134 2 Chronicles 32-34

  Even though Hezekiah has been completely faithful to the Lord, an army from Assyria shows up led by their king, Sennacherib.  Sennacherib runs a tight propaganda campaign, yelling in the language of Judah about how the battle's all but won already and how their god isn't going to be able to protect them just like all the other gods of other nations were unable to stop the mighty Assyrian juggernaut and so on and so forth.

  Hezekaih heard about their coming beforehand though so he had time to take a few precautions.  He had the walls of Jerusalem repaired and improved and stopped up all the water sources outside the city.  When Sennacherib tried to demoralize the army, Hezekiah responded that all those other gods were made by the hands of men and that Assyria has certainly never faced a God like the theirs.  He told his own army that, with God really on their side, they wouldn't even have to fight at all.

  Reading through this part, I was interested to see how God would feel towards Hezekiah afterwords.  I sense a kind of tension from the previous stories about relying on God.  It's obviously insulting to God to sit back idly and demand God do everything to make life easy for them, but on the other hand, attempts by ancient kings to fix things themselves seemed to also offend God.  David's census of the men in Israel is an example of that.  I still can't fathom why it was such a terrible thing for him to have done.  There's another king who fell victim to this also, although his name and the specifics of his story escape me.  I believe he set up a trade agreement with Tyre or someone and they built a bunch of ships together, but they didn't consult with God first so God destroyed their plans.  Hezakiah is very devout though, so he probably spoke at length with his prophets off-camera before working on the walls and the water sources to prepare for the siege.

  In the end, Hezekiah yells prayers and God sends an angel to wipe out the Assyrian army.  With the battle over, the Sennacherib can do nothing but go back to Assyria in shame.

  God performed many miracles for Hezekiah.  He eventually got a little prideful because of it and stopped being very thankful.  God reprimanded him though and Hezekiah quickly snapped back in line.  Later on, God left Hezekiah to test him (I'm not sure what exactly this means) but Hezekiah remained faithful.  It sounds like there's a lot of this story that we're not hearing because it's covered in the Book of the Kings of Judah, but it sounds like Hezekiah is just about the most virtuous and faithful king we've heard about to date, and Judah thrives under him.  Babylon even starts sending down messengers to learn about what was making Judah so awesome.

  Hezekiah's son Manasseh however, took the throne at 12 years old and adopted the customs and gods of all the other nations around Judah.  There's an interesting line in 39:9 that says "They did more evil things than the nations the LORD had destroyed to make room for the people of Israel."  So Assyrians show up again and this time take Manasseh captive.  While a prisoner, Manasseh humbles himself and prays to God, and God takes pity on him, returning him home.  After that he straightens up and worships the Lord.  Manasseh ruled for 55 years.

  Amnon ruled next for 22 years.  He was king type 1, the bad kind.  He was eventually killed in a plot by his officials.  Then the people of Judah killed the officials and made Amnon's son Josiah king.  So, that was kind of a mess.

  Josiah became king at 8 and he must have had some really good advisers because he became a type 2 king, the King David type.  He tore down the altars to other gods, cleaned out the temple, etc, etc.  When they were clearing out all the treasure from the temple vault to get some restoration projects going, someone stumbled across the scroll of the law given to Moses, which I guess had been lost for a while.  When Josiah saw it he flipped out.  Even with all the good Josiah had been doing, nobody had really been following these rules.  He consulted with some prophets and God told Josiah that he was doing a good job and had made himself humble before God, so he was going to be okay, but yes, God was super-angry about the neglect of the law over the last several (hundred?) years, so He was going to basically wipe this country off the face of the Earth.  He would wait until after Josiah died though.

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.

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.

Political blog day

  I'd like to make the claim that I'm not posting today to show solidarity with internet giants like Wikipedia, Reddit and XKCD, but there's a good chance I wouldn't have gotten a segment done today anyway.  I will point out however that in a world with SOPA and PIPA as they are currently written, free casual blogging sites would not be possible because domain holders would be held legally and financially responsible for the content posted anywhere on their networks.  That means any user-generated content has to make it through the legal department before it can be put online.  So no more comments sections, no more online fora and no more blogs from U.S.-based websites.

