2 Kings

2 Kings

Tonight we look at a period of time in which great materials are produced. The whole Book of Isaiah is produced during this time. I am going to have us look at the first half because such a huge chunk of Isaiah looks forward to the time period after the exile that it is appropriate to look at it in connection with that time period. But all of the book is written and, of course, it is one of the grandest books of all Scripture and a huge prophetical book. We also look at Micah and Nahum, and we are going to take a look at a small portion of 2 Kings and, as well, a small portion of Chronicles, mainly as a reflex compared to the material that we have in Kings. In so doing, we trust that God will be with us, and let’s ask Him to do so by prayer.

Father, we would love to have, as the result of our time spent, the fact that Your word was better and clearer in our minds, and we know that You know how to help that process. So we pray that you will be with us for the next two and one-half hours, and that, when we leave, we will indeed have grown in our ability to appreciate and to use Your word for good purposes. That we ask for Christ’s sake. Amen.

I. The Assyrian Empire

This map is titled the Assyrian Empire. If you look at the dotted line area it goes up to around here, it says Assyrian Empire as of 824 BC. So there was an extensive Assyrian empire, but as you can see it gets no further, no closer, to Jerusalem and Judah or Israel or anything than Damascus, which is southwestern Syria. The empire of the Assyrians is not at first a big problem, but then, look at the line as it is drawn for 640 BC, which is where our time period concludes tonight, this little chunk of time we are looking at. The time period for 640 of the empire has it going across all habitable regions of the great Arabian Desert fully, including all of Syria and Israel and Judah and so on down, and covering almost all of Egypt and including even in Cyprus way up into parts of modern day Turkey and huge portions of what today would be Armenia, etc. It is massive. That is a development that we contend with during this time period. A number of references that we make tonight, a number of things you read in the commentaries, things that you read about in the actual books that you look at are dealing with the significance of the rise of the Assyrian Empire.

II. Tiglath-Pileser III

It really comes to the fore with a king called Tiglath-Pileser III. That is just a name that you will read about. It is in the commentaries so you can check it out. His actual name in Assyrian was Tukulti-apal-esharra which means "the Tigress River has provided an heir". We know him through Greek and Latin as Tiglath-Pileser. In the Bible he is called by just one syllable out of that name, “Pul”. Sort of like somebody with a very long name, like “Ike” for Eisenhower, just shorten it way down. It is a nice abbreviation because can you imagine his mother and all the time she would have to spend calling him home, “Tukulti-apal-esharra III, come for supper;” pretty soon it is cold. The empire is, to a considerable degree, launched into the domain of the Israelites, into the area that the Assyrians called “across the river,” meaning across the Euphrates River, and what we would call Palestine or Syria-Palestine, by this guy Tiglath-Pileser III.

A. Why Expand?

When he came to power in 748 he said, “We’re going to expand.” Why did people do that? What was going on in the minds of kings that would make them have this lust for land? Why did they want to grab more and more? The answer is, basically, it was an economic consideration. When a king comes to power, if he wants to build new temples, they are going to be very expensive. If he wants to build new palaces, they are going to cost a lot of money. If he wants to have wealth for his people and do public works projects and dig new canals, all of it is expensive.

B. Tax, Toll and Tribute

Where can the money come from; where do you get the money? The answer is: you get money in the ancient world from tribute, tax, and tolls, the three T’s: tribute, tax and toll. We even have, in a number of Biblical texts, those three mentioned. They do not all have T’s in the Hebrew, but tribute, tax, and toll.

Tribute is what you can get from another country that you force it to pay to you every year. If you conquer a country you can say, “You’ve got a choice, I’ll kill you all or you can pay us and send it to my capital every year so much.” That was very popular. It was a great system. It was a kind of what you might call “protection money”. In American culture we have gangsters who go to a store and they say, “You have a choice, we’ll throw a brick through the window or you can give us thirty dollars a week,” so the store owner pays the thirty dollars a week for protection from the gang. It is like that.

Then, also, there was tax, so you could have a regular taxation system. You know, Jesus was born in Bethlehem because the Romans were taxing everybody. Joseph owned some property in Bethlehem because he is of that lineage, he is a descendent of David and that is David’s family town and that is why they are there. They normally would be at home at Nazareth, meet with the tax collectors and have their property surveyed and so on. In that connection Jesus was born. That is what the Romans did just like everybody else before them had done it.

Then there is also toll. Troops are garrisoned at key points on the roads. If you want to travel off the roads, good luck. It is very hard to travel in Palestine off the roads. So they would simply at narrow points on the roads, between hillsides that make it difficult to go around, station what we would call tollbooths and they would collect money that way.

