanted to make a point of disrespecting Pharaoh and Egypt. I wonder if this ire is related to the policy in Ancient Egypt of treating the Pharaoh like a God on Earth. “Fine, you say you’re a God like Me? Let’s see you come roll with the big dogs when you can’t get any water and you’ve got frogs in your pockets, bitch.”

Anyway, Pharaoh agrees to let the Jews go so Moses un-plagues the land, but then Pharaoh has his heart hardened again and tells them he changed his mind. They have to stay.

Two more plagues come, gnats and then flies. Pharaoh agrees to let them go again and again revokes their permission to leave once the plagues are gone.

Now things get real. The next plague kills all the livestock, then everyone is stricken with boils so bad they can’t even stand up straight to talk to Moses in the palace (some God, all covered in gross sores) then a nasty hail storm sweeps through and kills all the flax and barley. People are starving and in pain and Pharaoh has no choice but to let the Israelites go.

But, then God hardens his heart and, well, you see where this is goin