The books of Kings

King David is old now. They pile blankets on him and he still can’t get warm. His servants find a young woman from Shunem, Abishag, to look after him.

Replying to @adonijah

He’s got himself chariots, horsemen and fifty men to run ahead of him. David’s son by Haggith, born after Absalom, very good-looking. And his father has never once asked him why he’s doing any of it.

Adonijah throws a sacrifice and a feast at the Serpent’s Stone by En-rogel, just outside Jerusalem. Joab the army commander and Abiathar the priest are backing him. The guest list says the rest: all the king’s sons are invited. Nathan the prophet, Benaiah, David’s elite soldiers and his brother Solomon are not.

Worth knowing: this was Nathan’s idea. He told Bathsheba exactly what to say, and promised to walk in halfway through and back her up.

Bathsheba@bathshebaWent in to the king in his bedroom. Reminded him he swore to me by the LORD that my son Solomon would be king after him. And now Adonijah has made himself king and he doesn’t even know. All Israel is waiting for him to say who sits on the throne. If he doesn’t, the day he dies, Solomon and I will be treated as criminals.

Replying to @jonathan.son.of.abiathar

Every guest gets up, terrified, and scatters. Adonijah runs and grabs hold of the horns of the altar. Solomon’s answer: behave yourself and you won’t lose a hair on your head. Step out of line and you die. He comes down, bows to King Solomon, and is told to go home.

David dies and is buried in the City of David. Forty years as king: seven in Hebron, thirty-three in Jerusalem. Solomon sits on his father’s throne, and the kingdom is firmly his.

Solomon marries Pharaoh’s daughter to seal an alliance with Egypt. He loves the LORD, and he goes to Gibeon, the biggest of the hilltop shrines, and offers a thousand burnt offerings there.

Life under Solomon: Judah and Israel as many as the sand on the beach, eating, drinking and happy. From Dan to Beersheba, everyone safe, each family under its own vine and its own fig tree.

Food for Solomon’s palace, one day: 1. Thirty loads of fine flour. 2. Sixty loads of meal. 3. Thirty oxen. 4. A hundred sheep. 5. Deer, gazelles, roebucks and fattened birds on top.

Wiser than anyone in the East, wiser than all Egypt. Three thousand proverbs, a thousand and five songs. He could talk about every plant from the cedars of Lebanon to the little hyssop growing out of a wall, and about animals, birds, reptiles and fish. Kings sent people just to listen to him.

Solomon’s workforce: 30,000 men conscripted from all Israel, sent to Lebanon in shifts of 10,000, a month there and two months home. Adoniram runs the forced labour. Plus 70,000 carriers, 80,000 stonecutters in the hills and 3,300 foremen.

Building starts. 480 years since Israel came out of Egypt, in the spring of Solomon’s fourth year: the house of the LORD.

While it’s going up, the LORD tells Solomon: do things my way, keep my laws, and I’ll keep through you the promise I made your father David. I’ll live among Israel, and I won’t abandon my people.

Inside, it’s all cedar, carved with gourds and open flowers. Not a stone showing. At the back is the Most Holy Place, the inner room, covered in pure gold, and in it two cherubim carved from olive wood and covered in gold, their wings stretched out to touch both walls and each other in the middle.

The temple took seven years. His own palace took thirteen.

Moving day. All Israel’s elders come to Jerusalem at the autumn festival to bring the ark of the LORD up into the new temple. The priests carry it. In front of it, so many sheep and oxen are sacrificed nobody can count them.

Then Solomon stands at the altar in front of the whole assembly, spreads out his hands towards the sky, and prays.

Replying to @theisraelites

Solomon’s peace offerings: 22,000 cattle and 120,000 sheep. The bronze altar was far too small for it all, so he made the middle of the courtyard holy and used that.

The LORD appears to Solomon a second time, like at Gibeon. I’ve heard your prayer, he tells him. My name is on this house for ever. Walk with me like your father did and your throne will last. But turn away to other gods, and this temple will become a heap of rubble, and everyone who passes will ask why the LORD did this.

Replying to @hiram.tyre

The name stuck. It’s still called that.

Solomon builds a fleet at Ezion-geber on the Red Sea, and Hiram sends sailors who know the sea. Every three years the ships come in with gold, silver, ivory, apes and peacocks.

Solomon’s throne: ivory, covered in gold, six steps with a lion at each end of every step. Nothing like it in any kingdom. Every drinking cup: gold. Silver? Nobody counted silver in Solomon’s day. He made it as common in Jerusalem as stones.

