2 Chron 1-36 - yup: one whole book...

The readings - days 130-140 - 2 Chronicles 1-36

So this post, once again, will be far too short, and more than a little meta.

I thought for sure that I was caught up, or at least very far along to road to being caught up, but Chronicles had other plans, so here we are - first post in ten days and a full book behind me.

Chronicles, part deux, was better than the first, but only slightly. It had more ups than the last one did in terms of kings actually behaving themselves, and there were a few points that, while I was reading them, did actually leap out at me as being interesting. However, since I was reading through the entire book in a matter of days, and desperately trying to catch up, they were sacrificed to the god of necessary expediency, and were lost.

Speaking of idolatry, these Israelites sure were good at it. Even kings that were mostly good at not worshipping small wooden statues didn't often go all the way and disassemble other temples, home shrines, and "the high places," like they were supposed to.

Whether it's intentional or not, the Bible sure is setting up a repetitive, cyclical rhythm of Israel screwing up and then waking up, then repeating over and over again.

And then Babylon comes, destroys the Temple, along with Jerusalem, and takes everybody into captivity.

And then Persia destroys Babylon and Cyrus says to the Israelites, "yeah - you guys should probably just go ahead and head home to rebuild your temple and your city. Sorry about Nebuchadnezzar..."

Reading the closing bits of 2 Chronicles is a little like spending an hour looking through a microscope, and then to have the room bulldozed around you. The story is so wrapped up in the goings on of these two comparatively minuscule kingdoms that when a few real local superpowers come barreling through it's a pretty harsh reminder that even at the best of times, the kingdom of Israel was in a pretty precarious spot. Shame they didn't seem to really grasp that either...

And that brings us to Ezra, which will have us caught up on posts and readings by tomorrow.

2 Kings 2-25 - A desperate attempt to catch up

The readings - days 113-119 - 2 Kings 6-25

So it's come to this...

When I started this blog I wasn't anywhere near convinced that it was going to be a project I could keep up with, and I'm surprised it took me more than 30 per cent of the way through the Bible to really hit a giant lag. In my defense, it was the result of my being on the opposite side of the planet without reliable or consistent Internet service for more than a week, but still... here we are.

So I'm now epically behind, and as far as I see it, the only way I'm ever catching up is if I break one of my initial rules, which was to always limit posts to just a handful of chapters, ideally no more than two days' worth of readings per post, regardless of how far behind I was.

Up till now that's been serving me fairly well, since I've managed to keep up with readings and not actually get all that far behind on postings, but now that I'm well over an entire book behind, I'm going to have to do a grave disservice to 2 Kings (and to 1 Chronicles, but that's for tomorrow...) and just give a brief, not-at-all-sufficient, summary of the book with some specific thoughts and then move on.

So here we go: a short post covering almost all of 2 Kings...