Unlocking the Bible

Furthermore, the concept of a ‘reign’ in the Bible is very different from in the United Kingdom, where, under a constitutional monarchy, the Queen reigns but does not rule, the power residing in the elected government. The big advantage is that the armed forces and courts of law are not under the government directly, but are responsible to the Queen. The monarchy is valued not so much for the power it wields as for the power it keeps from others.

The kings of Israel, by contrast, had absolute power. They made the rules and commanded the armed forces. There was no parliament, no voting and no opposition parties. The king ruled by decree and not by debate. His influence over his subjects was total, and therefore his character and conduct shaped society during his rule. He stood as a representative of the nation before God, but also as a representative of God before the nation.

This meant a major change in the way the nation was evaluated. During the time described in Joshua, Judges and Ruth, there was a loose federation and the people were judged according to their actions. In Samuel and Kings, however, the king’s character and conduct decided the fate of the nation.

Selected history

Although the book is about the kings of Israel, it is not evenhanded in its allocation of space to each king. For example, Omri was a king in the north whom we know from other historical sources to have had an outstanding reign, creating an extraordinary economic turnaround for the nation. Yet the book of Kings dismisses him in eight verses, because he was deficient in the one area that mattered: he did evil in the sight of the Lord. Similarly, Jereboam II had a mini golden age in the north, yet he is given just seven verses for the same reason. On the other hand, Hezekiah, who was largely a good king, is given three chapters, a single prayer of Solomon covers 38 verses, and the stories of Elijah and Elisha, who were not kings at all, take up a third of the two books of Kings.

This apparently uneven treatment occurs because the writer is not driven by a conventional historical approach. We noted in our study of Joshua that any historian has to select what is important, make connections between the events or people he has selected, and then give an explanation as to why the events led on from each other. The writer of Kings is not interested in focusing on political, economic or military history, though he may mention all these in passing. Rather, he is concerned with two aspects of each king’s rule or kingdom:

1 Its spiritual qualities – worship, either of the God of Israel or idols

2 Its moral qualities – justice and morality, or their opposites

Prophetic history

Kings is the last of a collection of books known as the ‘former prophets’ in the Hebrew Bible and follows Joshua, Judges and Samuel. This is history from God’s viewpoint. Individuals and events are mentioned because God regards them as important and necessary for future generations. A man may be a brilliant politician or economist, but God is primarily interested in his belief and behaviour.

We could rightly term these books ‘holy history’, for they are a record with an abiding message and a story with an eternal moral. They offer us not just a lesson from history, but the lesson of history. Those who do not learn it are condemned to repeat it.

Universal truth

There are patterns in the history of Israel which can be universally applied. Take, for example, the length of the reign of each king mentioned in the book. A good king reigned on average for 33 years and a bad king on average for 11 years. From this we can derive the general principle that good rulers last longer than bad ones, since God is in ultimate control of history and can keep good kings on the throne.

There are exceptions – not every good king had a long reign and not every bad king had a short one – but the principle is generally true and can, indeed, still be seen in the length of time modern leaders rule.

The rise and fall of the nation

Kings covers some pivotal events in the history of God’s people which we need to note if we are to grasp the message of the book and understand the books which follow. The book of 2 Samuel and the early part of 1 Kings describe the powerful position of Israel on the world stage, but most of the book of Kings is concerned with the nation’s downfall. Under David and Solomon the nation was eventually united, and the empire stretched from Egypt to the Euphrates. At last the Israelites inhabited most of the land promised to Abraham 1,000 years before, and controlled more besides. But from Solomon’s time onwards they headed downhill, through civil war and a divided kingdom to exile in a foreign land.

The national split meant that the name Israel no longer referred to the whole nation, but only to the 10 tribes of the north. The southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin were known by the name of the larger one, Judah. This distinction continues through the rest of the Old Testament.

The southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin became known as ‘Jews’, derived from the tribal name Judah. Before this point the people were known collectively as ‘Hebrews’ or ‘Israelites’. This is an important distinction to bear in mind. In the New Testament John’s Gospel distinguishes between the Jews in the south and the Galileans in the north. It was the Jews in the south who were largely responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, not all the people of Israel per se.

