Bible Reading Challenge Blog

A bloodbath ensues once Solomon is placed in power.  It seems that each of these stories is given almost as excuses as to why Solomon had every right to kill the people that he killed.  Let’s start with his brother, Adonijah, who uses Solomon’s mother as part of his scheme to really get under the skin of Solomon.  I’m not sure why he would do this unless he had a death wish.  Solomon kills his brother because he asked for a woman who was Solomon’s.  

Solomon kills Joab even while he is holding onto the horns of the altar.  The King banishes Shimei to Jerusalem  to city arrest and Shimei agrees to it.  But then three years later he leaves to get his property and comes back and Solomon kills him  for it.  It is interesting that this chapter ends with the words: “So the kingdom was established in the hands of Solomon.”  Almost  as if as a result of this bloodshed Solomon was able to establish his kingdom.  By eliminating your enemies you establish your kingdom.  What a non-Christian approach to government that we would be careful not to follow.

Notice how the chapter begins as we find David giving advice to his son Solomon.  We can see a straight line between this chapter and Joshua chapter 1 where we hear the Lord tell Joshua: Be strong, be courageous.  We see these words given by David to Solomon in 2:1.  David tells Solomon to follow the way of the Lord, to follow his commandments, to follow his statutes so that you can prosper in all that you do.  Again, this is a similar command that Joshua receives when he takes over from Moses.  David dies and is buried in Jerusalem, which was, and is, the city of David.

This simple command to obey God, to follow his commandments, and to be strong and courageous is one that we need to obey.  It will not keep us from all evil, we will still be tested and things will not always go the way that we want or hope, but we will be in the will of God which will open up doors to opportunities that we never thought possible.

Before we get to the content of I Kings 1 we should get to the context of I and II Kings in totality.  I and II Kings were originally a single book of the Bible but in the 15th century they were separated probably because a single book this long was too unwieldy for the scribes to be able to handle it completely.  It begins with the ending of the protagonist of I and II Samuel who is King David.  There is some thought that the prophet Jeremiah was the one who had written this book of the Bible and that it was written around the time of King Josiah around 620 BC.  Remember, King David ruled around 1,000 BC.  Josiah was the one who spearheaded the reforms which included ensuring that the Word of God and the history of the people be written down for posterity sake.  It could have been written as a result of this edict.

These books of the Bible contain the very good and the very bad times in the nation of Israel.  From the single or united monarchy under Solomon to its division into a Northern and Southern Kingdom with the people doing their own thing and turning their back on God.  The god Baal becomes prevalent throughout this writing as the Israelites turn their back repeatedly and on God’s chosen one to rule them.  But let’s get to the first chapter.

This past Sunday I preached in II Chronicles how God promised Solomon that if the people of Israel obeyed that there would never be a problem in finding a successor for Israel.  Here we have Solomon who is made king of Israel but in the midst of a mess that his mother and his father’s prophet had to sort out.  Another of David’s sons, Adonijah, had placed himself as the next in line and had gathered his allies to ensure that it would take place.  David’s prophet, Nathan (the one who told David, You’re the man! after accusing him of treason for sleeping with Bathsheba), catches wind of it and they are able to get Solomon crowned before much damage is done.  But it was close.  

King David was really old, vs.1, and so time was running out.  Nathan came up with a plan and it worked exactly as they wanted.  Solomon had every right to kill those who had tried to take the throne away from him, but he seems to have mercy and tells his half-brother to go home.  He forgave him but had him assure him that he was a good man and that he would not cause any more trouble.  Solomon’s time to reign is about to begin.  David is still alive so we have to see what happens from the time that Solomon is anointed and from the time he actually rules.  Remember David was anointed years before he began his rule as Saul still reigned.  That caused a little friction, but Saul was in good health.  We don’t expect the same here.

We find ourselves in the story of a girldad in the Old Testament, Zelophehad.  Remember him from chapter 27?  Well, back in that chapter we saw that Moses really protected his daughters and ensured that they would never end up without land if their husbands died.  But now that decision created another problem.  If they married outside of their family and outside of their tribe then that land would be lost to that tribe forever.  So…, Moses requires that these daughters, and all daughters, must marry within their father’s family in order to keep the land within the tribe.  So, it means that the daughters don’t lose land when they marry, but they must marry within their father’s tribe.  

