Ezra 1-10 - Caught up

The readings - Days 141-143 - Ezra 1-10

So I now have an official answer to give people who try to act like never having read the Bible cover-to-cover is somehow anathema to being Christian. (Yes, I have been told that before, by both crazy Christians and crazy Atheists alike)

It was never meant to be read this way.

I'm not saying that I'm regretting doing it, or that I'm planning on stopping, or even that it's not (at times, at least) incredibly rewarding and enlightening to do it this way. What I'm saying is there's no way that this book was intended to be read through like a novel.

The only alternative to that conclusion is that whoever compiled it had absolutely zero concept of how stories work, and how people would like to read things in order to actually comprehend them effectively.

As if the complete discord of reading through the summarized history of Israel (the single and split kingdoms)  - twice - in Samuel, Kings and Chronicles wasn't enough to convince you that this is not a linear collection of episodes/chapters, here we are in Ezra, which opens with a reference to a prophesy that will not actually be made (according to the way the books of the Bible are laid out) for quite some time.

Cyrus lets the Israelites go home and rebuild stuff, and he does so, according to the text, to fulfill the prophetic words of Jeremiah. For those keeping score, we still have to go through Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon and Isaiah before we get to Jeremiah. Anyway, rant over.

Anyway, so the exiles are on their way home to rebuild the Temple and Jerusalem, but because nothing can ever be straightforward, the neighbours had to go and cause trouble, resulting in a three-king delay before the construction can actually finish. Artaxerxes gets a letter from Judah's enemies, who point to Jerusalem's "rebellious past" and successfully convince him to put a stop to the rebuilding process, and it's not until Darius takes over that Cyrus's original "send them back" decree was dug out of the archives and followed.

And then, as soon as they're back on home soil, what happens? The good ol' intermarriage things starts up again... This time, though, there's a twist. We get a sense of Ezra maybe being a fair shake more attentive to God's wants for His people than previous rulers - and by a remarkable coincidence, he's not actually a king, but instead is acting as Israel's leader from the office of priest. Funny how the whole "king" thing never took off all that well, eh?

Oh well.

This post is another in an alarmingly long list of posts that are shorter than usual for the somewhat counterintuitive reason that it tries to cover too much stuff, but I'm happy to say that we're now completely caught up. Tomorrow should bring another post that's more focused and, therefore, likely a lot longer and more in-depth.

1 Chronicles 18-29 - I really can't believe how boring Chronicles is...

The readings - Days 127-130 - 1 Chronicles 18-29

This is unbelievable. I was really within a day of actually getting caught up, but Chronicles is (so far, anyway) so abjectly uninspiring that it's very, very difficult to muster the motivation to post something, since I'm essentially (as I said before) trying to find something interesting to write about a boring recap of stuff that's already happened.

*sigh*

HOWEVER, there is something that shows up in the latter half of 1 Chronicles that hinges on the fact that this is a re-run.

1 Kings 6-9 - architecture and priorities

The readings - days 104 and 105 - 1 Kings 6-9

If I had a TARDIS, one of the places I would definitely like to visit would be the original Temple in Israel. Chapter six and most of chapter seven are dedicated to describing it in detail, and the level of luxury and beauty described here is incredible. It's a fitting successor to the Tabernacle, and correspondingly more ornate, since this one gets to have actual walls, and doesn't need to be portable.

It's no wonder that the construction of the first temple is, after the generic "he was wise" thing, the thing that Solomon is most known for. Seven years in the making, with tens of thousands of workers involved at every step of the process, and an intentionality and reverence (workers hewing the stone had to do all their carving off-site so that even while it was being built, the inside of the Temple was undisturbed by excessive noise) that is truly inspiring.

Then we find out that Solomon spend nearly twice as long working on his own palace, which was almost twice as big as the Temple. Huh.

Still, God doesn't seem to sweat it, and Solomon seems to be keeping on the up-and-up on other fronts - making his proper dedicative sacrifices and instructing the people to remember/keep God's commandments, etc, so maybe it's not so big a deal.

1 Sam 1-8 - The king and I... srael...

The readings - Days 86 and 87 - 1 Samuel 1-8

If Judges is any indication, the fact that 1 Samuel starts with a man who is from the hill country in Ephraim is hardly the most optimistic sign... Hopefully this one turns out better.

A couple of interesting things about the opening chapters of 1Sam struck me over the course of this run-through.

The first is that I find it somewhat bizarre that people blindly throw out a phrase like "traditional Biblical interpretation of marriage" without, apparently, much of a fleshed-out idea of what that might mean. Samuel himself is the son of a second wife. Anyway... moving on.