The Living Bible (113 page)

1 Kings
14

Jeroboam’s son Abijah now became very sick.
²
 Jeroboam told his wife, “Disguise yourself so that no one will recognize you as the queen, and go to Ahijah the prophet at Shiloh—the man who told me that I would become king.
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 Take him a gift of ten loaves of bread, some fig bars, and a jar of honey, and ask him whether the boy will recover.”

    
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 So his wife went to Ahijah’s home at Shiloh. He was an old man now and could no longer see.
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 But the Lord told him that the queen, pretending to be someone else, would come to ask about her son, for he was very sick. And the Lord told him what to tell her.

    
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 So when Ahijah heard her at the door, he called out, “Come in, wife of Jeroboam! Why are you pretending to be someone else?” Then he told her, “I have sad news for you.
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 Give your husband this message from the Lord God of Israel: ‘I promoted you from the ranks of the common people and made you king of Israel.
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 I ripped the kingdom away from the family of David and gave it to you, but you have not obeyed my commandments as my servant David did. His heart’s desire was always to obey me and to do whatever I wanted him to.
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 But you have done more evil than all the other kings before you; you have made other gods and have made me furious with your gold calves. And since you have refused to acknowledge me,
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 I will bring disaster upon your home and will destroy all of your sons—this boy who is sick and all those who are well.
*
I will sweep away your family as a stable hand shovels out manure.
¹¹
 I vow that those of your family who die in the city shall be eaten by dogs, and those who die in the field shall be eaten by birds.’”

    
¹²
 Then Ahijah said to Jeroboam’s wife, “Go on home, and when you step into the city, the child will die.
¹³
 All of Israel will mourn for him and bury him, but he is the only member of your family who will come to a quiet end. For this child is the only good thing that the Lord God of Israel sees in the entire family of Jeroboam.
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 And the Lord will raise up a king over Israel who will destroy the family of Jeroboam.
¹⁵
 Then the Lord will shake Israel like a reed whipped about in a stream; he will uproot the people of Israel from this good land of their fathers and scatter them beyond the Euphrates River, for they have angered the Lord by worshiping idol-gods.
¹⁶
 He will abandon Israel because Jeroboam sinned and made all of Israel sin along with him.”

    
¹⁷
 So Jeroboam’s wife returned to Tirzah; and the child died just as she walked through the door of her home.
¹⁸
 And there was mourning for him throughout the land, just as the Lord had predicted through Ahijah.

    
¹⁹
 The rest of Jeroboam’s activities—his wars and the other events of his reign—are recorded in
The Annals of the Kings of Israel.
²⁰
 Jeroboam reigned twenty-two years, and when he died, his son Nadab took the throne.

    
²¹
 Meanwhile, Rehoboam the son of Solomon was king in Judah. He was forty-one years old when he began to reign, and he was on the throne seventeen years in Jerusalem, the city which, among all the cities of Israel, the Lord had chosen to live in. (Rehoboam’s mother was Naamah, an Ammonite woman.)
²²
 During his reign the people of Judah, like those in Israel, did wrong and angered the Lord with their sin, for it was even worse than that of their ancestors.
²³
 They built shrines and obelisks and idols on every high hill and under every green tree.
²⁴
 There was homosexuality throughout the land, and the people of Judah became as depraved as the heathen nations which the Lord drove out to make room for his people.

    
²⁵
 In the fifth year of Rehoboam’s reign, King Shishak of Egypt attacked and conquered Jerusalem.
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 He ransacked the Temple and the palace and stole everything, including all the gold shields Solomon had made.
²⁷
 Afterwards Rehoboam made bronze shields as substitutes, and the palace guards used these instead.
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 Whenever the king went to the Temple, the guards paraded before him and then took the shields back to the guard chamber.

    
²⁹
 The other events in Rehoboam’s reign are written in
The Annals of the Kings of Judah.
³⁰
 There was constant war between Rehoboam and Jeroboam.
³¹
 When Rehoboam died—his mother was Naamah the Ammonitess—he was buried among his ancestors in Jerusalem, and his son Abijam took the throne.

