2 Chronicles 21-26: More Kingly Cross-Reference

In 2 Chronicles, we continue our cross-referencing of the kings of Judah, all of whom were discussed earlier in 2 Kings.

Jehoram

In 2 Kings 7:16-24, we learned that Jehoram did evil in the eyes of the Lord and that he was too much like a king of Israel rather than a king of Judah, probably because he was related to Israel's royal house. In 2 Chron 21, we get more specifics. For instance, he put all his brothers to the sword along with some of the princes of Israel when he came to the throne, which I think we can all agree is no sort of way to behave. In his later reign, he has some military success, but builds alters that are either to other gods or to God, but not to God's specifications. For this offense, he gets the kind of letter from Elijah that you really hate to see in your mailbox:

"This is what the LORD, the God of your father David, says: 'You have not walked in the ways of your father Jehoshaphat or of Asa king of Judah. 13 But you have walked in the ways of the kings of Israel, and you have led Judah and the people of Jerusalem to prostitute themselves, just as the house of Ahab did. You have also murdered your own brothers, members of your father's house, men who were better than you. 14 So now the LORD is about to strike your people, your sons, your wives and everything that is yours, with a heavy blow. 15 You yourself will be very ill with a lingering disease of the bowels, until the disease causes your bowels to come out.' "

Subsequently, this prophecy comes unpleasantly true.

Ahaziah

This is the guy that in 2 Kings 8:25 - 9:29 pays a visit to the king in Israel, Joram, and they both end up getting assassinated by the rebel Jehu. The interesting thing here is that they die quite differently in Kings and Chronicles.

27 When Ahaziah king of Judah saw what had happened, he fled up the road to Beth Haggan. Jehu chased him, shouting, "Kill him too!" They wounded him in his
chariot on the way up to Gur near Ibleam, but he escaped to Megiddo and died there. (9:27)

9 [Jehu] then went in search of Ahaziah, and his men captured him while he was hiding in Samaria. He was brought to Jehu and put to death. (22:9)

This is not a hugely important point, but the contradiction is pretty blatant. For those of you who like the idea of contradictions in the Bible, here is a total smoking gun for you. Those of you who don't think contradiction within the Bible is possible have a problem on your hands here. However, it's worth remembering that, whatever your perspective, the exact way that Jehu killed Ahaziah is not exactly a point critical to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.


Athaliah

Athaliah, the matriarch who kills off most of her family to consolidate power, is discussed in 2 Kings 11 and 2 Chronicles 23 with only minor divergences of detail and wording.


Joash

Joash, in 2 Kings 12 and 2 Chronicles 24, is the king who is brought up in secret in the Temple and then takes the throne when the high priest engineers a coup against Athaliah. More details about his major Temple repair project show up in Chronicles, in an account that hints at a running power struggle between the religious and civic leadership. Moreover, we learn that Joash had Zechariah, the son of the high priest who put him in power, killed for criticising him. This sheds some light on why Joash himself is assassinated a while later.


Amaziah

In both accounts -- 2 Kings 14 and 2 Chronicles 25 -- Amaziah is most noteworthy for provoking Israel and then getting stomped by Israel; Jerusalem is sacked, and many of its walls torn down. In Chronicles, we also learn that he adopts the gods of the Edomites after conquering them, clearly a no-no. There is also an interesting passage in which, obeying a prophet of God, Amaziah dismisses an army of Israelite mercinaries he had hired, and they proceed to raid, plunder, and kill all up and down Judea. This is the only passage in which I remember seeing such explicitly negative consequences for obeying God's instructions. There is also this little detail, neutral in the Bible but likely to color a modern reader's impression of Amaziah:

The army of Judah also captured ten thousand men alive, took them to the top
of a cliff and threw them down so that all were dashed to pieces. (25:12)

These kind of passages are, in a way, just gratuitous gore and just signs of the ancient times. But they are still worth meditating on, I think, when you hear someone talking about how the ethical code of the Old Testament is the foundation stone of all morality.


Next Week: Finishing up with Chronicles.

