Second Kings

In the Hebrew Bible, First and Second Kings are one book.  Collectively, they are a history of the Israelite monarchy.   During most of this period, it is dual monarchies because two southern tribes make up the kingdom of Judah, the remaining tribes being Israel.

Second Kings covers a period of about 250 years.  It begins in the reign of Ahaziah.  It ends with the fall of Judah to Babylon.

Fall is an appropriate word.  The book describes the decline of the Israelite monarchy.  It is strongly associated with moral decline and apostasy.  Israel was called out to be God’s people.  Instead, they worshiped the gods of the people who occupied the land before them or of their neighbors.  Sometimes this idol worship was introduced and encouraged by the kings.  Some of the practices associated with these foreign religions included temple prostitution, sodomy, and child sacrifice.

When God established ancient Israel as a nation, he made a covenant with them.  If they followed Him, He would cause them to prosper in the land He gave to them.  If they did not, and especially if they abandoned Him to worship other gods and do evil, he would cut them off from the land and let their enemies overcome them.  That is exactly what happened.

Israel, the northern kingdom, succumbed first.  It fell during the reign of Hoshea.  It became a vassal state to Assyria.  More than that, the Assyrians removed the Israelite population to other lands and resettled Israel with people from across its empire.  Chapter 17 is an indictment against Israel, listing its crimes the judgment of expulsion from the land.

God did not let Israel go easily.  Much of the first half of the book is devoted to the exploits of Elijah and Elisha.  These prophets called people back to God and stood up against the influence of false religions.  Later, Isaiah would warn against the coming captivity to Assyria.

Judah held out longer, in part probably because of fitful reforms by kings such as Hezekiah and Josiah.   None of the kings of Israel committed themselves to god, but some of the kings of Judah turned their hearts to God, restoring the worship of God and sometimes even breaking down the idols of false gods.  Even so, they fell like their brothers to the north.

Babylon was the empire that overtook Judah during the reign of Zedekiah.  Zedekiah himself was appointed by Babylon after it took his nephew Jehoiachin as a prisoner.  Babylon also moved much of the population.  The poor were left to tend the farms, but anyone with status, military skill, training in crafts, or education was moved to Babylon to serve there.  The Israelite monarchy was finally broken and replaced with a Babylonian governor.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Deuteronomy

First and Second Samuel

First Kings

Second Kings.  The Holy Bible.  New King James Version.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

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Unimaginable by Jeremiah H. Johnston

What would the world be like if Christ had never come and the Christian church had never been create? New Testament scholar Jeremiah J. Johnston imagines it would be a bleak place. He describes why he thinks so in Unimaginable.

Johnston contrasts the Christian worldview, and its results, with cultures where non-Christian worldviews were dominant. The first of these is the pre-Christian era, especially Greek and Roman culture in the centuries shortly before and after the ministry of Jesus Christ. The second is the 20^th Century political regimes that opposed Christian mores if not religion altogether: Nazism, Fascism and Communism. Adolf Hitler and Bonito Mussolini imagined a return to a pre-Christian, pagan age of Aryan or Roman dominance. The Communists were opposed to any religion; the state operating on behalf of the workers was the dominant force. These movements in some ways were reversions to the morals that predated Christian influence.

The gods of Greece and Rome were immoral characters who had little concern for humanity. The Caesars, god-kings, were largely selfish and self-aggrandizing. In contrast, the Christian God proclaimed His love for people. He demonstrated his benevolence in Jesus, son of God and king of kings, who lived a humble life of service and sacrifice.

Life was cheap in ancient Greek and Roman culture. For instance, babies who were diseased or deformed, or simply girls, were often abandoned to die. In contrast, Christians believed that human life was inherently valuable.

Women were not considered equal to men in pre-Christian times. In contrast, women were present at the major events in Jesus’ ministry and were often acknowledged in the New Testament for their leadership in the early church.

Women were considered of little worth in the ancient world. In addition, slavery and racism were common in the in the Greek and Roman Empires. The superiority of some people was considered plain, and it was appropriate for them to dominate, control and enslave lesser people. Jesus taught that there was no meaningful difference between races (Jews or Greeks), free men and slaves, or the sexes.

There was not religious freedom in the Roman Empire. The Jews were tolerated because of the antiquity of their religion, but others were required to worship the major Roman gods and to acknowledge the divinity of Caesar. Christians were considered atheists for their refusal to acknowledge Roman gods.

Johnston describes an opening of the door in the late 19^th Century to anti-Christian ideas and morals. Philosophers and scientists of the time such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friederich Nietzche and Sigmund Freud were committed to a materialistic view of the world. Humans were not special creations; they were simply sophisticate animals that arrived from the same undirected happenstance that brought for every other thing without purpose. Religion and morals were inventions of people, not revelations from a higher authority.