  All of the copyright infringement will still happen because there's obviously nothing our government can do about foreign web servers, but the hope is that by enacting tough legislation that gives devastating powers to the Justice Department and several large corporate copyright holders to shut down American websites, they can cut off some traffic and intimidate most of the rest.  Support from Congress generally seem to split between those who are willing to cripple American online industry in favor of taking mediocre action to protect the intellectual property of a handful of major companies, and some old guys who just don't know how the internet works.

  At the end of the day I don't have a lot of personal stake in this.  I'll be fine either way, but it kind of seems like as a nation, online industries are about the only ones we're making money with right now so I would be hesitant to monkey with the way they work.

http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html

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.

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.

129 2 Chronicles 13-17

  Abijah succeeded Rehoboam as king of Judah.  The text very conspicuously omits any mention of Abijah being of the anointed line of David, which is interesting given how heavily Abijah leaned on this anointed bloodline thing when he railed against Jeroboam and Israel.  And he must have at least been on good terms with God because he eventually angered Israel into attacking Judah and fended them off handily because, as the book says, God was on his side.
  That's pretty much all Abijah did during his reign though. Next king:

  Abijah's son king Asa ruled over a period of peace.  He was a big fan of the Lord and oversaw the removal of all kinds of shrines and ashera poles which I guess were all there during his father's reign?  After a decade the cushites came and attacked though, leaving a lush, Indian paradise to come take over a whole bunch of desolate Middle-eastern tumbleweeds.  This seems a little bit like Oregon invading Arizona to me, but Judah was a power-house around this time so maybe it was just a matter of principle.
  Anyway, Asa was tight with God so he won easily and the cushites went home defeated.  Then God spoke to the prophet Azariah and told him to tell Asa that He would be found if Asa would seek Him and that Asa could turn Judah back toward God if he tried.  Asa did try and had all the pagan idols in Judah destroyed (again?  more thoroughly?) and restored the temple that Solomon had built.
  Honestly, I didn't realize that Judah had turned away from God since Solomon's time.  This is all happening withing the "18 year reign of Jeroboam" in Israel, so it's not like we're looking at a long, slow decline over several generations here.  Judah must have forgotten about God literally within months of the death of Rehaboam.  I guess there's probably a lesson there about how much damage a lame representative can do to the church.  David did pretty well and the nation flourished.  Solomon did pretty well and the nation flourished.  Rehoboam was kind of a jerk, spending the credibility that his predecessors had earned, and the nation splits, both side descending almost immediately into idolatry.

  Later in king Asa's reign, he stripped his grandmother of her political power because she promoted the worship of foreign gods, and he sent a bunch of treasure to the king of Damascus to restore a treaty from back in Solomon's day.  This latter move proved to be a mistake because, even though it worked out well in the short term and Israel stopped causing trouble with Judah, Asa relied on this treaty in stead of relying on the Lord.  A prophet told Asa as much and Asa was angry with him and put him in prison, then started oppressing the people.  I think the moral there is that once you start turning your back on God, it's a small step to becoming a huge jerk.  So Asa had a good start, but eventually screwed up being in charge.  Next king:

Jehosephat was the son of Asa, but the text also refers to David being his ancestor so now we finally have some evidence that we're still talking about the line of David here.  Jehosephat fortified the border with Israel and removed the high places and Ashera poles.  He's the third king in a row to have removed the high places and Ashera poles, so I guess the people must have been just sort of constantly erecting these things all through these times.  Jehosephat sent teachers and Levites around through Judah teaching people about the Lord.  Smaller groups in the area like the Philisitnes and the Arabs paid tribute to Jehosephat.  It's interesting that a pretty solid indicator of how tight the king is with God seems to be what the neighboring pagan tribes think about him.  Whenever a Jewish leader is really on the up an up, all the key gentiles in the area also think that he's great.  God said in Exodus that He would reveal himself to anyone who honestly sought Him, although he was talking specifically to Moses and the Israelites.  There seems to be a theme though of foreigners outside of the Jewish tradition still knowing that God is God, and supporting whomever God supports.  Balaam and Malchizedek come to mind specifically.