But King Solomon loved a lot of foreign women. Pharaoh’s daughter, and women from Moab, Ammon, Edom, Sidon and the Hittites, from the very nations the LORD had told Israel not to marry into, because they’d turn their hearts to their gods. Seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. And as he got old, they did turn his heart.

Replying to @booksofkings

On the hill east of Jerusalem he builds shrines for Chemosh, the god of Moab, and Molech, the god of Ammon. The same for every foreign wife, so they can burn incense to their gods.

The LORD is angry with Solomon, who had seen him twice. He tells him: I’ll tear the kingdom away from you and give it to one of your servants. Not in your lifetime, for David’s sake. And not all of it: one tribe stays with your son, for David and for Jerusalem.

Meet Jeroboam son of Nebat, from Ephraim. Solomon noticed how hard the young man worked and put him in charge of all the labour gangs from the tribes of Joseph. One day, leaving Jerusalem, Jeroboam meets the prophet Ahijah from Shiloh on the road, the two of them alone in a field. Ahijah is wearing a new cloak. He takes it off, tears it into twelve pieces, and tells Jeroboam: take ten.

Solomon reigned in Jerusalem over all Israel for forty years. The rest of what he did, and his wisdom, is in the Book of the Acts of Solomon. He dies and is buried in the City of David, and his son Rehoboam is king.

This was from the LORD, to keep the word he’d given Jeroboam through Ahijah.

The books of Kings@booksofkingsMeet Jeroboam son of Nebat, from Ephraim. Solomon noticed how hard the young man worked and put him in charge of all the labour gangs from the tribes of Joseph. One day, leaving Jerusalem, Jeroboam meets the prophet Ahijah from Shiloh on the road, the two of them alone in a field. Ahijah is wearing a new cloak. He takes it off, tears it into twelve pieces, and tells Jeroboam: take ten.

Rehoboam sends Adoram, the man in charge of forced labour, out to them. They stone him to death. Rehoboam jumps into his chariot and gets away to Jerusalem.

Replying to @theisraelites

Only the tribe of Judah stays with David’s family.

Replying to @shemaiah

Rehoboam had 180,000 men from Judah and Benjamin ready to march. They listened to the LORD, and went home.

What Jeroboam is thinking, and keeping to himself: if the people keep going up to the temple in Jerusalem to sacrifice, their hearts will go back to Rehoboam. And then they’ll kill me.

Replying to @jeroboam

It became a sin. People walk as far as Dan to worship in front of the calf. He appoints priests from anyone at all, not the Levites.

Even after all that, Jeroboam doesn’t change his ways. He keeps making priests for the hilltop shrines out of anyone who wants the job.

Replying to @queen.of.tirzah

All Israel mourns for him and buries him. Ahijah had said he was the one in Jeroboam’s family the LORD saw something good in.

Rehoboam’s fifth year: Shishak, king of Egypt, attacks Jerusalem and takes everything from the treasuries of the temple and the palace. All of it. Even the gold shields Solomon made. Rehoboam has bronze ones made to replace them.

Replying to @soldier.gibbethon

Omri marches on Tirzah. When Zimri sees the city is taken, he goes into the palace citadel and sets it on fire around himself. He was king for seven days.

Omri buys the hill of Samaria from a man called Shemer for two talents of silver, builds a city on it, and calls it Samaria, after Shemer.

Ahab son of Omri becomes king of Israel, twenty-two years in Samaria. He does more evil than every king before him. He marries Jezebel, daughter of the king of the Sidonians, and starts worshipping Baal. Builds him a temple in Samaria, an altar, an Asherah pole.

Three years on, still no rain. The LORD tells Elijah: go and show yourself to Ahab, and I’ll send rain. The famine in Samaria is severe.

Replying to @elijahs.servant

The sky goes black with cloud and wind, and heavy rain comes down. Ahab rides off to Jezreel. And the power of the LORD comes on Elijah: he tucks his cloak into his belt and runs ahead of Ahab’s chariot all the way.

Ben-hadad gets the reply while he’s drinking in his tent with the thirty-two kings. A prophet tells Ahab the LORD will hand this army to him, through the young officers of the district governors. At noon 232 of them march out, the army behind them. Ben-hadad, still drinking: take them alive, whether they’ve come for peace or war. Aram runs. Ben-hadad escapes on a horse.

Replying to @aram.officials

A man of God tells Ahab: Aram thinks the LORD is a god of the hills and not the valleys. So the LORD will hand this whole army to you, and you’ll know that he is the LORD.