Tribute, tax and toll, that is what they are after and you cannot get that unless you get more territory. Basically, what happens is a king says, “I want to do all those things, I want to have the money for these grand things. How am I going to get it? I’ll just take it from another country.” The other countries do not like this. Naturally, they want to fight and they will resist in every way that they can. The story of the Assyrian Empire is a story of conquering and then drawing back, because you cannot keep enough occupation troops everywhere to do everything you might like, and then countries eventually say, “Okay let’s give it a try. Let’s stop paying tribute, tax, and toll and see if we can get away with it.” If the original conquering empire is strong enough, back will come the troops and they will conquer you again. That is really what happened. You get cycles of this sort of thing waxing and waning and there is much of that going on. It is not behind the scenes; it just is not always super-visible to you unless you realize that that is an awful lot of why the Israelites are threatened by the Assyrians and why some of the events we will talk about tonight even happened. Tiglath-Pileser launches it and by 745 BC, three years into his reign, he already had begun the process of expanding his empire and his first military raids into Palestine, into Israel and Judah and other places come as early as 745 BC.

III. Overview

In general, let’s look at 2 Kings, where this kind of thing is described, because we have not had a chance yet just to talk about 2 Kings as a book.

A. Elijah and Elisha

The first eight chapters are especially devoted to Elijah and Elisha. Elisha comes into the picture after Elijah, who is all alone, is very discouraged, and Elisha is his first disciple. Gradually the mantle is moved over to Elisha, who is his heir. I would like to comment on one little thing. This is just a kind of a detail, in a way, but it is so often misunderstood and misapplied. In 2 Kings 2:9 Elisha asks an interesting thing of Elijah. Elijah says, "What can I do for you before I am taken from you? I know that my life is short and you’re going to be my successor.” Elisha says to him, “Let me inherit a double portion of your spirit.” That is quite a statement to make.

How do people get portions of God’s spirit? Could I have a single portion and somebody here have a double portion? Could somebody else have a double portion compared to that person, so it is a four-to-one ratio of that person to me spiritually? Is that the way the Holy Spirit works? Some people have thought so, based on this passage. It is really, however, a misunderstanding of an idiomatic way of speaking about something. In ancient Israel the heir, that is the heir, the older child in a family, always got the double portion of whatever the parent was leaving to the children. If there were three children in a family, the oldest would always get double what any of the others would get. So what you have to do to divide the shares up is add one for that extra share so something can be doubled. Think about it. If you have two children, for the oldest to get double the youngest, you have to add one. So, two children is N + 1 = 3 that is the shares. The oldest one gets two and the youngest one gets one. What does the oldest one get? Two-thirds and the younger one-third. If you have three children you have to add one to get into fourths. The oldest gets two-fourths that is one-half, and each of the younger gets one-fourth. If you have nine children, you add one. The oldest gets two-tenths that is one-fifth, each of the others gets one-tenth and that is how it works. You always add one and then divide up the shares giving the oldest child the double one. The double portion is an idiomatic way of saying “inheritance”. I got my double portion or people might say, “Your dad is pretty old now, I suppose you will be coming into your double portion pretty soon, hey Ralphie?” and Ralphie might say, “Yeah, I’m going to miss my dad like everything but he has put it aside for me.” That would be the way it would be spoken of.

What Elisha is really asking is, “May I inherit your ministry. May I, in fact, carry on your work; not just that I will succeed you as “a” prophet, but may I really step into your shoes?” Elijah says 2 Kings 2:10, “You’ve asked a difficult thing. Here is how you will know, if you see me when I’m taken from you, it will be yours.” This will be a sign from God, is what he is saying, that you are to carry on my ministry directly and unbroken, not just have your own, but carry on in my place, exactly as my full heir. “If not,” he says, “if you don’t see me, you won’t be my heir. It does not mean you can’t be a prophet, you just won’t be my heir.” Then what happens in the story, he does get to see him. He sees a fabulous thing; he sees a chariot of fire and horses of fire appear, and the two of them get separated. Elijah is taken up into heaven in a whirlwind. When he sees this he cries out, “My father, my father;” that is what the people called the prophet, they call him father. That is what the disciples called any teacher, so he called him "my father, my father". He says, “The chariots and the horsemen of Israel.” He is just so excited, he gets to see him go and he also gets to see a vision of Israel’s chariotry. This is a great thing; this is exciting to him.