2 Chronicles 10-20: Reheboam, Asa, Jehoshaphat, and ol' whatshisname.

Last time, we took a quick look at 2 Chronicles 1-9, a biography of Solomon that covered pretty much the same terrain as 1 Kings 1-11. The next 11 chapters of 2 Chronicles continue to run more or less parallel to 1 Kings, covering the lives of the first four kings of Judah. The accounts differ in that there is considerably more detail on these guys here in Chronicles, and in that unlike 1 Kings, 2 Chronicles does not cover the Kings of post-Solomonic (a word I just made up, but which sounds very scholarly!) Israel. Also, in one case the accounts are just... different.

Here's how the material lines up in the two books:

Solomon: 1 Kings 1 - 11; 2 Chronicles 1 - 9
Reheboam: 1 Kings 12 & 14; 2 Chronicles 10 - 12
Abijah/Abijam: 1 Kings 15: 1-8; 2 Chronicles 13
Asa: 1 Kings 15: 9 - 24; 2 Chronicles 14 - 16
Jehoshaphat: 1 Kings 22; 2 Chronicles 17 - 20

Reheboam is still the same headstrong jerk (remember, he's the "chastise you with scorpians!" dude) who provokes the schism in the Israelite kingdom. In Chronicles, however, we're given a suggestion that he eventually grew into the job and was eventually a halfway decent administrator. We're given a lot more detail on Asa and Jehoshaphat, but they still come off as good, successful kings who follow God's laws and stay mostly in God's favor. The additional material is mostly military history, plus oddments such as that Asa contracts a disease of the feet late in life.

Abijah/Abijam

But what about this Abijah/Abijam situation? Well, in both books there is a son of Rehoboam, the father of Asa, who ascends the throne in the 18th year of King Jeroboam of Israel and rules Judah for three years. But in Kings he's named Abijam, and in Chronicles he's named Abijah. It's especially confusing because theres another Abijah back in Kings; that Abijah is the son of Jeroboam, not Rehoboam, and he dies before reaching the throne. With me so far?

Well, a typo is not quite a contradiction. But the Abijam of 1 Kings is quickly dismissed as one of the unrighteous kings who turns his back on God.

3 He committed all the sins his father had done before him; his heart was not fully devoted to the LORD his God, as the heart of David his forefather had been. 4 Nevertheless, for David's sake the LORD his God gave him a lamp in Jerusalem by raising up a son to succeed him and by making Jerusalem strong.

The Abijah of 2 Chronicles, on the other hand, leads his army into a battle in which it is greatly outnumbered and outmaneuvered, but then prevails but calling on and trusting God to defeat his unrighteous enemies. So, while neither account makes a statement of fact that the other explicitly indicates is untrue, they certainly present radically different accounts of King Whatshisname.

The Library of Fragments

It is always interesting to see the Biblical texts talking to each other, though. The writer of 1 Kings, after covering Jehoshaphat, asks:

45 As for the other events of Jehoshaphat's reign, the things he achieved and his military exploits, are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Judah?

Why yes, yes they are -- and here we are reading about them, in the annals of the kings of Judah. Meanwhile, in Chronicles we are told that:

34 The other events of Jehoshaphat's reign, from beginning to end, are written in the annals of Jehu son of Hanani, which are recorded in the book of the kings of Israel.

Which, like so many of the books casually mentioned in the Old Testament, is presumably lost to us forever. Bummer.


Next time: Wrapping up the Bible-readin' year.

2 Chronicles 1 - 9: Solomon Redux

That Déjà vu Feeling, Again

1 Chronicles outlined the history of the Biblical chronology from Creation to (mostly) the reign of King David, with lots of specific individual names and genealogies thrown in. So, I expected that 2 Chronicles would start with an outline of Solomon's reign, with lots of supplementary data about the individuals in his civil, military, and religious administration. But as usual, the Bible defeated my expectations.

What we get instead in the first nine chapters of 2 Chronicles is just a very slightly altered retelling of the material on Solomon in 1 Kings 3 - 10. There are a few differences -- the famous baby-splitting story is not in 2 Chronicles, nor (in contrast to the expected pattern) is a long list of court and local officials that's in 1 Kings -- but for the most part it is a nearly word-for-word retelling. The speech that Solomon gives to dedicate the Temple -- the one I argued established a whole new religion -- is also here, with only a few differences in phrasing. The description of the building of the Temple is repeated, as is the account of the Ark being moved into the new temple.

I Ain't No Queen of Sheba, Baby, Whatever THAT Means....

