Bible: Old Testament: English Standard Version

2 Samuel continues the narrative of David’s rise and rule. In the beginning, after Saul’s fall, the kingship is contested. David’s own tribe, Judah, anoints him as king, but some of the other Israelites coalesce under the leadership of one of Saul’s sons, Ish-bosheth. David and Ish-bosheth struggle for power, and David emerges triumphant. David then rules over all of Israel, reigning from his new capital Jerusalem, a Jebusite (Canaanite) stronghold he had captured. David conducts campaigns, expanding Israelite territory and solidifying their position in the geopolitics of the ancient “Near East.”

Despite the fact that David is God’s chosen king, he nonetheless makes several grievous mistakes. The greatest of these is his affair with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, one of David’s greatest soldiers. David sees Bathsheba bathing from his roof and is entranced by her beauty. He seduces her and arranges to have Uriah killed in battle. The affair results in a pregnancy, but because of David’s disobedience, God pronounces judgment on the situation and sends the prophet Nathan to announce that the baby will not survive. David repents of his sin and reconciles himself to God’s judgment. Later, David’s son Absalom raises a coup d’état against him. David flees Jerusalem, and only later is his army able to defeat Absalom and regain control of the country. In the process, however, Absalom is killed. David is grief-stricken by the death of his son, but he continues to rule over Israel for the rest of his days. He desires to build a permanent place of worship for God in Jerusalem, replacing the temporary tent-structure of the tabernacle, but God tells him that that duty will fall to the son who succeeds him.

The book of 1 Kings continues the narrative from 1 & 2 Samuel. It opens with the death of King David and a brief power struggle between David’s sons, from which Solomon, the son of Bathsheba, emerges victorious. God appears to Solomon in a dream and offers him a favor. Solomon asks for the wisdom to lead his people morally, and God, pleased, promises him wealth and long life as well. The first section of 1 Kings is a narrative of Solomon’s consolidation of power and his construction of the temple, 480 years after the exodus from Egypt. Solomon places the Ark of the Covenant inside the temple. At the consecration, God promises to remain in the temple as long the people of Israel are faithful to him. Solomon reigns over Israel at the height of its power in the region, building a reputation for his own wisdom and his kingdom’s prestige. He manages to maintain stable relations with the powers around him, partly through the use of political marriages. By the end of his life, Solomon has some 300 wives and 700 concubines, many of whom represent alliances with neighboring states and tribes (1 Kings 11:3).

After Solomon’s reign, 1 Kings narrates the succession of monarchs who follow. Rather than remaining united after David and Solomon, the kingdom splits into two parts: the northern part, representing the majority of the tribes, and a southern part, representing a minority of tribes but including the most populous one of all, the tribe of Judah. The northern kingdom is henceforward called Israel, and the southern kingdom Judah. The split happens under Solomon’s son Rehoboam, who in contrast to Solomon’s storied wisdom, is an unwise king, brutal in his method of government, and in response the northern tribes break off under a leader named Jeroboam. Israel does not maintain its worship of God as faithfully as Judah does, partly because Judah has the temple in Jerusalem, but the northern kingdom has no officially sanctioned place at which to worship God. Some of the kings attempt to remedy this by creating cult sites within their own territory, a move that is harshly rebuked by the prophets. No prophet features more prominently in 1 Kings than Elijah, who minsters during the reign of King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, the latter of whom is intent on turning the people of Israel to the worship of the Canaanite god Baal. Elijah resists this change in Israel’s religion, even winning a challenge against the priests of Baal in which his prayer draws down fire from heaven, thus proving to the people that the God of Israel is the one true God.

