136 Ezra 1-3

King Cyrus unites all of Persia and takes over Babylon, then he releases all the interned Israelites and sends them back home.  I guess it would be more accurate to call them Judans than Israelites, since the nation of Israel was conquered by Assyria before the Babylonian exile.  I guess I'll start gradually switching over to just calling them Jews.

Not everyone decides to return home, but many families are influenced by God to come back to Jerusalem and rebuild.  King Cyrus returns all the treasure that Nebachadnezzar had looted from the temple when he attacked and more cedar wood is imported from Tyre and Sidon.  Persian influence must reach through this whole area because Cyrus has to sign off on the transfer of wood before it can be delivered to Jerusalem.

Even though they're scared of the neighboring peoples, the Judans observe all the rituals and ceremonies from the law of Moses.  Things seem to be looking up.

133 2 Chronicles 28-31

  This is getting ridiculous.  It's taking me longer to get through first and second Chronicles than the entire rest of the bible combined so far.  I thought it was going to get more interesting once I got through the laws of Moses, but those were actually pretty interesting.  These kings are so boring that God had to write them all down in two different places in the Bible just so we wouldn't miss them if we fall asleep in 1 and 2 Kings.  It's like there are only two kings in Judah and they just alternate for 600 years.  Once king is wicked and defiles the temple and puts shrines to other Gods up everywhere.  He dies of something gross and isn't buried with his people.  The other king is pretty good like David was.  He is allowed up to one major sin or personality flaw and still finds favor with the Lord.  I think on my next pass through the Bible I'm going to have to come up with some kind of short hand for writing about these guys.

  Anyway, Ahaz is king for around 16 years, but he's one of the first type of king.  After he dies his son Hezekiah becomes king and he's one of the second type.  He opts out of his one freebie sin and seems to live completely virtuously, so he's really favored by God.  Not being as ambitious as some of the other kings though, he mostly seems to use his favor to help out the people in their dealings with God, so he sounds like a pretty good guy.  He intervenes on behalf of a lot of people who try to enter the temple without cleansing themselves first and God is okay with it.  That's the kind of thing that God has shown no reservation about killing people with fire over so you can tell Hezekiah must have had some serious pull.

  What's really interesting about the story of Hezekiah, in its own way, is how boring it is.  The history of Israel and Judah seems so full of political conflict and rebelion against God and all this nasty stuff, but reading this story, and thinking about how much I wished it wasn't included in the final draft of the Bible as I went through, made me realize that there are probably a ton of stories far more boring than Hezekiah's that actually did get cut.  After all, we already know that we're getting an incomplete account because every story ends with a reference to a book of kings that we don't have anymore.  So, there could have been whole families that were left out of Kings and Chronicles because they were deemed uninteresting and their account is only available in the official Book of the Kings of Judah.  King Steve ruled for 6 years and did all the same things his predecessor did, but not quite as much.  He neither pleased nor angered God and then he died.  That would certainly explain why all these kings seem to fit into one of two archetypes, they're all the extreme cases.

  I guess trying to go through the history of this many kings this quickly will always seem incomplete though.  We just don't hear about anybody long enough for me to start caring about what happens to them.  This book has poor character development.  The next couple are named after specific people though so I've got high hopes for them.

130 2 Chronicles 18-20

  Jehosephat allied with Ahab, the king of Israel, through marriage, and started repairing the fracture between the two nations.  Ahab asked to Jehosephat to go to war with him against Ramoth Gilead, some random middle-eastern parcel of desert.  Befoire Jehosephat would agree to such a war though, he asked about what the Lord thought.  Ahab brought all his prophets out and they all said that whatever Ahab wanted to do would be awesome, but Jehosephat pressed him and asked if he had any prophets of the Lord.  Ahab admitted that there was a prophet of the lord in Israel named Micah, but he complained that it was a drag to listen to Micah because all he did was say negative things all the time.  Jehosephat insisted that they hear what Micah had to say though so Ahab dutifully summoned him.

  Micah heard that all the cool prophets were telling Ahab that he would crush Ramoth Gilead and be awesome forever, so he tried to tell the two kings the same thing they had been hearing so far.  Micah was a bad liar though and Ahab ordered him to tell them what the Lord had actually revealed to him.

  Micah told the kings that things would not go well at all in battle, so Ahab had him put in prison and ordered that he have nothing  but bread and water until his own safe return from the front.  So really there's no way for Micah to win here.  The warning must have had some effect though because Ahab wore a disguise to the battle so no one would know who he was.