These influencers, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, challenged Christian morals. They opened the door to devaluing human life, devaluing women (Nietche was explicit about his belief that women were inferior to men), justifying racism with science along with subjugation of “lesser” races, and the elimination of religious freedom, or even individual freedom. The likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Josef Stalin put these ideas into practice, leading to impoverishment, oppression, and death for millions of people.

Some would lay a lot of suffering at the feet of Christianity. Johnston argues that Christianity has alleviated a lot of suffering and paganism and atheism have much greater sums of human misery on their accounts.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Language of God by Francis S. Collins

Maus by Art Spiegelman

The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark

Johnston, Jeremiah H. Unimaginable: What Our World Would Be Like Without Christianity. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2017.

First Kings

First Kings is a history of the kings of Israel and Judah beginning with the transition for David to his son Solomon.  The book also recounts some of the notable prophets of the time, particularly Elijah and Elisha.

Solomon was David’s contested successor.  David had many sons older than Solomon, though some were dead, notably Absalom who had tried to usurp the throne.  David’s son Adonijah was preparing to succeed his father, and even organized an elaborate celebration to court the favor of important aristocrats.  The prophet Nathan discovered the plot.  He, Solomon, David, and Bathsheba, Solomon’s mother, arranged to elevate Solomon to the throne while his father still lived.

Solomon was notable for his wisdom.  God offered to the young king what he wanted.  He asked for wisdom to govern the people rightly.  God was pleased with the answer and gave Solomon wealth and power in addition to wisdom.

Wisdom didn’t keep Solomon out of trouble.  He had many wives (no doubt trouble by itself), and he permitted his foreign wives to continue practicing their religions, so the worship of false gods was allowed in the kingdom.  Idol-worship would be common amongst Solomon’s successors.

After Solomon, the kingdom was divided.  The ten northern tribes formed a kingdom generally referred to as Israel.  Two southern tribes made Judah.  Throughout this period, idol-worship prevailed in Israel.  Some kings of Judah served God, but many did not, and the godly kings did not succeed in eradicating idolatry.

Following Solomon, most of the kings of both the north and the south are summed up briefly.   Some just get a paragraph.  We see the kingdom rise and fall based on the faithfulness of the people.  When they sought God, even imperfectly, He blessed them and they thrived.  When they sought to gratify themselves and follow false gods, they quickly ran into trouble.  This is a pattern in the history of ancient Israel that started before the kings and continued after them.

First Kings ends with the reign of Ahab, famously married to Jezebel.    These monarchs promoted the worship of Baal and suppressed the worship of God.  They were opposed by the prophet Elijah.  Elijah is associated with some spectacular miracles.  God withheld rain from the land until Elijah called an end to the drought.  Elijah called out the prophets of Baal in a contest to call down fire from heaven  Baal did not answer his worshippers, but God sent fire for Elijah, who that day executed hundreds of Baal’s priests.  This put him in serious conflict with Ahab and Jezebel.

Elijah is also well known in that he did not die, at least not in a conventional sense.  He was taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire.  He appeared to Christ and a few disciples on during the Transfiguration.

It is clear that First Kings is intended to be a summary.  It frequently refers to records of the actions of the kings as if these might be available to a reader who wanted to confirm the recounting of find more information.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

First and Second Samuel

Luke

Mark

Matthew

Proverbs

First Kings.  The Holy Bible.  New King James Version.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

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Old Testament History

The historical books of the Old Testament (the first 17 books in the typical organization of Christian Bibles) tell the story of the rise and fall of the Israelite nation. The big chunks of history are organized in this manner:

1- Founding the nation and receiving the Law (the Pentateuch, which includes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy),

--The conquest and early settlement of Canaan (Joshua and Judges),

3-The early roots of a kingdom in Israel (Ruth and I Samuel),

4-The Israelite Kingdom (II Samuel, I and II Kings, I and II Chronicles), and

5-The end of captivity and rebuilding of Jerusalem (Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther).

The books are not organized in a strictly chronological order. In addition, there are overlaps and gaps.

A theme that runs through the books is the active engagement of God. He is engaged in all of His creation, and particularly in the history of the Israelite nation. He called them out to be His people, he caused them to rise and prosper as a nation, and when they turned away from them, He brought them low.

Another theme in these books is the importance of moral leadership. When the nation had morally upright leaders, the people tended to also be morally upright. When the leaders were selfish, greedy, lustful, and following false gods, the people followed them into every kind of sin. We are strongly influenced by others, especially our leaders.