Seven days facing each other. Then the battle, and Aram is beaten. Ben-hadad runs into the city of Aphek and hides in an inner room.

Replying to @aram.officials

Ahab has him brought up into his own chariot, makes a treaty with him, and lets him go.

Replying to @aram.officials

A prophet stops the king on the road with a message from the LORD: you let go the man I’d marked for destruction, so it’ll be your life for his life. Ahab goes home to Samaria sullen and angry.

Replying to @jezreel.local

The orders came in letters with Ahab’s name and seal on them. Jezebel wrote them. The fast, the seat of honour, the two scoundrels: all her idea, and the elders did exactly what she wrote.

Replying to @jezreel.local

Jezebel tells Ahab: get up, the vineyard’s yours, Naboth’s dead. And Ahab gets up and goes down to take it.

Replying to @elijah.tishbite

When Ahab hears it, he tears his clothes, puts on sackcloth and fasts. Sleeps in sackcloth. Goes about quietly. And the LORD tells Elijah: have you seen how Ahab has humbled himself in front of me? Because he has, the disaster won’t come in his lifetime.

At Ramoth-gilead, Ahab tells Jehoshaphat: I’ll go into battle in disguise. You wear your royal robes.

Then someone draws his bow, not aiming at anyone in particular, and the arrow finds the gap between the plates of Ahab’s armour. Turn round, get me out of the fighting, he tells his driver, I’m badly hurt. He’s propped up in his chariot facing the Arameans all day, and that evening he dies.

Jehoshaphat, Asa’s son, reigns in Judah for twenty-five years and does what’s right in the LORD’s eyes, like his father. He builds ships to sail to Ophir for gold. They’re wrecked at Ezion-geber before they ever sail.

Ahab is dead, and Moab has broken away from Israel. His son Ahaziah, the new king, has fallen through the lattice of his upstairs room in Samaria and is badly hurt. He sends messengers to ask Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron, whether he’ll get better.

Replying to @third.captain

The angel of the LORD tells Elijah: go down with him, don’t be afraid of him. So Elijah goes to the king himself and tells him to his face: you won’t get up from that bed. And Ahaziah dies, just as the LORD said through Elijah. He has no son, so his brother Joram becomes king.

They’re still walking along, talking, when a chariot of fire with horses of fire comes between them, and Elijah goes up to heaven in a whirlwind.

Mesha, king of Moab, breeds sheep, and used to pay Israel’s king a hundred thousand lambs and the wool of a hundred thousand rams every year. After Ahab died, he stopped. So Joram marches on Moab with Jehoshaphat of Judah and the king of Edom. Seven days on a roundabout route through the desert, and the water runs out. Nothing for the army, nothing for the animals.

Replying to @moab.border

It was water. It came flowing in from the direction of Edom at the time of the morning sacrifice and filled the land. When Moab charged the camp, Israel was waiting, and Moab ran.

Meet Naaman. Commander of the king of Aram’s army, a great man, highly regarded, because the LORD had given Aram victories through him. A brave soldier. And he has leprosy.

Gehazi, Elisha’s servant, has other ideas. He runs after Naaman, who gets down from his chariot to meet him. Is everything all right? Fine, says Gehazi. Elisha sent me: two young prophets have just arrived, could you spare them a talent of silver and two sets of clothes? Naaman insists on two talents. Gehazi hides it all in the house.

The Arameans come down towards him. Elisha prays, and the LORD strikes them blind. This isn’t the road, he tells them, and this isn’t the town. Follow me, I’ll take you to the man you’re looking for. And he leads them straight into Samaria. Then their eyes are opened, and they’re standing in the middle of Israel’s capital.

Replying to @booksofkings

After that the Aramean raiding bands stop coming into Israel.

Some time later, Ben-hadad brings his whole army and besieges Samaria. The famine inside gets so bad a donkey’s head sells for eighty shekels of silver.

Replying to @four.at.the.gate

The Lord had made the Arameans hear chariots and horses and a great army. They decided Israel had hired the Hittite and Egyptian kings against them, and ran at dusk, leaving their tents, horses and donkeys exactly as they were.

Replying to @samaria.siege

The king had put the officer he leaned on in charge of the gate. The crowd trampled him in the gateway, and he died. He saw it with his own eyes. He didn’t eat any.

Replying to @hazael

Elisha tells him: go and tell him he’ll recover. But the LORD has shown me he’ll die.