  When they actually went out to fight Ramoth Gilead, the enemy had orders to ignore all of the Judean and Israelite soldiers and to concentrate only on the king.  Since Jehosephat was dressed as a king and Ahab was disguised as a random charioteer, this did not bode well for Jehosephat.  Enemy soldiers began pursueing him immediately.  He prayed to God though and the Lord protected him.  The enemy soldiers realized that he was not the king of Israel and stopped following him.  Meanwhile, Ahab was struck by a random spear and died by nightfall.

  Jehosephat wasn't completely off the hook though.  He had gone to war on the side of Ahab even though he knew that a prophet of the lord had spoken out against it.  As soon as he got back home, his own prophets of the Lord gave him an earfull.  But, he did tear down all the Ashera poles so he bought himself a little bit of leeway I guess.

  Some people from the east came in later and tried to invade Judah, but Jehosephat went before the Lord and prayed about it.  He asked God if He would allow someone to come in and take the land that God had given to the Isaraelites back in the day, especially since the only reason they were neighbors with these people from the East anyway was because God had forbidden Aaron and the original Israelite armies from wiping these guys out.  Now God is surprisingly susceptible to cogent arguments in the Old Testiment so He agrees that it's not fair for foreigners to come in and swipe the land He gave to them, so if the Judean army goes out and stands their ground in an act of faith, they won't even have to fight.  They do, so they don't.  Judah wins without firing a shot when the other army tears itself apart in the night.  Judah even gets the plunder.

  Jehosephat rules for 35 years which it a huge amount of time compared to most other kings.  The impression I get from him is very devout, but a little naive.  Aside from that misguided alliance with Ahab, he also tries to reconcile with Israel a second time by allying with Ahzakiah, another king of Israel, to build some ships for trading.  God still doesn't like Israel though so all his ships sink.

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.

Day 93 2 Samuel 1-3

            Sorry for the frequent delays.  Once I get caught up again I’m going to try to get a week or two ahead so I have some buffer space again.

            Samuel was so awesome that he got two books, even though he’s dead for the second one.

            In second Samuel, David learns about the death of Saul from a guy who says he helped Saul kill himself.  He’s an Amalekite, which is a strike against him already, then David and his men mourn deeply for Saul and execute the Amalekite messenger for having killed God’s anointed.  I think that’s kind of a technicality, but it wouldn’t be the most obtuse interpretation of God’s will we’ve seen so far.

            When the Lord tells David that it’s a good time to return to Israel, he goes into Hebron and explains that he is now the king of Israel.  The tribe of Judah is on board, but no one else is buying it.  The rest of Israel is following Saul’s son Ish-Bosheth propped up by Saul’s general Abner.  Just as one would expect, things go pretty well for David and the tribe of Judah, but not so hot for Israel.  David starts having lots of sons and stuff, but Ish-Bosheth winds up losing the support of Abner over some accusations regarding one of Saul’s concubines.  Abner actually went to join David over the quarrel, but David sent him away.  Once David’s general heard about what happened though, he had Abner brought back again and killed him, believing the whole thing to be a ploy and that Abner was a spy.

Day 85 I Samuel 4-6

            God punishes Eli’s sons and the rest of Israel by letting the Philistines win an important battle against them.  After the first defeat, the ark of the covenant is brought out, but God isn’t with Israel so Eli’s two sons are killed and the ark taken by the Philistines.  When Eli heard about this, he fell over and died too.  Samuel had gained quite a reputation by now though as someone with a direct line to God, so he was in a prime position to move in politically.

            Meanwhile, the Philistines were jazzed about having captured the God of the Israelites and took the ark to live with a giant statue of their god, Dagon.  When they came back the next morning, the statue of Dagon was on its belly on the ground in front of the ark of the covenant.  This happened a couple more times, along with some nasty curses and stuff.  Everyone started getting bad tumors.

            They moved the ark to another city, but then that city started having problems too.  Finally they decided that the ark was more trouble than it was worth and they needed to give it back.

            Once the ark was back in Israel’s hands, Samuel got everyone to worship the Lord properly again without trying to mix in a bunch of foreign gods and idols, and then organized an army to meet the Philistines, who had still been steadily soaking up more and more of Israel’s land.

            When Samuel prayed for God to help them in the battle, there was so much thunder and noise that the Philistines were routed before the battle even started.  Samuel’s army just waded through and killed them all.