The visit from the Queen of Sheba (1 Kings 10:1-13; 2 Chronicles 9:1-12) is virtually identical in both books, too, which was kind of disappointing to me. "Queen of Sheba" is one of those phrases you hear all the time, and I had hoped that I would come out of this knowing why she was significant, and what people mean when they toss her around as a metaphor. No such luck.

The Queen is a nearby ruler who hears that Solomon is very wise. She comes to Jerusalem and chews the fat with him; "Solomon answered all her questions; nothing was too hard for [the king/him] to explain to her." (10:3 or 9:2, take your pick). She's said to be very impressed with the Israelite court, and remarks that the Israelite God must be very praiseworthy to have put Solomon in charge and made hims so prosperous. Then she gives lavish gifts (which are enumerated), recieves even more lavish gifts (which are not), and leaves.

So, why is the Queen of Sheba important? Beats me. Sounds like an state visit from a wealthy neighbor, is all. Anybody know more about the significance of this passage?

As with the visit from Sheba, so with Solomon's life as a whole: there is so little of substance in the Bible about someone who is one of the biggest of the Biblical Big Names. I was hoping we'd get more details here in 2 Chron, but it didn't happen. On the other hand, now that the text is not running in a straight chronology, maybe there will be more information in coming chapters about the man. The Song of Solomon, for instance, seems like it might be relevant....


Next Time: More Retellings!

1 Chronicles 10 - 29: The Return of 1 Samuel

More Grist for the Biblical Genealogist

I don't usually cover this much Biblical real estate at one go, but as with the first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles, the remainder of the book is also primary genealogical. And hey, I love my Bible project, but I'm not so far gone that I'm going to start filling notebooks with family trees, just because I can. Others have done so, and good for them.

This section is kind of like the class yearbook for 1 Samuel. There are brief summaries of some of the events in Saul's and David's reigns, all of which we have read about before, but this time they are accompanied by long lists of the various leaders, musicians, warriors, and what-not involved. You can imagine excited Israelites picking out great-great-great-great-grandpa Jahath, son of Sholomoth, from the line-up of "other Levites." For the modern reader, however, they are a bit impenetrable, and when people suggest turning to the Bible for guidance, inspiration, or enlightenment, it seems a safe bet that this is not really the part of the Bible they are thinking about.

Dynastic Wrangling Revisited

The only difference in the Samuel narrative and the Chronicles narrative that jumps out at me is the difference in the way the succession of kingship is handled. As I mentioned in the section on 2 Samuel 1-6 the original story of David's succession from Saul was highly dodgy indeed. This is all glossed over in Chronicles, where we are just told that all Israel come together to David at Hebron (11, 1) and asked him to take charge, and he did.

In 1 Kings, similarly, Solomon's succession from David -- he is designated the heir behind closed doors, at his father's deathbed and by his mother's urging, while the son everybody expects to inherit the throne is holding his own coronation -- smells as fishy as it possibly could. It's a rather different story in 1 Chronicles 21-23 and 28-29, where we are shown David publically announcing Solomon as his heir, commanding the local leaders to accept and support Solomon as his heir, and working together with Solomon to design the Temple. Once is not enough; then they acknowledged Solomon son of David as king a second time, anointing him before the LORD to be ruler. (29:22) All of this, in this version, with David still lucid, upright, and able to preside over large assemblies.

The sequencing of the Bible, with the Samuel & Kings books coming before the Chronicle books, leaves the impression that we get the accurate version the first time around -- basically a coup d'etat engineered by Solomon and his mom against his older brother, with or without the knowledge or consent of the failing King David -- and that this second version is a sanitized gloss intended to shore up the legitimacy of the royal line. The story cleaned up for the yearbook, as it were.

I don't know (and haven't checked) that the two versions were actually written in that sequence, however, and it's not automatic that the Samuel/Kings version was written first, or that it's more accurate. Maybe this second story is the earlier and more accurate version, and the Samuel/Kings version is a smear job? Maybe neither of them are accurate? Maybe they are both semi-accurate, but represent two strands of an oral tradition after a few generations of independent evolution? Hard to say as an amateur reader. This is one of those occasional moments, though, where the Bible is not internally consistent on a simplistic factual level.

