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.

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.

127 2 Chronicles 6-9

  Kind of a late post for the holiday week, but that's okay because you can pretty much just look at my previous posts from 1 Kings, like this one.  King Solomon has a lot of really ambitious building projects all over the country and people come from all over the world just to listen to him say brilliant things, most notably the queen of Sheba who brought him extravagant gifts of precious metals and gushed about how lucky his attendants were to get to bask in his wisdom all the time.

126 2 Chronicles 3-5

  2 Chronicles is boooorrrriiing.
  I was just rereading some of my older posts from Genesis when everything was all about God walking around telling people off and angels doing stuff.  2 Chronicles is about Solomon building the temple to God in Jerusalem.  Specifically, it's about Solomon negotiating a trade contract with a foreign king for some lumber and craftsmen, then overseeing, in minute detail, the dimension and decoration of the temple.  To summerize: it was really big and pretty much everything was covered in gold.

  For me, the real take-away message is about how our deeds are so different in their scope to God's deeds.  My problem reading 2 Chronicles today was really that I was trying to compare Solomon's administration of the temple building project to God literally creating the universe from nothing.  I'm not saying that the Israelites lost sight of that difference when they were building the temple, but I know how easy it can be to be wowed by a big building project.  It would probably seem quaint to us today if we saw the first temple, since we would try to compare it to the great wall of China for size, the taj mahal for majesty and the white house or Versailles for opulence, and it would probably come up with three strikes.  So it seems silly to us to see something like Solomon's temple and compare it to the majesty of God himself, but we still do the same kind of thing constantly today, just with bigger and better buildings.
  We do this with the things we learn about how the universe works.  And don't get me wrong, I am absolutely all for scientific exploration and advancement, but anyone who gets up in arms about some struggle between science and religion must have some serious misconceptions about one or the other.  Our learning and understanding has increased a thousand fold over the last few hundred years, but it's still not that significant when you start looking at it as a percentage of the whole, of all the learning and understanding there is to be had.

  Of course, in the story of the Tower of Babel God looked at the big tower that was going up and said that He couldn't allow men to work together in such a way because then nothing would be impossible for them, and he confused all their language and made them split up into different nations.  So maybe the things we accomplish are really profoundly important on a Godly scale.  Who knows?  The book of Genesis was weird.


  The ark of the covenant is placed inside the temple once it's complete.  The text says that the only things inside are the stone tablets with the law given to Moses, but wasn't there other stuff in there too before?  Yes, I've found some other mentions of Aaron's staff from that time it grew and budded and a pot of manna from when Moses led everyone through the desert.  I wonder what happened to them.

125- 2 Chronicles 1 and my triumphant return

  Things have been very busy the last few months, with drastically, rapidly changing plans and developments in various ministries and what have you, but those are all stories for other blogs.  I'm going to try to get back into a regular posting schedule here and someday maybe even finish this giant book that's been keeping both my soul and my coffee table so stable all these years.

  There will be a few changes from the last round of posts though.  For starters, no more of this trying to post every day.  The reading schedule is doable, but trying to summarize and comment on another passage every day can quickly get really shallow or really sloppy, and sometimes both.  With everything else I'm working on, I think it will be very doable to shoot for one post per week, maybe two when I'm overcome with the spirit.
  Posting less often means that my system of numbering posts according to how many days it's been from the begining almost completely meaningless, so that's going to have to change.  Call me obsessive, but I just like it when things are numbered, so I'm still going to keep posting a number before each post, but they're not going to mean quite the same thing.  Actually I guess the only difference is that I'm just not going to write the word day in front of them anymore.  That should be pretty easy to get used to.


  In the first chapter of 2 Chronicles, David is dead and Solomon is the new king of Israel.  He goes to the tent of meeting and makes a huge sacrifice to the Lord.  When God appears to him that night and asks him what he wants, Solomon requests the knowledge and wisdom to  rule well.  God considers this a very classy request since Solomon could have used this opportunity to increase his own holdings, which is the sort of request we've seen from most people to date.  God grants Solomon's wish and also grants him all the riches and power that he could have asked for but didn't.  Afterword, Solomon had a lot of nice things imported from other places and the economy of Jerusalem thrived.

  This is more or less unrelated, but bear with me.  We always write the titles of books like 1 and 2 Kings and Chronicals and John and so forth with numerals in the titles, but when we say them out loud, we say first and second.  So how would these books be alphabetized?  Is 1 Kings under F or in that weird section off to the side where you find books that start with numbers and symbols?  Most lists of Bible books just omit the numbers and treat the sets as complete books just broken into parts, like the last two Harry Potter Movies, which I suppose is exactly what they are.  I suppose it doesn't matter much either way, but this is just a warm-up question anyway.  We'll get into some more controversial stuff later.  Promise.

A short break

  Obviously I haven't been updating this blog regularly.  I've had some other projects demanding my attention and I just am not able to maintain a regular posting schedule.  Even though this is supposed to run over the course of a year, I would like to simply pause for a while until I can get back on track and then pick up where I left off, starting 2 Chronicles.  Maybe in the fall.