            After such a high-profile victory, of course Samuel was the people’s choice for a leader.  For years he did laps around Israel mediating and teaching.  They wanted him to give them a king too, but he balked at that.  God was supposed to be the king, that was what was to set them apart from other people, what made them set apart for God.  The Israelites specifically wanted a king to make them more like the other nations around them though, and finally Samuel gave into their demands for a king.

            God told him first to explain to the people that a king would roll in and take all their best stuff for himself and his court and require taxes and tribute and service and all this material stuff on top of what was to be set aside for God.  Samuel di his best to convince them that they didn’t want a king, but the people had made up their big, loud, communal mind and they would not be swayed.

            Samuel told God about their demands for a king and He said to give them one.

            I have a friend who’s an anarchist as well as a Christian.  Well, he might not identify himself as an anarchist, but he’s sympathetic to their cause.  I don’t agree with him all the time in his interpretations of scripture, but I feel like the last couple books have really promoted an anarchistic political system.  Obviously there are clans and priests and all these official sounding social artifacts, but in practice, the way things work is that a need arises and then God drops in a judge with the skills needed to resolve the situation.  If there’s a battle that needs to be fought, God calls up a good general and tells him to build an army.  If there’s a whole bunch of Philistines that are going to need to be put in their place, God releases a super-human psychopath to terrorize them.  If there had been some great need to build a relationship with the Latin tribes in Italy, God would have called a judge who was really into the shipping industry or something.

            Now contrast that system with America today.  If there’s a battle to be fought, we have a standing military already prepared to keep us safe.  If there’s a famine or a natural disaster, we have federal programs already set up to deal with them, the national guard, FEMA, and so on.  This reminds me of another facet of the arguments made in Steven Levitt’s Ishmael which I mentioned several times back in Genesis.  Levitt opines through the titular character that it’s ridiculous to insist upon such a high degree of personal control over the world as we exercise in our culture.

            On a personal level, Jesus talked about how we shouldn’t spend all of our energy worrying about where our clothes or shelter or even our next meal are going to come from because those things are under God’s control.  When we spend all our energy trying to bring them under our own control, it’s disrespectful and only serves to show our own ignorance, but I’m getting ahead of myself now.

            I’m interested to see how this king thing works out.

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 76 Judges 1-2

            Everyone continues to sweep across Israel driving out Canaanites.  God hands out victory after victory, including Jerusalem, which will be super-important later on.  There is a big list of places though where Canaanites are still allowed to live because they refuse to leave.  I’m not sure what that means exactly since Israel has an invincible God-powered military machine, but the Canaanites refuse to leave a few places and so they stay.  Later on they are all made to do forced labor so I guess that doesn’t count, as making a treaty with them and so is allowable under the covenant with God.

            They don’t do a very good job of breaking down all the altars to foreign gods though so an angel of the Lord, or possibly the Lord Himself depending on your interpretation, chewed them out pretty good for not completing their end of the deal.  Again though, it couldn’t have been too bad because it is also true that the nation was on good terms with God all through Joshua’s time and beyond through the reign of the elders and leaders who had first-hand knowledge of God’s work.

            The next generation didn’t do so great though.  In fact they entered a time of wavering between breaking the law and following it.  Basically, when things were good, the Israelites would slack off and do what they pleased, worshiping other gods and ignoring their history and covenant with God.  Once they angered God enough, He would send raiders and curses and make the Israelites lose battles all over the place until they came back to Him and to their covenant out of desperation.  Then, because He promised to take them back when they asked, He would raise up judges to lead the people back into a proper relationship with God, defeating foreigners and teaching the Law.  Every time one of these judges would finish their work and die though, the people would fall back into sin.

            That last paragraph summarizes about half a chapter in the book of Judges, which seems to sort of broadly cover several decades, maybe hundreds of years.  It’s interesting to me that this complex pattern is laid out so simply.  I mean we take that kind of analysis for granted today because I can scan Wikipedia for a few minutes and find a handful of infographics outlining relevant events surrounding pretty much any theme I like, but it’s hard to tease out that kind of pattern with only the tools available to a pre-roman era anthropologist/goat-herder.

Day 75 Joshua 22-24

            The tribes living east of the Jordan river are finally dismissed to go back home.  They build a giant altar just on their side of the border which stirs up a lot of concern back in Israel proper.  Knowing that God will punish the whole nation of Israelites for the idolatry of a few tribes, the rest of the Israelites are ready to go to war with the tribes of Benjamin, Gad and the quarter-tribe of Manasseh.

