Week 18 1 Kings 16-22
I’ve been wondering why the Big Four kings of Israel got so much coverage (while the other fifteen only got about seven-verses each).
At first I thought that King Ahab was featured because his story was told in tandem with the life of Elijah – a bit-player behind the main man. That might be true but looking at the Ahab-specific content I see he was pretty important too (of the 209-verses 167-verses are about Ahab). But there’s more to it. The Lord actually communicated with Ahab using the prophets:
• Elijah forecast the three-year drought
• There were the miraculous and shocking events at Carmel
• a prophet gave Ahab battle intel for his fight with the Arameans
• Elijah lowered-the-boom on Ahab because of the murder of Naboth (to his credit Ahab did repent for that)
• Micaiah forecast Ahab’s doom in battle.
So at least five times Ahab bumped into some pretty big signposts. And so now I’m thinking that Ahab was one of the featured Big Four because he was given more first-hand & personal & specific & convincing info from the Lord than any other king of Israel.
In spite of all that he didn’t make the best use of those benefits. In the end the verdict on Ahab was: no one else so completely sold himself to do what was evil in the Lord’s sight as did Ahab.
Note 1: quote from 1 Kings 21:25 (NLT).
Note 2: Ahab connected with prophets in: 17:1 18:16-46 20:13-28 & 35-43 21:17-29 & 22:6-28.