1 Chronicles 1 - 9: Chroniclezzzzzz

The first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles trace a geneology from Adam -- remember him? THE Adam, Human #000-00-0001? -- through the descendents of King Saul. It does not mention each and every single human being who was alive during this period, but it sure seems like it does when you are trying to read it. This is a pure, stereotypical kind of Biblical drudgery that I don't believe we've seen since Genesis. Random example:

16 The sons of Levi: Gershon, Kohath and Merari.
17 These are the names of the sons of Gershon: Libni and Shimei.
18 The sons of Kohath: Amram, Izhar, Hebron and Uzziel.
19 The sons of Merari: Mahli and Mushi.

These are the clans of the Levites listed according to their fathers:
20 Of Gershon: Libni his son, Jehath his son, Zimmah his son, 21 Joah his son, Iddo his son, Zerah his son and Jeatherai his son.
22 The descendants of Kohath: Amminadab his son, Korah his son, Assir his son, 23 Elkanah his son, Ebiasaph his son, Assir his son.... (6)

Had enough? Sure you have.

For the most part, it's just a family tree in a textual format. On occasion, we are given a detail or two about occupation, location, wealth, or accomplishments, but these are definitely footnotes to the main show. Which is: lineages! It's all about the lineages! Well, some people are into geneology, I guess.

Confusion in the Source Material

There are a lot of literal footnotes in this section too. I haven't talked much about this, but throughout the Bible up to this point there have been occasional footnotes that refer to contradictions in the various source manuscripts. Now, I don't know much about the Biblical source material, but footnotes refer to multiple Hebrew, Septuagint, Syriac, and "Vulgate" sources. As with anybody working with pre-modern or early modern texts for which multiple "originals" exist, the editors of the N.I.V. (or any other Bible) have taken their best shot at reconciling the contradictions into a coherent, consistent single narrative.

This poses another modest technical problem for anyone who would approach the Bible as an absolutely literal document. 1 Chronicles 1:42, for instance, lists:

The sons of Ezer:
Bilhan, Zaavan and Akan.
The sons of Dishan:
Uz and Aran.

OK. But when you chase the footnote down, you find that there's disagreement about the sons of Ezer. The sons as listed above are according to "many Hebrew and Septuagint manuscripts." "Most Hebrew manuscripts," however, say that the sons of Ezer are Zaavan and Jaakan. Moreover, it's unclear about whether Dishan is named "Dishan" or maybe "Dishon."

This is a minor problem from a strictly factual standpoint, of course, because nobody gives a damn who Ezer's sons were. Philosophically, however, it is one of the thousands of loose threads that make strict literalism such a tough gig. If you profess to believe the absolute truth of every word of the Bible, and I ask you who Ezer's sons were, you have a crisis on your hands. You've got two contradictory absolute truths.

There are only so many ways you could respond to this paradox, and none of them are very satisfying. Here are the ones I could think of:

1) You could pick one of the original sources and run with it. Problem is, to pick the RIGHT source with any confidence would be the work of many lifetimes. Have fun in your Syriac class!

2) You could say something like "they must BOTH be right! Ezer must have had FOUR sons!" But that's a cheap out; each text clearly implies that it is a complete list of sons.

3) You could assume that the N.I.V. editors must have been inspired by God, and that therefore the current translation must be correct. Except that, if the current Bible in your hand is always correct, things turn quickly into a textual free-for-all. I could take the N.I.V. and, say, rip all of the pages about Solomon, and hand it to you. Neither you nor I would be in any position to say that I hadn't been inspired by God, and that my new Solomon-free Bible didn't represent a new, unexpected revelation.

4) You could learn of the correct answer through personal revelation. Obviously problematic, since personal revelations aren't known for lining up when more than one person is involved.

Or, 5) I suppose you could acknowledge the contradiction and claim it as a mystery beyond human understanding. According to a logic passing human comprehension, you could say, each of the Biblical sources must be Truth, and the apparent contradiction about Ezer's sons progeny is just something we have to live with. I respect this line of thought, actually, but it too has a problem. Saying that the Bible is true but not always open to human understanding is to claim meaning that is beyond the literal meaning of the text. The same reasoning, after all, could be used to suggest that the Biblical creation story describes, in a way that is not open to direct human understanding, a long process of biological evolution in which human beings emerge after various misadventures from primordial proteins. SO, it is not a gambit that's really open to a literalist.

Did I miss any options? Feel free to jump in here, vast army of beloved readers.