The book of Numbers ends with the final declaration that what was written previously were the commandments and the ordinances that God passed down to Moses before they entered the promised land.  That means that once they enter the promised land they would be ready.  On to the next book of the Bible in this challenge: I Kings.

We talk a lot about murder in this chapter.  It begins with the command by God for the Levites to be given 48 cities by the tribes of Israel.  It ends with the section giving the Levites the land to ensuring that the land which contains the houses of refuge, the cities of refuge, the place where criminals can run if they are accused of something and are seeking safety, all of those lands must belong to the Levites.  That makes sense.  You give the priests all of the lands that contain the criminals running from the law in them.  One would think that the priests would be the ones with the compassion to work with all people.  But on that note…

The next verses in the chapter speaks specifically as to which criminals can and cannot flee to those cities.  Only those who killed someone accidentally is able to flee to those cities.  As vs.15 states: “anyone that kills a person without intent may flee there.”  From vs.16 and following it lays out the distinction between murder that was meant and murder that was not meant.  I guess we would call it premeditated vs. accidental.  It was 100% eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

But, not just one witness was able to convict a person, it had to be more than one.  Also, a murdered was not able to pay his way out of the crime.  The reasoning behind all of this was to keep the land pure of people who thought it was okay to murder.  Jesus, remember, had this to say: “³⁸ “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’^[a] 39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. ⁴⁰ And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. ⁴¹ If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. ⁴² Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.”  

We get the boundaries for the promised land laid out in this chapter.  It is less about the tribes and what their territories will be and more about the territories themselves and the geographic boundaries that the new nation will represent.  It is in this chapter where the leadership is laid out for Israel with Eleazar and Joshua each taking their respective places.  Eleazar is the chief priest and Joshua takes up the civic and military duties.  The other names that are listed represent the leaders of each of the tribes.

We are coming to a close in the book of Numbers and soon we will find ourselves inching towards I and II Kings.  It will be interesting to see how God never really wanted to have a king to lead the people, because there is such a temptation to make the king as close to god as anyone on the face of the earth.  That is what happened with all the tribes around them, so God wanted to avoid that.  But we see that the transition from judges to kings that God relents and gives the people what they want.  

We find ourselves with a detailed summary of the movements of the nation of Israel from the time that they left Egypt up to the time that they were about to, but had not yet, entered the promised land.  It is the wilderness journey remembered and it is a journey which took 40 years to accomplish.  There are 42 stages described here in Numbers.  Makes sense, since the book in which these stages are written is called numbers.  

We see an interesting detail  in vs.2 where we find that Moses wrote down the stages and the starting points and the details of the tribes.  Remember, as we have said earlier, we do not posses, we do not have, there does not exist that we know of, an original copy of what Moses wrote down.  This book of Numbers has been passed down in oral and then written form for centuries.  I just don’t want people to think that when it speaks about Moses writing down these details that somewhere in a vault there is the original copy which we can use to compare to what we currently have.  

We see a similar summary of these events in Deuteronomy 1:1-3:28.  I do find it interesting that what I consider one of the most powerful events and most iconic events of the early Israelite history, the crossing of the Red Sea, is just mentioned in passing.  Also, the miraculous provision of the manna and the quail isn’t even mentioned.  Neither is the presence of God in a cloud or a pillar of fire.  The author here was very circumspect in what he included in the details.  Just the facts.

We have a bit of a twist to the previous declarations from God that no one will cross into the promised land before the generation that fled from Egypt had died.  We actually get a specific age of 20 which we didn’t have before.  We see that anyone who was 20 and over when they left Egypt will not enter into the promised land, while those who were younger than 20 when they left Egypt would be able to enter the land.