The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville, TN:  Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Exodus

Exodus. The Holy Bible. (NKJV). Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Exodus continues the history of the Israelite nation that began in Genesis. The main emphasis is on the how God acted to lead them out of Egypt.

Back in Genesis, Israel (Jacob) and his large family moved to Egypt to escape a famine. They thrived there under the patronage of one of Israel’s sons, Joseph, who God had placed in a position of great power in the Egyptian government.

At the beginning of Exodus, Joseph was dead and so were the pharaohs who knew him. A pharaoh came to power who felt threatened by the many foreigners who were flourishing in the midst of his nation. He decided to enslave and oppress the Israelites, even to the point of having their male children exterminated.

Moses escaped this fate by the shrewd, faithful actions of his family and the providence of God. He grew up in the household of Pharaoh, with Pharaoh’s daughter as his guardian and his own Hebrew mother as his nursemaid.


Moses is a huge figure in the Bible, so one would expect to find a lot about his life. It’s not so. Exodus is a story about God, and even though Moses is a great prophet, his early life and his many years in exile are treated briefly with a focus on how God preserved and equipped His prophet for the work He had in mind

The remainder of the first half of the book deals with how God acts to win the Israelite’s release from Egypt with Moses as His spokesman. This was famously accomplished with ten plagues. It may seem excessive, but the intent was to drive home, especially in the minds of the Israelites, the power and providence of God. The Egyptian gods, god-king, and magician-priests were powerless against the God of their fathers, who was generous and loving toward them. (The Israelites forgot this lesson with amazing speed, just as we often do.)

The second half of Exodus deals with the establishment of those things that identified Israel as a nation: the law and the tabernacle. The law was given by God, through Moses, because God would be their king. The tabernacle was a place of religious ceremony, but also the thrown of God, who produced a physical manifestation of His presence there.

I suspect others, like me, can find the second half of this book to be rough going. The directions for making the tabernacle and its furnishings are so detailed that one could build a reasonable reproduction of it. Even in this part of the book, there is a demonstration of God’s power and provision.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Genesis
The Gospels

Malachi

Malachi appears last in the Old Testament and is chronologically toward the end of the period, the prophet possibly being a contemporary of Ezra and Nehemiah. By this time, the Jewish people had been back in Israel for some time and they were losing their zeal for God.

Malachi called out the people on many of the ways they neglected God and their calling to be His people. They offered substandard sacrifices. They married foreigners who worshipped false gods. They refused to tithe. They were envious of other nations. Even the priests were complicit in the sins of the people.

He warned of a judgment coming. There was hope for the faithful; their always is for those who trust God.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Ezra

Luke

Matthew

Nehemiah

Romans

Malachi. The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

The Pentateuch

The first five books of the Bible are collectively referred to as the Pentateuch, from the Greek for “five books.” In the Hebrew Bible, they are referred to as the Torah, from the Hebrew for “law.”

The Pentateuch is partly a book of laws. In the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy can be found the civil and ecclesiastical law given for the Israelite theocracy would be established in the Promised Land. Moral law also appears in these books, most famously in the Ten Commandments.



Some would say that “law” is too narrow an interpretation of “torah.” A better word might be “teachings” or “doctrine.” The contents of these books were meant to be taught and contain repeated instructions to remember and to teach the works of God to successive generations. Stories from these books have been told and retold for centuries.

These books contain more than law. They are history as well. In particular, they are a history of God’s interaction with creation and especially mankind. Genesis begins with creation and ends with Joseph, a key figure in history of the Israelites and, in some ways, a type of Christ. Abraham and his descendents are the main thread of Genesis in which we see God working to rebuild a relationship with sinful humanity. The remaining books with the Israelites eventual enslavement in Egypt to border of the Promise Land. The prophet Moses is the main figure of these books as God’s spokesman.

It can be easy to get lost in the details of these books. They are not as riddled with genealogies and “begats” as some suggest. Even so, sometimes there is a surprising amount of detail. The style in some sections can seem stilted to modern readers. Familiarity with Jewish traditions can bring some life into the sometimes dry descriptions of ceremonies.

Don’t let yourself be too bogged down by the details. Remember that they are important. As a believer, they are important because they are part of the inspired Word of Gods. As a reader seeking to understand these books, they are important because they were important to the people who wrote, copied, and even memorized these books for generations.

