Pick a headline
Here’s a perfectly accurate headline from 2 Kings, according to the anonymous historian or historians who wrote it:
God wipes Israel and Judah off the map.
But the shocking subhead could fill in as a headline, too.
Jews skipped Passover for 400 years.
What?
“The people hadn’t bothered with Passover for centuries—since the time of the heroic judges of Israel. Even through all those centuries, with all the kings of Israel and Judah—still no Passover” (2 Kings 23:22).
Huh? King David didn’t eat the Passover seder meal every spring? Neither did Solomon? Not even good king Hezekiah?
Apparently not.
By comparison today, three of four Jewish souls on earth eat the Passover seder every spring. It’s a ritual meal to remind them that God freed their ancestors from slavery in Egypt more than 3,000 years ago. That was back when Moses led them to the Promised Land, which became Israel, and is now Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
So why didn’t the people of Israel and Judah celebrate Passover? The possible answer sounds like another shocking headline:
Jews lost the Bible.
Their Bible at the time was likely just the laws of Moses. Prophets were just getting warmed up, while poets and pundits waited on inspiration.
A priest found the forgotten book of the law in the Jerusalem Temple when Josiah was king, sometime between 641-609 BC, the years he reigned.
The priest may have found just the book of Deuteronomy; speeches Moses gave late in his life to sum up the laws of God and to remind the people to obey them or risk the extreme punishment.
When the priest read the law book to Josiah, he freaked, ripping his clothes in anger and grief and probably in fear of God. Then the king personally read the laws to a crowd of Judah’s leaders.
Too little, too late to save the Jewish nation
He and the people recommitted themselves to God and promised to obey the laws.
Not too late for them. They lived in peace during Josiah’s reign. But it was too late to save Judah. For one generation after another, the Jewish people of Israel and Judah broke the laws they apparently had lost and forgotten.
But God remembered.
“If you don’t follow the law and obey the words I’m writing here….The LORD is going to scatter the people of your nation all over this earth” (Deuteronomy 28:58, 64).
ONE BOOK SPLIT IN TWO
First and Second Kings were written as one book. But it was too long to fit on a single scroll. So, when Jewish scholars translated it into the international language of the day, Greek, in the decades before Jesus was born, they split it into two books. They did the same with the history books of Samuel and Chronicles.
WRITER
The writer is unknown. Scholars most often speculate that the writer or writers lived during the exile—which is where 2 Kings ends. Babylonian invaders exiled the Jews in 586 BC. They erased Judah from the map by deporting leaders and citizens who survived the war. The writer may have written this history by pulling information from royal records and from oral history passed down from generation to generation, from one family leader to the next.
TIMELINE
The combined books of 1-2 Kings cover about 400 years, from David’s reign in roughly 1000 BC until Babylonians leveled Jerusalem and other cities of Judah in 586 BC. First Kings ends with the death of one of the most infamous kings of all: Ahab.
Second Kings reports two of the biggest events in ancient Jewish history:
- Assyrians conquer and erase the northern Jewish nation of Israel in 722 BC
- Babylonians do the same to the southern nation of Judah in 586 BC.
TOP STORIES
Prophet Elijah carried away in a windstorm, chapter 2.
Prophet Elisha brings a boy back to life, 4.
Elisha cures Syrian commander of leprosy, 5
Jehu kills Israel’s king and mother, Jezebel, 9
Israel suffers one king-killing coup after another, 15
King Ahaz and his grandson King Manasseh sacrifice their sons to idol, 21
Assyrians deport Jews of Israel, erasing the northern nation, 17
Assyrians fail to capture Jerusalem, 18-19
Babylon levels Jerusalem, deports the captured Jews, 25
LOCATION
Most stories take place in what is now Israel and the Palestinian Territory of the West Bank.
Some Israelites lived east of the Jordan River in what are now parts of Syria and Jordan.
The united kingdom that David and Solomon once ruled had split into a pair of Israelite kingdoms: Israel in the north and Judah in the south.
Judah’s capital remained Jerusalem throughout, from the time of David until the fall of the Jewish nation 400 years later. Israel’s capital shifted from Shechem (1 Kings 12:35) to Tirza (14:17) to Samaria (16:24).
PURPOSE
First and Second Kings preserves the story of the once-united Jewish nation. It was a fallen nation if—as many scholars speculate—the anonymous writers compiled their resources while exiled to what are now Iraq and Iran.
First Kings picks up from 2 Samuel with the death of King David and the beginning of Israel’s most productive and gloriously garish generation. They built the nation with gusto and wealth and braggadocio.
But the writers did more than promote and puff the Jewish kingdoms. Especially in 2 Kings, they huffed and puffed about the dark side of life under kings who worshiped idols. There wasn’t even one good and godly king in the northern Jewish nation of Israel. There were, however, a few in the southern nation of Judah, most notably Hezekiah and Josiah.
But Judah’s King Manasseh was the last straw. He sacrificed his own son to an idol, burning the boy as an offering.
A later king, Josiah, tried to make amends by destroying the pagan shrines.
“Josiah’s efforts were too little, too late for saving Judah. King Manasseh’s sins threw the switch on God’s anger. The LORD had already decided: ‘I’m getting rid of Judah’” (2 Kings 23:26).