Next Week: More Geneology! Now, with anecdotes! Or, the Return of 1 Samuel!

2 Kings 17-24: The End

The story this far: God created the world, but the humans he put in charge of it kept screwing up. In Genesis 12, God picked one human in particular, the man who would become Abraham, and decided to focus on him and his descendants. In the rest of Genesis, we followed the family's saga through Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, at which point the extended family had become the nation of the Israelites, living in servitude in Pharaonic Egypt.

Under the leadership of Moses and Joshua, the Israelites busted out of Egypt and descended on the Eastern Mediterranean with expansionist fervor. Under the shadowy leadership of the judges, they formed a small empire. Under Saul, the empire became a kingdom; David and Solomon would both reign over the Israelite kingdom until a succession crisis after Solomon (and his son Reheboam's dim-wittedness -- "chastise you with scorpions" indeed) led to civil disorder and a split into the competing kingdoms of Judah and Israel. Since then, a few centuries of war and peace, chaos and order, have come and gone. Last week, though, we saw that the Israelite kingdoms have been increasingly pinched by internal disorder and external pressures.

All of this has happened in a basically unbroken narrative that goes, in my Bible, from page 8 to page 293. Except for a few digressive stories, notably the Book of Ruth, the Bible has up to now been a straightforward chronological history of the Israelites and their leaders. But it looks like we've hit the end of the line. Not only does it look like there is going to be a major disjunction between the end of 2 Kings and our next reading, the beginning of 1 Chronicles, but we're definitely not going to continue with the Israelite kingdom. There's not going to be an Israelite kingdom.

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On a procedural note, can I just say: I know I've been sluggish lately, but here we are at the end of summer. My goal was to have finished Ruth by now. And where are we? Wrapping up 2 Kings! 2 Kings!! Check me OUT!

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The Big Squeeze

OK, what's happening to the Israelite kingdoms is that they are medium-sized countries caught between two rapidly expanding empires. Egypt, to their southeast, has always been a powerhouse, but the kingdoms of the Euphrates valley over to the east have been fairly weak for a long time. In recent decades, however, the Assyrian empire has been growing. And growing and growing. Last week, we saw several examples of Assyrian military and cultural hegemony over the Israelites.

At the beginning of 2 Kings 17, King Hoshea of Judah takes his throne. He continues his predecessor's practice of paying tribute to Assyria, but after a few years makes overtures to Egypt, offering to be a client state to the other superpower. The Assyrians catch wind of this and throw him into prison. While he languishes, they lay siege to his capital at Samaria for three years, which could not possibly have been any fun for anyone concerned. When the city eventually falls, there are wholesale forced migrations on a Stalinesque scale; the Israelites are resettled elsewhere in the Assyrian Empire, replaced by other displaced people from other Assyrian lands. The Assyrian Empire, mind you, is not remembered for its kindly approach to civil administration.

Why did this happen? 2 Kings 17 speaks to this point at great length. What it boils down to, of course, is that the Israelites are being punished because they persisted in sin. In particular, they persisted in worshipping the other gods of the region despite numerous instructions to the contrary. God had had enough, and the Assyrians act as agents of his anger and frustration.

A side note on Polytheism.

I have mentioned this before, but it is always interesting how much tension there is in the Old Testament between the implied monotheism of, say, the creation story, and the matter of fact polytheism of the main narrative. God isn't chronically angry because the Israelites worship gods that don't exist; he's angry because they worship Baal, Asherah, and so on -- actual gods, his competitors in some sense. During this election season, when the occasional candidate will profess to believe the literal truth of every word of the Bible, I'm always curious as to how they reconcile their conviction of the existence of Asherah with the more traditional monotheistic message of mainstream Christianity. But I digress.

The people that the Assyrians resettle in Israel don't know from God, of course, and they certainly don't know to (or how to) worship him. This irritates God, who keeps sending lions to eat them; the King of Assyria eventually sends a priest back out of exile to teach the people what the god of the land requires. (17:27) This helps things somewhat, but proper worship of God never really catches on.

Judah, Alone

With the Kingdom of Israel in exile, Judah hangs on for several more decades. King Hezekiah digs way, way into the royal and Temple vaults to send tribute to the Assyrians, which holds them off for a while. An Assyrian commander offers the population of Jerusalem a choice between assimilation and extinction (it's one of the most dramatic Bible stories I've read yet, 18:17-37), but God intervenes by slaying 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in their sleep, which gives Judah some breathing room.