A TALE OF TWO NATIONS

Kings covers the histories of these two ‘nations’. The spiritual and moral standards of the 10 tribes in the north steadily deteriorated, until Assyria sent them into exile. In the south the progression downwards is less marked. There were good kings such as Hezekiah and Josiah, but eventually they went the same way as the north and were taken away to Babylon. Their forefather Abraham had been called out of Ur – now they finished up where Abraham had begun, though this time as displaced persons.

It is a salutary lesson about how easy it is to lose what has been gained. Often the duration of the demise is much less than the time it took to reach the pinnacle.

The kingdom of Israel

The kingdom of Israel went through three stages, summarized in the table below.

1. United kingdom

2. Divided kingdom

10 tribes in the north – ‘Israel’

2 tribes in the south – ‘Judah’

3. Single kingdom

UNITY

The first stage was the ‘United Kingdom’, when three kings reigned in turn over the whole of Israel. The first king was Saul, who was largely bad; the second was David, who was mainly good; and the third was Solomon, who was both good and bad.

Each reign lasted exactly 40 years. The number 40 is often indicative of the length of time God tests people. Jesus was tempted for 40 days in the wilderness; the children of Israel were in the wilderness for 40 years. It is a trial period in God’s sight, and all three kings failed the test. They started well, but finished badly. David received credit for being ‘a man after God’s own heart’, but even he had a disappointing end.

The book of 1 Samuel covers Saul’s 40 years, 2 Samuel covers David’s 40 years and the first 11 chapters of 1 Kings cover Solomon’s 40 years.

WAR

As soon as Solomon died, the north and the south became locked in a civil war that wrecked the ‘United Kingdom’. The seeds of unrest had been sown when Solomon had taxed the nation heavily and confined the benefits to the south, causing the north to grow discontented. Solomon’s death was the catalyst for this unrest to boil over into armed conflict.

The two southern tribes kept the capital Jerusalem and the royal line of David. The 10 tribes in the north lost both and set up their own centres of worship, at Bethel and Dan, complete with two golden calves as the focus of their worship. Since the royal line was in the south, they also elected their own king, Jeroboam.

Succession in the north proved to be rarely smooth. There were assassinations, coups d’état, takeovers. The kings were often self-elected.

For 80 years after the split, there was war between the north and the south amid increasing animosity, culminating with the tribes in the north making a treaty with Syria and Damascus to try to wipe out the two tribes in the south. Isaiah gives the details in his prophecy.

PEACE

The 80 years of war between the north and the south were followed by 80 years of peace, during which God sent two prophets who play a huge part in the book of Kings. Elijah’s ministry is recorded in 1 Kings and the first two chapters of 2 Kings, and Elisha, who followed him, is a key figure in the early part of 2 Kings.

The respite did not halt the decline, however, and in 721 BC the Assyrians defeated the northern tribes of Israel and deported them from their land. They became the ‘10 lost tribes’, never to return to the land as a nation.

After the exile of the northern kingdom of Israel, the book focuses exclusively on Judah and Benjamin in the south. It was a very small kingdom, with Jerusalem as its capital and a small amount of land surrounding it, but their kings were descended from the royal line and they knew about God’s promise to David that there would always be one of his descendants on the throne.

When the northern tribes were deported, God sent prophetic warnings from Isaiah and Micah that the same would happen to the south, but this had little or no effect. The last event recorded in the book of Kings is that Judah was led into exile by the Babylonians just 140 years later.

Purpose

We come now to focus on the basic questions that should inform our reading of any book of the Bible: Who wrote the book? How did they write it? When did they write it? Why did they write it?

Who wrote Kings?

The writer of the book cannot be known with any certainty. Most Jews think it was Jeremiah and there are a number of reasons why the case for this is strong.

1 Parts of Kings are identical to Jeremiah’s prophecy – even the wording is exactly the same.

2 Jeremiah is not mentioned in the book, despite being a contemporary of Josiah and at the heart of many of the events described. It would seem impossible for anyone to cover this period without mentioning Jeremiah, but if Jeremiah is the author it would be in keeping with other writers of the Bible for him to be self-effacing.

3 We know that prophets often wrote about kings. Isaiah wrote about Uzziah and Hezekiah, and God specifically instructed Jeremiah in his prophecy to write about Israel.

4 Furthermore, there was a time in Jeremiah’s ministry when recalling the history of the nation would have been especially pertinent. His prophecy tells of the time when the people of God rejected his impassioned reminders that they should be obedient to the covenant and he had to pronounce curses on the nation. This would have been the appropriate juncture to write the book of Kings.