But, of course, it also means that he now will carry on the ministry of Elijah. How does this work? In particular, his ministry is endorsed by miracles. Actually, this is one of the closest parallels to Jesus Himself. If you look at the ministry of the Lord Jesus, all the Gospel writers will point out to you that He just did so many miracles that many people said, “You just had to believe.” That happens with Nicodemus in John 3. He comes to Jesus, what does he say? He says, “Teacher we know You are sent from God because nobody could do all these miracles You do and not be sent from God.” That is what he says. So miracles are sometimes used by God to give credentials to somebody. I think this is the way it still works today. You might not need a miracle to convince your congregation of the first church you take, "Fuzworth Center Baptist Church" in "Fuzworth Center, Iowa", a full twenty-eight people there to here you preach your candidating sermon. You may not need a miracle to convince them, but some people in some places may. It is very interesting how that works. In some parts of missionary activity and so on, miracles seem to happen in greater numbers. They are credentialing things. They are ways that God shows, in affect, what kind of power He has and, therefore, uses through an individual.

But miracles are also a reminder of what heaven is like. Do not every forget that. The essence of a miracle is that it is a little bit of a glimpse into the wondrous things of eternal life. If someone is miraculously healed from an illness, everybody in heaven will be healed; there is no illness in heaven. The one sure thing you can say, if you are a Christian, is that all your illness will one day be healed, because they sure will be, but it may not come, and it usually does not come for people, until death and transformation into heavenly existence, but it will come for everyone. Once in a while God causes it to come in this time, in this place, and that is very exciting. Elisha can use some of those miracles, just like Elijah could, because it is a tough situation they have got. These prophets are preaching to heterodox people who are worshipping idols in northern Israel and that is not easy. They have got tons of opposition and they are giving stern warning and that is not going to be well-received, so the miracles help to convince people. “I don’t like what he says, but how can you deny that he must be someone from God;” that is basically what people said about them.

B. Jehu Massacres Baal / Ashara Worshippers

Then a dramatic thing happens in chapter 9 and 10, a Yahwist northern king massacres everyone of the Baal and Ashara worshippers. It is a vast massacre; it is wild. This is not necessarily the way to solve problems, but he did it. It certainly shook up support for Baal and Ashara worship and increased a focus on Yahweh. Sadly it was a kind of brutally produced revival. It did not last all that long, but it was certainly evidence of how strongly someone like Jehu felt he had to deal with the dominant Baal / Ashara worship that the government certainly advocated.

C. Focus on Kings of Judah

Then the focus is more on the kings of Judah in chapters 11 to 14.

D. Destruction of the North

Then finally, in 15-17 is recorded the destruction of the North. It is captured by the Assyrians in 722 BC. Its population is partly exiled and partly replaced. You can read in 2 Kings 17 about that replacement, how people from all over other places in the Assyrian Empire were, by a king named Ashurbanipal, relocated into what then became known as Samaria. That is, of course, where the issue of the Samaritans and the Jews in New Testament times comes from. These Samaritans living in the north were neither ethnically pure Jews nor religiously pure Jews. They had many strange notions and doctrines, and they were what we would regard today as a cult. The Judeans, the Jews, regarded the Samaritans as members of a cult and did not even want to associate with them, and a lot of what happens in the New Testament relative to the Samaritans is against that background.

E. Hezekiah, Manasseh, Josiah

Then the chapters that we look partly at tonight and partly not, 18 -25 is a chunk of material in which Judah continues on for a whole century and a half. Three kings stand out in this century and a half, Hezekiah, Josiah, and Manasseh. What is fascinating is that Manasseh is right in the middle. I listed the two good guys first then Manasseh second. If you think about it, you have a good king, Hezekiah, and he institutes a number of reforms. Some of that is what Isaiah helps with and helps to inspire and encourage. Then a terrible king after him, in the person of Manasseh, who has, by the way, the longest reign of any Israelite or Judean king. He has a fifty-five year reign; so the worst guy reigned the longest. Then you have Josiah, the last good guy, in chapters 22 and 23.

F. Fall of Jerusalem to Babylonians

Then comes, after a brief interlude, the story of the fall of Jerusalem in chapter 25, and there it is the Babylonians. It was the Assyrians who captured the north but, by the time 2 Kings is over, the Babylonians have taken over the Assyrian Empire and, indeed, also extend it. Because that is the way; if you are the Babylonians, you get what you want. If you have a big enough appetite and are a big enough risk-taker you can say, “Let’s not just conquer some small nations, let’s swallow up this huge empire that we’ve been paying tribute, tax, and toll to. That is basically what the Babylonians did. It took years; it was a terrible struggle for almost a whole decade of bitter fighting, but they succeeded in capturing that empire.

That is a little overview of 2 Kings and what is going on. It is really some chapters here in this block, this block of the Judean remnant state period where the north, Israel, is gone and you have just got that one southern tribe, Simeon and Judah together had kind of merged but it is all just called Judah after a while, that is the remainder of the still independent, still functioning and worshipping people of God.