2015? Let's do it again!

This may be a post that I... well, not so much 'regret' as consider to have been written in folly...

Last year's task got away from me (to watch through the Nicolas Cage filmography in chronological order and record my thoughts) and that last time I tried the year of Bible it was nearly scuttled as well. I completed the reading, but the posting part came up well short, unfortunately.

However, let it not be said that I am anything other than a glutton for punishment, so for 2015, we're going to do this again. It's been a couple of years, and I'm actually looking forward to seeing how/if my opinions reactions to various passages will/have changed.

One thing regarding formatting and approach, however: last time around I was trying to specifically write a reflection on the passage at hand. While I feel that this is a useful guiding principle, it raises some fairly obvious problems when it comes to those sections that are less substantive than others (I'm looking at you, Deuteronomy and various scattered genealogies!). So,  I'm going to take it a bit easier on myself this time around. I'll still be aiming to post every day (or every couple of days at the very least) but I am going to leave myself a little leeway when it comes to the actual content, freeing myself up for those tangential directions that I never was much good at resisting anyway.

So, bring on January 1 and the start of a new project!

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.