So when
we left off, Elisha had just died. Which gets attached to a cute little story.
“2 Kings 13:20 So Elisha died, and they buried him. Now bands of
Moabites used to invade the land in the spring of the year. 21 And as a man was being buried,
behold, a marauding band was seen and the man was thrown into the grave of
Elisha, and as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived and
stood on his feet.”
So yeah…
I guess that’s, what, the third resurrection that’s been pulled off so far? How
special! I wonder if people started bringing other dead folks to Elisha’s
grave. I imagine it would have been tough to actually get him fully buried
after that point, what with the likely demand for further resurrections. But
then, oddly, nothing is ever mentioned about it again, one way or the other.
After
that, it’s pretty much back to politics and wars. Amaziah becomes king of Judah
(and he did what was good in the sight of God), and for no stated reason declares
war on king Joash of Israel. Joash (who was one of the many kings who “did what
was evil in the sight of God”) beats the everloving shit out of Amaziah’s army,
takes him captive, sacks Jerusalem, and loots the temple. Guess God was a
little off his defensive game that day. Or had, y’know, some of those famous
“mysterious reasons,” for letting the king who worshipped him faithfully get
spanked by the one who didn’t. Joash lives out the rest of his life reigning
over Israel, while Amaziah is eventually returned to Judah only to be
overthrown and murdered by a conspiracy of his own people.
Amaziah’s
son, Araziah, becomes king. He’s another who “did what was right in the eyes of
God.” His reward? God turns him into a leper. Seriously… the text specifically
says that God turns him into a leper. Possibly because, while he was faithful
to God himself, he wasn’t doing enough to oppress the people who worshipped
other gods or who worshipped Yahweh incorrectly (though that’s only implied as
the reason, and not stated outright).
What
follows is a succession of kings in both Israel and Judah that are largely
uninteresting. Some did “right” and some did “evil” in the eyes of God, some
were usurped and murdered, some were not, some were successful in war, some
were not. Dry stuff presented in very dry and cursory fashion.
So a few
generations down, we run into Hoshea, king of Israel. And he gets spanked by
the Assyrians, and forced to pay tribute. But when the Assyrians later find out
that he’s conspiring with Egypt to rebel, they just flat out invade and conquer
Israel. Hoshea himself is taken prisoner, and the people of Israel are forcibly
relocated. So the kingdom of Israel ceases to exist, leaving only Judah as the
sole bastion of Jewish sovereignty. And as per usual, after spelling out the
exact political and economic reasons why something happened, the Bible then
goes on to lay that blame squarely on the Israelites’ failure to worship God
properly.
A few
years later, the Assyrians are walloping on Judah as well. Hezekiah is king in
Judah, and he’s been running a little pogrom of persecuting people who worship
other gods and destroying their places of worship. So God likes him well enough
to intervene when the Assyrians stage a full-scale invasion. And…
Aggh…
fuck it! I’m sick of Second Kings! Sick or writing about it, sick of reading
and re-reading it to try and find interesting things to say. It’s boring as
shit, and I’m just gonna push through to the end so that today’s post can
finish it up and we can move on. Ultimately, it’s just a long and incredibly
tedious parable for “If you don’t worship God exclusively, he’ll fuck your shit
up. Mostly in ways indistinguishable from normal politics and war.”
So… God
tricks the Assyrians into going away. But they come back later and he kills
185,000 of them. Hezekiah gets sick, and God tell him he’s gonna die. But he
prays and God changes his mind to let him live another 15 years. He also tells
him that Judah is gonna get destroyed in a few generations, and Hezekiah is all
like “That’s good. Everything’s fine for me, so fuck my descendants anyway.”
A couple
generations later, Josiah is king of Judah and he goes whole hog on religious
persecution. Not only does he do one of those purges that seems to happen every
couple generations where the king tears down the worship places of every god
other than Yahweh, but also…
“2 Kings 23:19 And Josiah removed all the shrines also of the cities
of Samaria, which kings of Israel had made, provoking Yahweh to anger. He did
to them according to all that he had done in Bethel. 20 And he sacrificed all the priests of the high places who were
there, on the altars, and burned human bones on them. Then he returned to
Jerusalem.”
So yeah,
human sacrifice again. Mind you, this is after God had already told him
(through the prophet Isaiah) that he was going to destroy Judah anyway and
that, because Josiah was such a good little toady, God would reward him by
making sure he died before having to see any of the destruction.
Josiah is
eventually killed by the king of Egypt. We get a couple more generations of
kings before the Babylonians bitch-slap Judah into the ground and force them to
pay tribute. A few years later, Judah rebels against Babylon, so king
Nebuchadnezzar just all-out invades. Jerusalem is burned to the ground, and the
temple with it, and a Babylonian governor appointed. Many of the people of
Judah (including the king) are taken as prisoners back to Babylon, and the independent
Jewish states are gone. This is, of course, entirely because the Jewish people
had the wrong religious beliefs and practices.
And that’s
it. We’re done with Second Kings. I apologize for the brusque manner in which I
breezed through this last part, but I’d really had enough and had long since
ceased getting anything out of it. With my next post, we’ll be moving on to the
First Book of Chronicles. It is, unfortunately, a bit of a recap of stuff we’ve
already read. But maybe that means we can skip through it fairly quickly, and
perhaps it will provide some interesting comparisons.
Until
next time, y’all take care!
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