Hezekiah's son, Manasseh, rules for 55 years, so he couldn't have been terrible at administration. He is a rampant polytheist, though, and God is livid with him. He always liked Judah better than Israel, but now he's had enough even of the smaller, more faithful kingdom:

12 Therefore this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: I am going to bring such disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle. 13 I will stretch out over Jerusalem the measuring line used against Samaria and the plumb line used against the house of Ahab. I will wipe out Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down. 14 I will forsake the remnant of my inheritance and hand them over to their enemies. They will be looted and plundered by all their foes, 15 because they have done evil in my eyes and have provoked me to anger from the day their forefathers came out of Egypt until this day."

Yet it doesn't happen right away. Manasseh's son Amon is a washout, lasting only two years, but his son Josiah turns out to be a religious reformer. He puts money into Temple repair, and during renovations workmen discover the Book of the Law. The Book of the Law! The laws of Moses! Which has apparently been missing all this time, ever since the era of the Judges at least!

Josiah has the Book of the Law read to him, and listens with a real sinking feeling. "Uh oh," he thinks, "we've been screwing up right and left for centuries. God is going to be really, really pissed." He launches a comprehensive program of destroying all idols and all monuments to Asherah, Baal, and anybody else who isn't God. The text goes into extensive detail about where he goes, which altars he knocks down, and how he does it.

"Nevertheless," we are told, "the Lord did not turn away from the heat of his fierce anger" (23:26). By human measures, this seems pretty unfair. In punishing Israelites after Josiah's reforms, God will be condemning people for the sins of their ancestors, ancestors who incidentally had lost the relevant instruction manual. Religious philosophers, however, would tell us that you can't reasonably expect to understand the logic employed by God, who is infinite in knowledge and wisdom. You are so outclassed in that matchup that you can't possibly expect to follow his reasoning. I guess that's fair.


The End of the End

There are a few more kings in Judah, but it's pretty much just a couple of decades of death throes. They try to cut a deal with Egypt, but Egypt and Assyria seem to have worked out a power-sharing agreement, so that just causes more trouble. The Assyrians have Judah invaded by some of their other client states, and then start appointing puppet kings themselves. When the people of Jerusalem keep rising up, the city is eventually put to siege. By the time the Assyrian war machine grinds Jerusalem into submission, they have to dig way down into the ranks of the civil service to find leaders worth executing. They tear down the walls and burn all the buildings, and appoint a stooge to preside over the rubble. When the stooge is assassinated, everybody left in Judah can guess what is going to happen next. Anybody who can ride, walk, or crawl heads to the relative safety of field labor in Egypt. The Israelite Kingdoms are no more.

Oh, By the Way

A couple of times in today's reading, there were prophecies by a priest of Hezekiah's time named "Isaiah." That's a famous name, but so far he hasn't done anything that jumped out at me as especially spectacular. I'll keep you posted.


Next Time: 1 Chronicles, baby!

2 Kings 8-16: Kings! Kings! Kings!

OK, it's been a few weeks, but all three of my readers are on-the-ball sorts of people who will remember that last time we were watching the prophet Elisha, who came on the heels of his better-known mentor Elijah and was casting miracles right and left. I rather expected we would be seeing a lot more of him this week, as his narrative star seemed to be on the rise. But I was wrong. Starting about halfway through 2 Kings 8, we return to the king parade that we saw in the mid-section of 1 Kings, except with even less detail about the individuals in charge of the split kingdoms of Judah and Israel.

Now my first thought was, I need to assemble a timeline! The kings are presented in a kind of screwy order but with a lot of basic data about parentage and time of reign, so it would be very satisfying (to the right kind of dorky person (guilty!)) to put together a year-by-year chart of events and reigns, as well as a family tree. It would, if nothing else, help to sort out a lot of people whose names are teeth-grindingly similar (Think I'm kidding? Fairly typical sentence: Johoash king of Israel captured Amaziah king of Judah, the son of Joash, the son of Ahaziah, at Beth Shemesh. (14:13)

But, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to, as we say, "cut to the chase." Any objections? No? Good.

But What About Elisha?