Hazael goes back and tells Ben-hadad he’ll recover. The next day he soaks a thick cloth in water and spreads it over the king’s face. Ben-hadad dies, and Hazael is king of Aram.

King Joram of Israel, still recovering from his wounds, and King Ahaziah of Judah, who’s visiting him, ride out in their chariots. They meet Jehu on the land that used to be Naboth’s. Is all well, Jehu? How can anything be well, with all your mother Jezebel’s idol-worship and witchcraft? Joram turns to run: it’s a trap, Ahaziah! Jehu draws his bow, and Joram falls dead in his chariot.

Jehu comes into Jezreel. Jezebel hears. She paints her eyes, does her hair, and looks down from a window.

Jehu wipes Baal worship out of Israel. They pull down Baal’s temple in Samaria and turn it into a latrine. It’s still one.

Jehu got rid of Baal. These, though, he kept.

Jeroboam son of Nebat@jeroboamKindly note: going all the way up to Jerusalem is too much for you. Here are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt. One at Bethel, one at Dan.

In those days the LORD starts cutting Israel down to size. Hazael of Aram takes the land east of the Jordan, all of Gilead.

Jehoiada makes a covenant, a solemn agreement, between the LORD, the king and the people: they’ll be the LORD’s people. Then they bring the king down from the temple to the palace, and Joash takes his seat on the royal throne.

Replying to @king.joash

The money pays the carpenters, builders, masons and stonecutters, and buys timber and dressed stone. Nobody asks the men handing out the wages for accounts. They’re honest.

Elisha dies and is buried. Some time later, some Israelites are burying a man when they spot a band of Moabite raiders. They throw the body into Elisha’s tomb. The moment it touches Elisha’s bones, the man comes back to life and stands up.

The LORD is kind to Israel. He has compassion on them because of his promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and to this day he hasn’t been willing to destroy them or throw them out of his sight.

Replying to @king.jehoash

Amaziah doesn’t listen. At Beth-shemesh Judah is routed. Jehoash captures Amaziah, breaks down four hundred cubits of Jerusalem’s wall, and takes the gold and silver from the temple and palace back to Samaria.

Another Jeroboam, son of Jehoash, is king of Israel now, and he wins back its old borders, from Lebo-hamath to the Dead Sea, just as the LORD said through his prophet Jonah son of Amittai, from Gath-hepher. The LORD saw how bitterly Israel was suffering, with no one to help them.

King Azariah of Judah gets leprosy and lives in a house on his own until he dies. His son Jotham runs the palace and governs the country.

Israel’s throne, meanwhile. Zechariah son of Jeroboam: six months, then Shallum kills him in front of everyone and takes over. Shallum: one month, then Menahem kills him.

Pul, king of Assyria, invades. Menahem pays him a thousand talents of silver, raised by charging every wealthy man in Israel fifty shekels. The Assyrian king goes home.

In Pekah’s days Tiglath-pileser, king of Assyria, takes Galilee, Gilead and the whole land of Naphtali, and carries the people off to Assyria.

Replying to @uriah.priest

Ahaz offers his sacrifices on it, and moves the LORD’s bronze altar out of the way to the north side. From now on all the offerings go on the new one.

Replying to @samaria.fallen

This happened because Israel sinned against the LORD their God, who brought them out of Egypt. He warned Israel and Judah through every prophet and seer: turn from your evil ways, keep my commands. They wouldn’t listen.

It started here. Jeroboam led Israel away from the LORD, and they never turned from it. So the LORD removed Israel from his sight, as all his prophets had said.

Jeroboam son of Nebat@jeroboamKindly note: going all the way up to Jerusalem is too much for you. Here are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt. One at Bethel, one at Dan.

Replying to @new.in.samaria

They worship the LORD, and serve their own gods as well, the way they did back home.

Hezekiah son of Ahaz is king of Judah, twenty-five years old. He removes the hilltop shrines, smashes the sacred pillars and cuts down the Asherah poles. He even breaks up the bronze snake Moses made, because people had been burning incense to it. They called it Nehushtan.

Moses@mosesThen the LORD sent venomous snakes, and a lot of people died. They came to me: we sinned, pray for us. I prayed. The LORD said: make a snake and put it on a pole. Anyone bitten who looks at it will live.

Replying to @booksofkings

Hezekiah trusts the LORD, the God of Israel. There was no king of Judah like him, before or after. He rebels against the king of Assyria and won’t serve him.