In addition, they are part of a larger story. It’s a good story, too. It is the story of the establishment of a people, and from those people a nation. All of this is part of a larger story of redemption: God working through history to rescue, redeem, and restore people who were enslaved to sin and sentenced to death for their wrongdoings. It is an exciting story and the Pentateuch contains important early chapters that help us understand the rest what comes later.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Deuteronomy
Exodus
Genesis
The Holy Bible
King James Bible
Leviticus
Numbers

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London Under by Peter Ackroyd

London is an ancient city. The Romans established a settlement their a thousand years ago, but they weren’t the first inhabitants of the valley. It sits on soil into which everything slowly sinks. Rivers that brought life to the valley became choked with filth and were buried. The ground under London is thick with history, and the infrastructure of a modern metropolis mingles with the remains of its ancestors. Peter Ackroyd describes what is beneath the surface of that great city in London Under.

Ackroyd goes back to the earliest settlers of the area and the archeological remains of their lives. Their holy places were overbuilt by Roman temples. The temples dedicated to Roman gods were overbuilt by churches. Old paths became Roman roads. The filth of a city covered these roads and turned them back into dirt paths. Modern people paved them anew with brick, and later asphalt or concrete. It’s all still there, though, one thing layered over the other, but often still following the outlines ancient paths.

As you might expect from a man with who has worked with water, some of my favorite chapters relate to the rivers and sewers. London was built around rivers. As the population grew, these rivers became open sewers, carrying away all manner of waste until they were too filthy and stinking to bear. These rivers were enclosed and became underground sewers. As the city grew, it overwhelmed the sewers and turned the Thames into a stinking mess. Eventually it inconvenienced Parliament enough that they engaged the problems seriously in the 19^th Century, putting in place interceptor sewers that carried the waste away from the city. Many of the sewers that are now more than a century old are still in use.

Another feature of London that fascinates my engineering side is the Underground. The city has the oldest underground railway system. The first lines are more than 150 years old. It was built in bits and pieces by competing private companies, though now it is a unified system. The Underground has become such a part of London life that a literature related to it has developed. The tunnels have been the settings of novels and the inspiration for poems.

World War II and the Cold War were another significant phase of buried construction. The British government built many tunnels and bunkers to protect government resources threatened by war. During World War II, so many people sought shelter in the Underground that the government was forced to provide shelter space for people escaping the bombs.

Like any modern city, London now has an extensive underground infrastructure. Pipelines carry drinking water, sewerage, electric and telephone wires, fiber optic cables and all the other things that connect people to services in their homes and workplaces.  These important systems are hidden underground, out of site and possibly too often out of mind, where their work apparently does not disturb the sleeping remains of the many things that had come before.

If you are interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

The Water Room by Christopher Fowler

Ackroyd, Peter. London Under: The Secret History beneath the Streets. New York: Anchor, 2011.

Underground by Will Hunt

Will Hunt has been fascinated with underground places since his childhood discovery of an abandoned tunnel in his hometown. Perhaps abandoned isn’t quite right; Hunt found signs of occasional human occupation in the old tunnels. He pursued his interest in underground places and the way people used and experienced them around the world. He describes these experiences, and what these hidden chambers mean, in Underground.

Hunt’s explorations took him into both manmade spaces and natural caves. He retells adventures from the Paris catacombs and a trip across the city that was almost entirely underground. He entered mines and saw shrines miners created for the spirits (or monsters) that live in them, beings that are sometimes generous and sometimes dangerous. Perhaps these are relatives to the spirits, strange creatures and gods reputed to live in natural caves.

Caves and tunnels are important to varying degrees to almost all religions. Shamans, priests and philosophers have long traveled under the earth to seek insight or communication with other worlds. Hunt ties this to the hallucinations and distorted sense of time humans experience when they are deprived of sensory stimulation. He does not denigrate these experiences, but sees them as something universally human. The altered state of consciousness one might enter in the utter darkness of a cave is simply another way the mind works, and possibly the root of all religion.

People did not always understand what was underground, and we are still making discoveries. Even two centuries ago, the world under our feet was a mystery. As a fan of Missouriana, I was attracted to Hunts telling of the life John Cleves Symmes. A St. Louis-based trader and former Army officer, Symmes was a proponent of a hollow earth theory. We were not living in the inner world, but he imagined there were worlds within ours existing on a series of concentric spheres. From 1818 until his death in 1829, he traveled the country lecturing on this theory and raising money to mount an expedition. He never made that trip to inner worlds, but he was an inspiration to the authors of hollow earth stories such as Edgar Allen Poe, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Frank L. Baum.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

London Under by Peter Ackroyd

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

Second Chronicles

The Water Room by Christopher Fowler

Hunt, Will. Underground: A Human History of the World Beneath Our Feet. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

Daniel

Daniel was a prophet during the Babylonian captivity. He was carried to Babylon as a youth and eventually rose to high office in the courts of Nebachudnezzar and other rulers.