Good question. In 2 Kings 3-7, he was pretty much controlling events in the two kingdoms with his combination of religious authority and military magic. In Chapter 8, he starts off by advocating for a woman in a real estate dispute, which is nice and all but kind of a come-down.

Then there's an odd story (7-14) in which the King of Aram sends a servant to Elisha to ask if he will recover from an illness. Tell him he will recover, Elisha tells the servant, but actually he's going to die. And by the way, he tells the servant, you are personally going to do a lot of harm to the Israelites. The servant puts two and two together, reassures his king as per instructions, and then sneaks into the royal bedroom the next day, smothers the king, declares himself in charge, and announces an aggressive foreign policy against the Israelites. Elisha, here, is more or less equivalent to the witches in Macbeth, perched somewhere between prognostication and provocation. Which makes for a good story, but I'm not sure it's the ethical terrain you want your major prophets hanging out in.

In Chapter 9, he plays agent provocateur again, sending an underling to instigate a military coup by anointing a general while the sitting king of Israel is recovering from wounds sustained in a battle. The general, Jehu, kills not only the king of Israel but also his buddy, the king of Judah. This is supposed to clean up government by getting rid of the House of Ahab, but actually seems to kick off a period of decline for both states.

Elisha then disappears for a bit, then comes back for his last appearance in Chapter 13. It is an anecdote that captures not one but two qualities of Old Testament life that sit uncomfortably for many of us moderns. First, God and his envoys seem always to act capriciously, or at best according to a strange logic that often seems brutally unfair to the mere mortals on the wrong end of events. Second, it can be difficult to distinguish spirituality and religion from blunt-force magic of a kind that would seem more appropriate in a game of D&D than in your God of Love and Mercy. But you be the judge:

14 Now Elisha was suffering from the illness from which he died. Jehoash king of Israel went down to see him and wept over him. "My father! My father!" he cried. "The chariots and horsemen of Israel!"
15 Elisha said, "Get a bow and some arrows," and he did so. 16 "Take the bow in your hands," he said to the king of Israel. When he had taken it, Elisha put his hands on the king's hands. 17 "Open the east window," he said, and he opened it. "Shoot!" Elisha said, and he shot. "The LORD's arrow of victory, the arrow of victory over Aram!" Elisha declared. "You will completely destroy the Arameans at Aphek."
18 Then he said, "Take the arrows," and the king took them. Elisha told him, "Strike the ground." He struck it three times and stopped. 19 The man of God was angry with him and said, "You should have struck the ground five or six times; then you would have defeated Aram and completely destroyed it. But now you will defeat it only three times."

Then Elisha dies, but he comes back for one last miracle that revisits the above two issues:

20 Elisha died and was buried. Now Moabite raiders used to enter the country every spring. 21 Once while some Israelites were burying a man, suddenly they saw a band of raiders; so they threw the man's body into Elisha's tomb. When the body touched Elisha's bones, the man came to life and stood up on his feet.

Aside from the capriciousness of this tale, and its decidedly mediaeval feel -- saints' relics! -- it has a bit of a plausibility gap. Elisha is one of the great miracle workers in the written record, and it's hard to imagine him not getting a special burial plot. Why are they burying this other dude so close to him that they are actually exposing his bones? Show some respect, O Israel!!


The King Parade!

In order of appearance!

• Jehoram, Judah, reigned 8 years. Bad. Lost control of the land of Edom.
  
• Ahaziah, Judah, 1 year. Bad. Killed during coup in Israel.
  
• Jehu, Israel, 30 years. Anointed by Elisha, assumes power in coup. Has Jezebel killed by forceful defenestration. Slaughters all descendents of Ahab, and any relatives of Ahaziah he happens to encounter. Invites priests of Baal to a big fiesta, then has them slaughtered. Generally cleans house on religious deviance. Loses extensive lands to the Kingdom of Aram, who are led by the servant whom Elisha predicted would, or provoked to, take power.
  
• Athaliah, Judah, 7 years. Ahaziah's mom! A Biblical model for female leadership! What happens is, when Jehu kills her son, she has everybody else in the royal family killed, so she can have the throne herself! Details of her administration, we are not given.
  