1 Kings
15

Abijam began his three-year reign as king of Judah in Jerusalem during the eighteenth year of Jeroboam’s reign in Israel. (Abijam’s mother was Maacah, the daughter of Abishalom.)
³
 He was as great a sinner as his father was, and his heart was not right with God, as King David’s was.
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 But despite Abijam’s sin, the Lord remembered David’s love
*
and did not end the line of David’s royal descendants.
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 For David had obeyed God during his entire life except for the affair concerning Uriah the Hittite.
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 During Abijam’s reign there was constant war between Israel and Judah.
*
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 The rest of Abijam’s history is recorded in
The Annals of the Kings of Judah.
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 When he died he was buried in Jerusalem, and his son Asa reigned in his place.

    
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 Asa became king of Judah, in Jerusalem, in the twentieth year of the reign of Jeroboam over Israel,
¹⁰
 and reigned forty-one years. (His grandmother was Maacah, the daughter of Abishalom.)
¹¹
 He pleased the Lord like his ancestor King David.
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 He executed the male prostitutes and removed all the idols his father had made.
¹³
 He deposed his grandmother Maacah as queen mother because she had made an idol—which he cut down and burned at Kidron Brook.
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 However, the shrines on the hills were not removed, for Asa did not realize that these were wrong.
*
¹⁵
 He made permanent exhibits in the Temple of the bronze shields his grandfather had dedicated,
*
along with the silver and gold vessels he himself had donated.

    
¹⁶
 There was lifelong war between King Asa of Judah and King Baasha of Israel.
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 King Baasha built the fortress city of Ramah in an attempt to cut off all trade with Jerusalem.
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 Then Asa took all the silver and gold left in the Temple treasury and all the treasures of the palace, and gave them to his officials to take to Damascus, to King Ben-hadad of Syria, with this message:

    
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 “Let us be allies just as our fathers were. I am sending you a present of gold and silver. Now break your alliance with King Baasha of Israel so that he will leave me alone.”

    
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 Ben-hadad agreed and sent his armies against some of the cities of Israel; and he destroyed Ijon, Dan, Abel-beth-maacah, all of Chinneroth, and all the cities in the land of Naphtali.
²¹
 When Baasha received word of the attack, he discontinued building the city of Ramah and returned to Tirzah.
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 Then King Asa made a proclamation to all Judah, asking every able-bodied man to help demolish Ramah and haul away its stones and timbers. And King Asa used these materials to build the city of Geba in Benjamin and the city of Mizpah.

    
²³
 The rest of Asa’s biography—his conquests and deeds and the names of the cities he built—is found in
The Annals of the Kings of Judah.
In his old age his feet became diseased,
²⁴
 and when he died, he was buried in the royal cemetery in Jerusalem. Then his son Jehoshaphat became the new king of Judah.

    
²⁵
 Meanwhile over in Israel, Nadab, the son of Jeroboam, had become king. He reigned two years, beginning in the second year of the reign of King Asa of Judah.
²⁶
 But he was not a good king; like his father, he worshiped many idols and led all of Israel into sin.

    
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 Then Baasha (the son of Ahijah, from the tribe of Issachar) plotted against him and assassinated him while he was with the Israeli army laying siege to the Philistine city of Gibbethon.
²⁸
 So Baasha replaced Nadab as the king of Israel in Tirzah during the third year of the reign of King Asa of Judah.
²⁹
 He immediately killed all of the descendants of King Jeroboam, so that not one of the royal family was left, just as the Lord had said would happen when he spoke through Ahijah, the prophet from Shiloh.
³⁰
 This was done because Jeroboam had angered the Lord God of Israel by sinning and leading the rest of Israel into sin.

    
³¹
 Further details of Baasha’s reign are recorded in
The Annals of the Kings of Israel.

    
^32-33
 There was continuous warfare between King Asa of Judah and King Baasha of Israel. Baasha reigned for twenty-four years,
³⁴
 but all that time he continually disobeyed the Lord. He followed the evil paths of Jeroboam, for he led the people of Israel into the sin of worshiping idols.