But there were a couple of tribes who wanted to enter early into the promised land because their cattle wanted/needed more land and there was great land for their cattle in the area called the Transjordan, or across the Jordan.  They made a deal with Moses, which was basically making a deal with God.  Moses accused them of being opportunists thinking that they would wait for the other tribes to clear out the enemies and then they would just skate in and take the land that was promised to them.  

They said no, here is a compromise.  We promise to be a vanguard, those who go ahead of all the others and we will be the ones who battle the enemies as a sign that we are not afraid to enter the land and do battle even if our ancestors did say that we should not enter the land.  We  will wait to take over our land and settle in our land until all the other tribes of Israel have already settled in place.  That seemed like a good idea, Moses was happy with it, the people were happy with it, and so, it seems, that God was happy with it as well.  So now we begin to occupy the promised land after these many years in the wilderness.

We transition from the rules commanding the sacrifices to a situation where God is asking Moses to go into battle and telling him exactly how many troops and what his strategy ought to be when he goes into battle.  So they went to battle against the Midianites and they won, as we would expect.  They also brought back some booty to Moses in order to show what exactly they had done and how they had conquered.  With Moses in the battle is Eleazar who is now the high priest and the grandson of Aaron.  We  saw him before.

Well, Moses was not pleased that they had kept the women alive because they were part of that time when the men of Israel had turned their back on God to pursue the women of Midian and Eleazar had driven a spear through that Israelite man and that Midianite woman.  So, all the women were killed except those who had not slept with an Israelite in the past.  I know, hard to follow  and hard to stomach.  

But remember this was in order to ensure that the people of Israel were pure and that they had everything that they needed in order to be obedient to God, and to pass that obedience on to their children.  All was divided and so the chapter ends.

It should be fairly obvious that the role of women in the Old Testament was very different from the more egalitarian structure which we have today in our society.  Women simply were not able to make decisions, or vows on their own without the approval of either their fathers or their husbands.  The only women who were able to make decisions on their own were those who were either divorced or widowed.  This chapter describes the state in which women were to be in regards to decisions.

We begin the chapter simply by stating that when a man makes an oath he is bound to it, no ifs, ands or buts.  He has to do what he promises he is going to do.  “He shall not break his word.”  But when a woman makes a pledge…, well, that’s a different story.  She isn’t bound to a pledge if she makes it and her father or her husband hears her make it and then contradicts her.  She is not bound to it.  Just in case she says something that she really hasn’t thought through, I know, not nice.

But if the husband or dad is present and she makes a vow and they don’t say anything to contradict it then it is good to go and she is good to go.  Basically silence means approval on the part of the men. These were the guidelines that Moses  gave to the leaders of Israel even while God gave Deborah the power to preside, judge, and rule the nation of Israel.  But even Deborah is described in light of who is her husband, as she is described as the wife of Lappidoth.  But you can’t get away from the fact that she was able to make decisions for the entire nation of Israel without her husband ever being mentioned.

We have in this chapter one more round of sacrifices that are to be made on specific festival days.  Let’s lift up the festival of booths which begins in vs.12 and takes us all the way to the end of the chapter.  This is a religious celebration that was supposed to last 8 days, and each day had its own specific sacrifice that was to be made to commemorate the festival of booths.  Remember, this was a festival when they were to remember the time that they lived in the wilderness as wanderers in a foreign land.  The reference to this is also found in Leviticus 23.  But God commanded the people of Israel to live in booths during this time to remember their time in the wilderness.

It is interesting because Jesus’ ride into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was right on the heels of the festival of booths and it is thought that the people were able to get the palms from the roofs of the booths that the people were living in during this festival.  But remember, these verses in Numbers would predate that event by millenia so the two are not related, except by the fact that in Jesus’ day they still celebrated this festival.

I remember when I was at Swarthmore that during this festival of booths time period there were students who would observe it and build their booths and spend time in them to meditate and pray and to remember that they were called by God to take the time in their Jewish heritage and faith to remember this time in their historical and religious background.  It always impressed me the faith and the willingness for these students to do something on campus which pointed directly at their faith even in the midst of an institution of higher learning which tended to be somewhat adversarial to any faith in general which demanded action that could be interpreted as defying reason.  But isn’t that the nature of faith in general?