When the Babylonians occupied Israel and Judah, they carried forcibly resettled the aristocratic, wealthy and others they deemed valuable. Daniel was among these. He was brought to Babylon and trained to serve in the court of the king.

Daniel rose to prominence early on. He had a passion to serve God. He showed this by asking to be fed a diet of vegetables rather that the food from the kings table. This was probably food from sacrifices to Babylonian gods (though it may have just not been kosher). He must have been persuasive, for he prevailed. Because he and his friends were very healthy on this diet, he gained a reputation for wisdom.

His reputation grew when God began to show him interpretations of Nebachudnezzar’s dreams. In one of these dreams, Daniel saw the rise and fall of empires from the Babylonians to the time of Christ (the Roman Empire with the Persian and Greek empires in between). Much of his prophecies deal with the kingdoms to come from his own time to the first coming of Christ and the fate of Israel in that time.

The most famous story of Daniel is his survival of a night in the lion’s den. He was cast into it as a form of capital punishment for his devotion to God. This book also contains the story of Daniel’s friends Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego who were cast into the fire of a hot furnace for refusing to worship and idol, a statue in the image of Nebachunezzar. God brought them through unharmed.

Daniel is also mentioned in the book of Ezekiel.

Daniel. The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

First John

John was the youngest of the apostles and the last to pass away.  He was especially close to Christ during His earthly ministry, and John refers to himself as the one “whom Jesus loved” in his gospel.  The relationship was strong enough that Jesus entrusted the young man with the care of His mother, Mary, as one of his last acts on the cross.

In this circular letter to the churches, John drops the opening and closing introductions and greetings common to the other epistles. He launches directly into his message.  I find three themes in this book: the incarnation of Christ and true spirituality, knowing the truth, and love.

The Incarnate Christ and True Spirituality

Christianity firmly asserts that Jesus Christ is God and at the same time that He was incarnated as a man.  He lived and died and was resurrected.  He wasn’t resurrected as spirit, he was resurrected bodily.  John adamantly reiterated that this is not only the doctrine of the church, it is something he witnessed personally.

This teaching has consequences for Christian living.  We are not pure, undefiled spirits residing in sinful, depraved bodies.  We are body and spirit together.   The actions we take with our bodies have spiritual consequences.  Likewise, if we are godly in our spirit, it will show in our actions.

John’s writings on this subject may be a reaction to Gnosticism.  It seems that teachers of some form of Gnosticism or some other beliefs were attempting to infiltrate the church.  They taught a strong duality between spirit and body, so that the spirit was pure, good, and untouchable, so one could do as they pleased in the body, which was inherently bad, lesser, and corrupt.  In their view, the resurrected Jesus was as spirit and shed the corruption of flesh to become pure.

Throughout the Bible, you will not find a concept that material is bad and spirit is good.  In Genesis, God called the material world he made good, along with everything, man, animal, plant, and mineral, in it.  Satan and the demons are spirits, but they are evil.  The Bible assures believers that they will be resurrected bodily, like Christ, and that their resurrected body will be everlasting, good, and incorruptible.

Knowing the Truth

Knowing the truth is a Christian’s defense against false teaching.  John writes a lot about knowing in this letter.  That knowing is founded in the revelation of Christ and in God’s Word.  We can know that we know God (Chapter 2).  We can know that we have a new, everlasting life in Christ (Chapter 3).  We can know that God loves us (Chapter 4).  We can know that God hears our prayers (Chapter 5).

Knowing the truth allows us to test ourselves, what we hear, and who we hear it from.  Do we affirm the gospel, including the divinity and bodily resurrection of Christ?  Do we strive to keep God’s commandments?  Do we recognize when we sin and repent?  Do we love others and act on that love?  Jesus Christ said we could know a tree by its fruit, and John is encouraging us to look around and see if the fruit of would-be teachers is good or not.

Love

John is sometimes called the “Apostle of Love.”  Love is a theme of all his writings preserved in the Bible (yes, even Revelation in my opinion).

God loves us and we should love Him.  If we are Christians, we will love Him.  If we love Him, we will obey Him (Jesus said if we love Him, we will keep his commandments).  If we love Him, we will love others, especially our brothers and sisters in the church (Jesus said we would be known know for our love for each other).  Love is the God’s response to us, even when we were sinful and far from him, as evidenced in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ.  The appropriate response to Gods love is to love Him and love the others He loves.

John also wrote the Gospel of John.

First John.  The Holy Bible.  New King James Version.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

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