            When they show up with a giant army, the two and a quarter tribes living there explain that they didn’t erect this altar to any foreign God, but as a testament pointing at the tabernacle back west of the river.  They actually built their altar specifically so the other tribes wouldn’t be able to roll in after a couple generations and claim that they weren’t worshiping the Lord out here.

            Once everything is straightened out and nobody feels the need to annihilate anyone else anymore, they all have a big party in stead.  Happy ending.

            Joshua reaffirms the covenant between God and the people and, in front of all the elders. leaders, judges and officials of all the tribes of Israel, he bound them to all follow the Lord and not worship foreign gods or compromise their culture or religion with their neighbors.  God will not tolerate any nonsense when it comes to foreign gods and foreign worship.

            A while after this speech, Joshua dies.  A while after Joshua dies, Eleazer, the head priest dies.  Since the high priest died, I presume that means there was a free for all in the cities of refuge.  You have to stay inside the boundaries of a city of refuge if you accidently kill someone and want to avoid their people from killing you back, but you are allowed to leave when the head priest dies.  If you can’t ever leave the city, it’s got to be hard to make a living, which must be why a big part of your tithe is supposed to go toward supporting the cities of refuge.  Still though, I’ll bet living in a city of refuge was probably not a very pleasant existence.

            Eleazer is buried in the land of Ephraim, which is strange since he’s a Levite and not an Ephraimite.  That’s fine though, maybe Levites are all buried in other lands since Levite land was divvied up differently than everyone else’s.  Joshua is buried in Shechem, in some land that he bought there.  Now this is a pretty minor point, but my text says that that land became a part of the inheritance of Joshua’s line, but land that is bought is supposed to return to the original owner in a year of jubilee every 50 years.  At least the land is staying in the tribe of Ephraim, but it’s weird that this land is bought permanently.

            I guess no rules are broken though because the book of Joshua ends by claiming that the law was upheld all through the time of Joshua and the time of the elders that outlived him who had seen the miracles God performed in these times.

            I feel like this wouldn’t have been pointed out to us how well everyone followed the rules in this era unless it was in contrast to the era we’re going to read about in the next book.

Day 74 Joshua 19-21

            All the land is divided up among the tribes with cities set aside for the Levites and for cities of refuge.  One city of refuge is Kadesh in Galilee in the land belonging to the tribe of Naphtali.  Jesus is from Galilee so it’s possible we’re going to hear more about this city later.

Day 73 Joshua 16-18

            The half tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh are not allotted very much land for all of their people and there are Canaanites living in their part of Israel to boot.  The Canaanites are only allowed to do forced labor there, which I guess must be good enough to fulfill the law against having treaties with the native people.

            Joshua tells the tribes that they can have all the land they want up in the forested areas.  They just have to drive out the people living there first.  They gripe about it, but end up doing just that, even though the people living there have chariots and iron weapons.  Why a people living in forested lands would invest a lot in chariots is an interesting question, but the half tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh seemed to regard them as powerful combatants so it must have worked out well for them.

            The other tribes have still yet to clear out their lands completely either.  Joshua orders the remaining land surveyed and he casts lots in the presence of the Lord to determine the lands allotted to the clans in the tribes left over.

Day 55 Numbers 33-34

            The borders of Israel will be basically rectangular.  The east and west will be outlined by the Mediterranean and the Jordan river.  The southern border will be a line from the bottom of the dead sea straight across to Egypt.  The northern border will be a little higher than the Sea of Galilee and will run from Mt Hor, which was where Aaron died, through Libo Hamath to Zedad.  It’s difficult to pin down where any of these places are, but when I put Libo Hamath into Google Maps it takes me to the ruins of Tyre, which seems like about where that border might be.  Tyre is a really interesting city.  Carthage was a colony of Tyre, but before that, Tyre was a colony of Sidon.  That’s all after the time of the book of Numbers though.  I wonder if Zedad might have later become Sidon.   Of course I don’t have anything to base that one beyond the fact that they sound a little bit similar.  Maybe on my next pass through the Bible I’ll have time to research it more thoroughly.  Tune in next year.

            I’m a little surprised at how small the boundaries laid out by God really are.  I got the impression that Israel was supposed to take up the lion’s share of the Arabian Peninsula, but it sounds here like it’s only supposed to be about the same size and shape of the northern half of the current day nations of Israel, if you count all the U.N. contested Palestinian parts and the Golan Heights and all the stuff that Israel claims.  This puts Be’er Sheba and a lot of the places important to the history of Abraham and the early heroes of the Bible outside of the promised land.