Elijah finishes his service as prophet by crossing over the Jordan River with his protégé, Elisha. There Elisha witnesses Elijah being taken up into heaven by a chariot of fire. Elisha then takes up his own prophetic ministry in Israel, not only as a messenger of God’s words but also as a bearer of God’s miraculous power. Several miracles are attributed to Elisha, including raising a boy from the dead and making a single jar of oil continue to pour far beyond its own capacity, thus producing enough oil to save a family in danger of debt-enslavement. Elisha’s period of ministry comes to an end, but it is not the end of the prophets, many more of whom are active in both Israel and Judah. Both kingdoms, however, suffer a string of unfaithful monarchs who are inclined to seek their own power and to permit the worship of pagan gods. As such, they lose the protective power that would follow from being faithful to God’s covenant, and Israel falls to the invading power of the Assyrian empire in the eighth century BCE. Judah persists for a while longer, surviving the Assyrian invasion because of the rise of several faithful kings, including Hezekiah and (somewhat later) Josiah. In the end, the unfaithfulness of most of their monarchs leads to Judah’s downfall. Instead of heeding the call of the prophets to turn their hearts back to the worship of God, they resist and trust in their own strength. In 605 BCE, the Babylonian empire launches several waves of invasions which strip Judah of its sovereignty, capture political prisoners to take back as exiles, and ultimately, in 586 BCE, destroy the city of Jerusalem itself.

1 Chronicles covers much of the same period of history as 1 & 2 Samuel, and it stands in relation to the earlier historical books in the same way that Deuteronomy stands in relation to the previous books of the Pentateuch, offering a summary and synopsis from a slightly different perspective. 1 Chronicles is a look back at the history of the early monarchy from the viewpoint of a writer in the post-exilic period, and it begins with the most significant genealogical records in the entire Old Testament, encompassing the first nine chapters. The overwhelming focus of 1 Chronicles, however, is on the kingship of David, offering only a single chapter (1 Chronicles 10) on the preceding reign of the first king, Saul. 1 Chronicles offers a more unblemished portrait of David than that in 1 & 2 Samuel, making no mention of his affair with Bathsheba or the intra-family coup that nearly unseated him. Rather, it focuses on his organization of the political and religious life of Israel, and the only negative light in which David is cast comes from his act of taking a military census rather than putting his trust in God. This story is told in 1 Chronicles 21, and it explains the location of the later temple in Jerusalem as the place at which David built an altar and prayed for relief from God’s judgment. This fits with the larger priestly theme of 1 Chronicles, which focuses on the elements of Israel’s religious life that anticipate the organized worship of the temple.

In the same manner that 1 Chronicles offers a summary of the period of 1 & 2 Samuel, 2 Chronicles offers one for the period covered by 1 & 2 Kings. Since the author is writing from a post-exilic context in which the returned exiles are descended from the southern kingdom of Judah, 2 Chronicles offers a far greater focus on the monarchy of Judah than do 1 & 2 Kings, which devote significant attention to the northern kingdom of Israel. Despite their differences, 2 Chronicles has much in common with the parallel accounts of 1 & 2 Kings. In both sets of texts, kings are judged on the extent of their devotion to God and their willingness to follow his ways, and the final tragedy of Israel and Judah’s desolation at the hands of invaders is marked up to a root cause of sinfulness in both accounts.

Again, as with 1 Chronicles, one of the central interests in the book of 2 Chronicles is the function of the temple’s worship in Jerusalem. The first nine chapters are devoted to Solomon’s reign, with expansive sections on his construction and dedication of the temple. The centralized worship of God at the temple is presented as the foundational reality of Israel’s existence. In dealing with the remaining kings of Judah, the author of 2 Chronicles is keen to point out the ones who undertook positive religious reforms, including Asa (Chapter 15), Jehoshaphat (Chapter 19), Joash (Chapter 24), Hezekiah (Chapters 29-31), and Josiah (Chapters 34-35). 1 & 2 Chronicles together, with their emphasis on the Davidic line of kingship, bring God’s covenant with David into sharp focus and thus serve to heighten anticipation of a future messianic figure who will fulfill the covenant-promise of an everlasting kingdom to David’s line. Although the main narrative of 2 Chronicles closes with the exile and the fall of Jerusalem, a brief passage is appended to the end, which jumps ahead to the return from exile and thus leads directly into the events of the book of Ezra.