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 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 100 1 Kings 1-2

            David is really old now and one of his sons, Adonijah start setting himself up as the new king.  Once he hears about what’s happening though, David quickly makes his other son Solomon king before Adonijah gets back to Jerusalem.  That goes pretty well, with Adonijah stepping down and immediately recognizing his younger brother’s rule.  All he asks is that Solomon not kill him and Solomon says that he will be just fine as long as he’s a helpful part of the kingdom and doesn’t try to do sneaky political stuff.

            David dies around this time, but he gives Solomon some peculiar advise.  David’s rule was marked by astounding forgiveness and grace.  Every time something aweful happened, as soon as they got it sorted out, David’s men would want to go kill everyone who had stood against them and David would say something like “No way, we’ve won.  This is a time for celebration.” And let everyone go about their business for the most part.  Apparently he’s been taking good notes though because now he tells Solomon to start off his kingship by killing a bunch of these guys that David spared before.  All those times he swore not to kill somebody, he just filed it away so he could have his successor kill them decades later, which is kind of like what a sociopath would do.  David’s really old and near death now though so maybe he’s just getting jaded.

            Amidst Solomon having all these guys killed, Adonijah shows up again trying to marry the concubine assigned to keep David warm at night.  That’s not a euphemism, she was just supposed to lay down with him and keep the bed warm because he was too frail to keep himself warm anymore.  They never had sex so it isn’t taboo for David’s son to marry her, just a little bit weird.

            Solomon sees this as a political move though, which it probably was to be fair, and has Adonijah killed.

            This seems like a rocky start to Solomon’s rule, but I guess everyone knows he means business now.

            This is the 100^th passage which means I’m almost a third of the way through the Bible.  I had no idea what a commitment writing this was going to be, but I’m glad to have some accountability at least.  I don’t think I ever would have made it through Numbers if I didn’t feel obligated to post something about it online.  I’m feeling very thankful for those four or five guys in India, Russia and Washington who are regularly reading my entries.  Thanks guys.

Day 96 2 Samuel 13-15

            Two of David’s sons and one daughter get into a tense relationship.  One son, Amnon, falls in love with his sister and, after some scheming to get her alone, rapes her and then kicks her out of his home.  She’s devastated by what’s happened and runs away to live with the other brother, Absolom.  Absolom does some scheming of his own and murders Amnon for it later.

            Absolom went into exile after that, but he was tricky, and after a while he set up a series of events that got him back in David’s good graces.  He had an old widow approach the king and give him this story about one of her sons killing the other and got him to feel sympathetic for her and for her hypothetical son who was in danger of being killed by the village for revenge.  After David vowed by God to protect her remaining son (I really wish he would quit vowing things all the time, it’s going to come back on him eventually) someone else pointed out that this situation was just like Absolom’s.  David then allowed Absolom to come back to Jerusalem, but he was not allowed to see the king.

            After a couple years back in Jerusalem, Absolom hatched another plan and got invited back into David’s presence anyway.

            Once he was reestablished, Absolom got immediately to work on furthering his political ambitions.  Every time someone from Israel came to Jerusalem to petition the king for something or other, Absolom would meet them at the gate, listen sympathetically and say “Boy, that’s a legit case, it’s really too bad the king doesn’t have a representative you could talk to about that.  If I  were appointed judge, then I would totally help you out with that.  It’s too bad I’m not though.”

            After he’d made lots of friends, he invited a bunch of officials to come with him to Hebron, where he had all his agents celebrate and yell his name as he walked into the city.  Davids officials came home and reported that the people favored Absolom and David was so shaken up he fled Jerusalem, I guess under the assumption that Absolom was about to stage a coup.

Day 91 I Samuel 25-27

            David petitioned a wealthy Calebite to give his men some supplies, citing the good treatment this guy had received from David’s men at some earlier time.  The Calebite tells David’s men to get lost.  Several things all happen after that in rapid succession.

