Year in the Bible Week 24

Elijah Being Fed by a Raven by Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo c. 1510

What a week!

We started this week in Ecclesiastes, one of the five Old Testament wisdom books: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs.

It may interest you to know that the Catholic Church adds a couple books here; The Book of Wisdom (or The Wisdom of Solomon), and Sirach, which has a very interesting story that I encourage you to explore. Since I came up Catholic, I’m somewhat fascinated by the apocrypha, because the books have been well-preserved, and they are from a very specific time of silence before the birth of Christ. As Protestants, we don’t recognize these books as divinely inspired, but they are historically and morally useful, and I look forward to reading them at some point.

After the wisdom of Solomon we see the utter folly of his son, Rehoboam. Israel splits in two, Jeroboam becomes the northern king, and now we have a divided kingdom that would stay divided until the captivity.

The list of rulers of Israel in the north and Judah in the south gets almost overwhelming right away, as we track sinful rulers one at a time, and see how God deals with them. If you start to mix up Abijah and Asa, or Jehosephat, Zimri, Omri Basha, Nadab and others, perhaps this video will be helpful. .

Now we will move into 2 Kings to watch the tragedy of Israel’s decline, and we can sense its coming captivity. The story is still moving fast, but for most of the summer the timeline will slow down to a crawl. This is because we not only see the difficult history laid out in painful detail, but we also start to read the books of the prophets that God raised up during this time. The prophets give us the unfiltered will of God spoken over our lives, and their books are among my favorites in the bible. Enjoy your week!