5 Minute Bible

short | crisp | provocative

Past posts

 

Posts by category

Browsing Posts in 2 Kings

Humour in the Bible: Book 12: 2 Kings 1: Mission interrupted.

May 18, 2011 No comments

Elijah the Tishbite was a "lord of hair" (photo by JD Hancock)

Since Google suggests the first chapter of 2 Kings is humorous I’ll measure it against the criteria. It meets most (but not all) which i think makes it clear this passage is not merely funny but was intended to be funny. Though again it is a “black” humour.

As a bonus I’ll offer a reading of the passage, it seems a shame to be talking about humour but not be “allowed” to get any laughs :( NB: this reading is basically the NRSV, which being a very literal translation captures the fairy tale quality of the telling rather well.

So, here are links to the audio:

Humour in the Bible: Book 12: 2 Kings 1: Mission interrupted

Special bonus: reading of 2 Kings 1 based on the NRSV

 

2 Kings, Humour none

2 Kings 10: a really nasty text as a test for the 5 step process

November 3, 2010 8 comments

I once made a silly offer: “Give me a random Old Testament passage, and I’ll show you how the 5 step process works!” So they offered me 2 Kings 10, the lovely story of the seventy heads offered to Jehu in baskets. (Read it yourself if you don’t believe me.)

My goal was to show how the 5 step process could take us from that passage to a sensible message I could preach in church on a Sunday. This podcast is a summary of what we did. (I say “we” because I made my listeners do much of the work, asking:

  1. What DID the story mean? (I.e. what was it supposed to communicate to its early hearers, Jews in or just after the exile.)
  2. What are the differences that make a difference? (I.e. what has changed that either makes us likely to misunderstand, or that make our situation significantly different from theirs. One that isn’t mentioned in the podcast, but should have been is that we will be shocked by this tale of mass murder, they probably cheered it on, politics was a rougher game there than for most of us today ;)
  3. What does it say about God? (If the Bible is about God then each passage will tell us something about God. And Scritpture IS about God and NOT about us.)
  4. How do we understand this in the light of Jesus? Or, since this is an Old Testament passage: How does Jesus complete or fill out what is here?
  5. How does that work today?

Listen and see if you think I succeeded, got a message for today, and one which is Christian, and one which is fair to the lovely passage of Scripture they gave me!

BTW my mate Jonathan has been writing about Christian Preaching of the Old Testament, I wonder what he thinks of this example ;)

.

2 Kings, 5 Steps , , ,

E100-40: 2 Kings 25:1 – 25:30: The holy city falls

June 11, 2010 No comments

Detail from Sennacherib's Lachish frieze showing prisoners being impaled

Today’s is a grim reading. But such brutality was not unusual in the Ancient Near East. The Assyrians, for example, when they captured the Judean city of Lachish after a siege in 701BC impaled the surviving leaders outside the city, and left a mass grave of 1,500 people (mainly women and children).

Despite what one might even see as gentle treatment of the city by the Babylonians in 586, the fall of Jesusalem marked Hebrew thought deeply because it was God’s city, their last toehold of political independence in the promised land and Yahweh’s holy temple that the Babylonians destroyed. In doing so they also destroyed many Hebrew’s faith in Yahweh, and thus shaped our Bibles. Many of the prophetic books either warn of the coming desctruction, or seek to cope with the exile of the leaders and their resulting loss of faith in Yahweh.

Today’s reading therefore tells the core event that helped shape much of the Old Testament.


Right-click here to save the podcast for this audio

2 Kings, E100 none

E100 Week 8:The Fall of Israel

June 6, 2010 No comments

“The fall of Israel” is a theological (not historical) title. This five covers almost the whole history of the Israelite kingdoms from David to the destruction of Jerusalem. The Deuteronomistic History (Joshua-Kings) from which they all come (cf. remarks on Judges) tell the story with the end in view, one important goal of these books is to explain the fall of Jerusalem and the exile.

So this is a good selection to understand what is going on:

  1. Even the great king David is human and fails (spectacularly)
  2. Solomon is seen at his best – asking for and displaying wisdom not wealth or power;
  3. building the temple and expressing fine theology
    not as the king who began to lose an empire, and introduced idols to the temple
  4. Elijah and the fight on Mt Carmel is an archetypical story of the conflict between belief in gods and in God
  5. Then the final reading tells the ghastly and traumatic story of the fall of Jerusalem and the end of Israel as a political entity – but worse of the temple and crown promised by God!

Right-click here to save the podcast for this audio

1 Kings, 2 Kings, 2 Samuel, E100 none
Powered by WordPress Web Design by SRS Solutions © 2012 5 Minute Bible Design by SRS Solutions