            First, The Calebite’s wife, Abigail, heard about what had happened, correctly surmised that David was going to swoop in and wipe them all out, and started frantically scrambling to collect bread and oil to run out and give to his army.  Next, David’s messenger’s return with the news from the wealthy Calebite and David immediately rounds up four hundred men to go stomp on this guy.  Abigail and David end up meeting partway, but not until after David had just sworn something along the lines of “May God deal with me however harshly He sees fit if even one male is left of his by morning.”  Of course then Abigail shows up and smooths everything over and it would be pretty ridiculous for David to go wipe out Abigail’s family after that.  It seems for a moment like David has really put his foot in his mout.  He’s sworn this oath to God, but he did it in ignorance, and now there’s no way for him to do what’s right and still uphold his word to God.  Remember what happened to Saul’s army after Saul’s son Jonathan broke that stupid vow that he didn’t even know about.  He just ate some honey off the ground after Saul had sworn that no one would eat anything, and God allowed the Philistine army to escape annihilation at the hands of Israel because of it.

            David doesn’t even seem to register this problem though, and merrily goes back to his camp with Abigail’s supplies.

            As always, God has David’s back on this one though.  When Abigail returns to her husband, he is very drunk and the news of what had happened that day stopped his heart.  Vow fulfilled, David sends word that he would like to take Abigail as his wife.  She accepts.

            David has another encounter with Saul, much like the last one.  Saul catches wind of David’s camp and takes an army to go catch him.  David sneaks in with a couple other guys during the night and steals Saul’s water jug and his spear from right next to his head as he’s asleep.  His men try to get David to kill Saul, but he’s still not okay with killing ‘God’s anointed’ so he just leaves and then comes back in the morning to tell Saul about how he could have killed him again, but didn’t.  Saul again admits David’s superiority in all things and then leaves.

            At this point, it’s pretty clear that Saul’s not going to stop being a problem any time soon to David goes to live among the Philistines.  King Achish gave him and his men a small town to call their own an they spent the next year and four months raiding the country side from there.  They would go into a town and be sure to kill everyone in it before looting all their goods and animals.  That way, when the king asked where they had gone raiding, David could lie to him and say they went out into the Negev somewhere.  David told Achish that he was going into Israel a lot to raid the towns there, which he was pretty happy with.  He figured that with David stirring up all this trouble among the Israelites, they would all hate him forever and he would have to stay and be a loyal subject forever.

  Oh, also, Samuel died.

Day 89 I Samuel 18-20

            Saul is starting to get concerned about David’s growing popularity.  Everyone knows that David is getting these great military victories all the time and everyone except Saul seems to realize that it’s because God is with him.  Saul reacts mostly by yelling at people and throwing his spear at David a couple times.

            David went to seek refuge with Samuel for a while and when Saul sent men after him, they ended up prophesying with Samuel there in stead.  Twice more Saul sent men, but each time they kept getting caught up in the spirit of the lord and prophesying.  Finally Saul came himself.  He saw what was going on and started prophesying.

            I feel like they mean something different when they say prophesy than I mean when I say prophesy.

            All this time David has cultivated an extremely close relationship with Saul’s son Jonathan.  Like, it kind of sounds like they’re sleeping together, close.  They set up a very Hardy Boys scheme to prove that Saul is out to kill David because Jonathan is having trouble believing it.  Their plan works and Jonathan is convinced, but not before Saul throws a spear at him and calls him a “son of a perverse and rebellious woman.”

            In the end, David and Jonathan part ways with an oath that there be friendship between their families forever.

Day 71 Joshua 9-11

            The Gibeonites trick Joshua and the leaders of the camp into making a treaty with them by claiming to be from far away.  They heard about all the amazing things God has done for the Israelites and knew they couldn’t defeat them, or even survive them, so they resorted to subterfuge.  The Israelites are commanded not to make a treaty with anyone in Canaan, but they believed the Gibeonite envoy and didn’t check in with God before signing a treaty.  A little while later they came up to the Gibeonite cities and found out that they had just sworn an oath not to harm them.

            The people were kind of pissed at their leaders, but no one would violate the oath they made to God not to harm the Gibeonites.  Joshua made them wood cutters and water carriers, which I guess made an unpleasant lower class for them to occupy, but it’s better then the alternative.  A little later some other allied nations come and attack the Gibeonites, but Joshua actually brings the army to their aid and wipes out the other army.  In the process he stops the sun and moon in the sky for a day.

            They conquer all of southern Canaan down into the Negev.

            No other treaty problems came up as God hardened all the other tribes to fight the Israelites.  The only places in Canaan left with non-Israelites still alive in them were Gaza, Gath, which we think is kind of by Jerusalem and Ashdod, which is just a little north of modern-day Gaza along the coast.