• Joash, Judah, 40 years. Unfortunately for Athaliah, a stepdaughter manages to conspire with the Temple priest to hide a baby son of Ahaziah by another wife in the Temple compound. After seven years, the priest engineers a coup to put the little boy on the throne. Athaliah is slaughtered in the street. Not surprisingly, the boy king is decidedly pro-Temple, and things go grimly bad for the Baal camp. Joash doesn't seem to be much of a leader, though. His big legacy project is Temple repair, which goes very slowly, and he has to use all of the Temple and royal treasure to buy off the Aramites. He's eventually assassinated by his advisors.
  
• Johoahaz, Israel, 17 years. Bad. Usually subject to Aram. Military in steep decline.
  
• Jehoash, Israel, 16 years. Bad.
  
• Amaziah, Judah, 29 years. Pretty good. Kills his dad's assassins, but spares their families. Wins a war against Edom. Subsequently attacked and routed by Israel under Johoash; Amaziah is said to have provoked this war, but it's not clear exactly what he did wrong. Whatever Temple treasure was left behind by the Aramites goes to Israel now.
  
• Jeroboam II, Israel, 41 years. Bad. But, builds on Johoash's military success and is able to restore Israel to its old boundaries. (It's very interesting that there is no apparent correlation between what the Bible says of the various kings' moral character and their administrative or military effectiveness.)
  
• Azariah, Judah, 52 years. Good. But, he becomes a leper. Kingdom administered by his son Jotham.
  
• Zechariah, Israel, 6 months. Bad. Publically assassinated by Shallum.
  
• Shallum, Israel, 1 month. Bad. Assassinated by Menahem.
  
• Menahem, Israel, 10 years. Bad. Conspires with invading Assyrians to prop up his regime, and raises taxes to pay the tribute.
  
• Pekahiah, Israel, 2 years. Bad. Assassinated by a general, Pekah.
  
• Pekah, Israel, 20 years. Bad. Loses many cities and provinces to Assyria. Assassinated by Hoshea.
  
• Jotham, Judah, 16 years. Pretty good. Makes some progress in rebuilding Judah, still apparently reeling from its defeat under Amaziah nearly a century ago.
  
• Ahaz, Judah, 16 years. Very, very bad. Besieged by Israel and Aram, but holds out. Allies with Assyria to relieve the pressure, which once again costs the Temple dearly as its treasures are once again sent away as tribute. Ahaz is a great admirer of Assyria, and has a new Assyrian-style temple built next door to the main Temple, and moves some Temple fixtures and activities to the new building. This is presented matter-of-factly, but I bet it's pretty bad news.

Why Stop There?

Oh, come on. You were totally skimming and you know it. But the reason I stopped there, if you must know, is that the next section head is "Hoshea Last King of Israel," so it sounds like Something Big is about to go down. Also, I kept falling asleep in the sun.


Thoughts on the King Parade

In worldly matters, there seems little to distinguish the chosen people of God from any other of the people of God. The kingdoms of Judah and Israel do not represent model countries by any stretch of the imagination. They seem to have about the normal level of national ebbing and waning, strong leadership and miserable leadership, as any other people who did well enough to enter the historical record. They are also right there in the pack morally. Well, they're only human. But, since they have been given oodles of miraculous interventions and whole books of explicit divine instruction over the years, might we have expected them to do better?

The Bible is quick to attribute the fortunes of the Israelite kingdoms, good or bad, to the religious behavior of the kings or their subjects. If a battle is won or lost, there is usually a connection made to somebody's virtue or vice in the matter of religious orthodoxy. The matter of avoiding the worship of Azeroth, and especially Baal, is paramount. However, looked at over a long time scale, like we just did, this doesn't work especially well. The kingdoms prosper under irreligious kings, and falter under virtuous kings. Clearly, if the Israelites were correctly interpreting how divine will affected their national history, God is focused on details of practice that are not obvious to human logic.

Finally, things are in decline. Israel and Judah have begun to war not just with neighbors, but with each other. They are progressively unable to resist ascendant foreign powers, first the Aramites and then the Assyrian Empire. Corruption appears to be widespread in the courts, and both countries have coups and unstable regime change, which is invariably hard on a society. National wealth is chronically sent out to ransom the kingdoms against more powerful neighbors. In the great game of Civilization, the Israelites are losing ground fast. Even if I didn't (vaguely) know what was coming, I'd figure it was going to be pretty bad.


Next Time: Pretty Bad!