Hezekiah’s fourteenth year: Sennacherib, king of Assyria, captures every fortified town in Judah. Hezekiah sends word to him at Lachish: I’ve done wrong, pull back, I’ll pay whatever you ask. He pays with all the silver in the temple and palace, and strips the gold off the temple doors.

Replying to @isaiah

What he was thinking: at least there’ll be peace and safety while I’m alive.

Hezekiah also built the pool and the tunnel that bring water into the city.

Manasseh is twelve when he becomes king, and he reigns fifty-five years. He rebuilds every shrine his father tore down, puts up altars to Baal and an Asherah pole like Ahab’s, and altars to the stars in both courtyards of the LORD’s house. He even sets up a carved Asherah pole in the temple itself.

Josiah is eight years old when he becomes king. He does what’s right in the LORD’s eyes, and never drifts from it, left or right.

Replying to @shaphan

When the king hears what’s in the book, he tears his clothes.

Josiah’s clear-out: 1. Everything made for Baal, Asherah and the stars, taken out of the temple and burned in the Kidron fields. 2. The Asherah pole in the temple, burned and ground to dust. 3. The horses the kings had dedicated to the sun, gone. The chariots of the sun, burned. 4. The shrines Solomon built east of Jerusalem for Ashtoreth, Chemosh and Milcom, desecrated.

The books of Kings@booksofkingsOn the hill east of Jerusalem he builds shrines for Chemosh, the god of Moab, and Molech, the god of Ammon. The same for every foreign wife, so they can burn incense to their gods.

Josiah tells everyone to keep the Passover, as it’s written in the book. No Passover like it had been kept since the days of the judges.

No king before or after turned to the LORD like Josiah did, with all his heart, all his soul and all his strength. Even so, the LORD’s anger at everything Manasseh did didn’t turn away.

After Josiah, it goes fast. His son Jehoahaz is king for three months before Pharaoh Neco takes him away to Egypt, where he dies. Neco makes his brother Eliakim king and renames him Jehoiakim. Then Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, arrives.

Nebuchadnezzar carries off all the treasures of the temple and the palace, and cuts up the gold things Solomon made for the house of the LORD. Just as the LORD had said.

Isaiah@isaiahEnvoys came from Babylon with letters and a gift, having heard the king was ill. He showed them everything: silver, gold, spices, oil, the armoury. Nothing in the palace he didn’t show them. I told him: the day is coming when all of it will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left.

Babylon puts Jehoiachin’s uncle Mattaniah on the throne and renames him Zedekiah. Zedekiah does evil too. And he rebels against the king of Babylon.

The wall is broken through. The soldiers slip out at night by the gate between the two walls near the king’s garden. The Babylonians catch Zedekiah on the plains of Jericho; his army has scattered. They bring him to the king of Babylon at Riblah.

The LORD said this, the day Solomon finished it.

The books of Kings@booksofkingsThe LORD appears to Solomon a second time, like at Gibeon. I’ve heard your prayer, he tells him. My name is on this house for ever. Walk with me like your father did and your throne will last. But turn away to other gods, and this temple will become a heap of rubble, and everyone who passes will ask why the LORD did this.

They broke up the bronze pillars, the stands and the Sea, and carried the bronze off to Babylon. There was too much of it to weigh.

Huram-abi@huram.abiSolomon sent to Tyre for me. My mother’s a widow from Naphtali, my father was a bronze worker from Tyre. Cast two bronze pillars for the temple porch, eighteen cubits tall, about eight metres, lily-shaped tops, two hundred bronze pomegranates round each. Named them too. Jachin, he establishes. Boaz, in him is strength.

Before this one starts. Ahab is king of Israel, ruling from Samaria. He’s married Jezebel, a princess from Sidon up the coast, and taken up her god, Baal. No king of Israel before him has done this much to anger the LORD.

So Elijah disappears. The LORD sends him east, over the Jordan, to hide by a brook called Cherith. Water from the brook, and ravens bring him his food.

Replying to @elijah.tishbite

When the brook runs dry, the LORD sends him on to Zarephath, a town up the coast that belongs to Sidon. He’s told a widow there to feed him.

Upstairs, Elijah lays the boy on his own bed and cries out to the LORD. Has he brought this on the widow who took him in? Three times he stretches himself out over the boy. LORD my God, let his life come back into him.

Replying to @booksofkings

The LORD heard him. The boy’s life came back into him.

Replying to @drives.the.king

The power of the LORD had come on him.

Elijah is afraid, and runs for his life. All the way south to Beersheba, in Judah. He leaves his servant there and goes on alone into the desert.