Medicine Hat Joe

Week 19 2 Chronicles

When Solomon became king one of the first things he did was to call together his leaders of state. The chronicler says: then Solomon led the entire assembly to the hill at Gibeon where God’s Tabernacle was located. This was the Tabernacle that Moses…had constructed in the wilderness. David had already moved the Ark of God…to the special tent he had prepared for it in Jerusalem. But the bronze altar…was still at Gibeon in front of the Tabernacle of the Lord.
Reading today I realized I’d missed out on this completely. I had no idea that the Tabernacle and the altar were currently in Gibeon – as far as that goes I didn’t know where Gibeon was. But the old Exodus Tabernacle along with Bezalel’s bronze altar were in the town of Gibeon (I checked a map – it’s about ten kilometres northwest of Jerusalem).
So even though the ark of the covenant was in Jerusalem Solomon went to Gibeon to offer sacrifices at the Tabernacle. And that’s where the Lord met Solomon.
I flipped back to the Kings’ story of Solomon – years later – when he was dedicating his brand new temple: then the priests and Levites took the Ark of the Lord, along with the Tabernacle and all its sacred utensils, and carried them up to the Temple.
So the Tabernacle ended up in the Temple even though by then the Temple had replaced it.

Note: quotes from 2 Chronicles 1:3-5 & 1 Kings 8:4 (NLT)

Week 19 1 Chronicles

Way more than half of 1 Chronicles is the story of David – chapters eleven to twenty-nine. About two-thirds of the book.
I remember back in March when I was reading the two books of Samuel. The writer spent a lot of time on David too. But a big difference between Samuel’s David and the chronicler’s David is that the Samuels tell the interesting stories: David & Goliath, David the Fugitive, Abigail, some of the David-the-king stories. The Samuels also tell some unsavoury stories: Bathsheba & Uriah, Tamar, Absalom’s revolt, the civil war, Sheba, the Gibeonites, the national census. The chronicler skips them.
A couple of days ago I decided to track the David story in Chronicles. I was wondering: if the chronicler overlooked all the good stories then what did he use in their place? I finished 1 Chronicles today and here’s what I’ve got. I calculate that there’s 521 verses in the chronicler’s David story. Out of those 521 I figure that 301 have to do with the topic of David & Israel’s religion – ark temple Levites religious music and like that. So 58% of the David story is about the king who loved & was devoted to & promoted faith in the Lord. [The next biggest topic is David and the armed forces & international conflict & military combat. I counted 148 verses there – about 28% of the story.]
So it looks like the chronicler wants to convey one main thing to his readers – that David is the Faithful-Believer-King.

Note: the numbers are approximate – don’t bet the farm on them.

Week 19 Psalm 119

I read the first 8 verses of 119 yesterday…and the other 168 verses today.
I wouldn’t normally use a day-to-day reading-ratio of 1:22 because I like to keep readings roughly equal. But today I noticed in verse thirteen the writer used the phrase: recite out loud – which sounded like Advice for a Reader. I wanted to see if there were other usable bible-reading tips so I kept reading from 9 to 176.
What I ended up with was a list of Down-to-Earth Bible Reading Practices…
Recite out loud
Study the words
Try to understand the meaning
Be honest
Concentrate
Keep your mind on the reading
Think about what you’re reading
Don’t forget what you read.
I checked another version. It used the word meditate in place of study and concentrate. It also liked the phrase diligently consider more than mental focus or think about the content.
So then out of those eight I boiled down a short-list of four good reminders for myself:
Study what I’m reading. Try to understand what I read. Concentrate-meditate-focus. Don’t forget about what I just read.

Note: the tips are from Psalm 119:13, 15, 27, 29, 78, 95, 97 & 99, 141 & 153 (NLT; the other version was NASB). Added: I thought about adding a fifth reminder – be honest (NLT says: keep me from lying to myself (29)). In the end I didn’t. Figured it’d be difficult since dishonesty is one of my strengths. Honest bible-reading is a Big Snag.

Week 18 Psalm 119

I started 119 today.
There was a note at the bottom of the page: this psalm is a Hebrew acrostic poem; there are 22 stanzas, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The eight verses within each stanza begin with the Hebrew letter of its section. The editors of another bible I use pasted in Hebrew alphabet headers between each 8-verse stanza – aleph beth gimel and like that.
None of that helps a non-Hebrew-reading guy. But what I did notice right away is that the writer starts talking about something that’s super-easy for a reader to forget. The thing is this: lots of times bible-reading is just a simple information-gathering exercise – for example I read that the Lord created the world and now I know. But 119 talks about an additional feature – an extra that goes beyond reading-the-words. The basic idea when I read is reading but the next-step idea is to try to amalgamate or internalize or metamorphize or transmute that information content.
For example the writer is talking about blessed – or happy – people and says they:
Follow the law of the Lord
Obey his decrees
Search for him with all their hearts
Don’t compromise with evil
Walk only in (the Lord’s) paths.
These are pretty big not-just-reading steps.
I think a lot of the time I’m reading just to read-through. So this thing about doing what I’m reading is a good heads-up (but one that’s very hard).

Note: quote from Psalm 119:1-3 (NLT). The footnote is from NLT.

Week 18 1 Chronicles

One of the reasons I read-through is because I figure the whole bible is worth reading. Which means I’m starting with a kind of Uniform Equivalency Rule that says it’s-all-valuable.
That rule is balanced off with another one: the Uniform Non-Equivalency Rule that says some parts are more valuable.
I use both rules. Everything is valuable and there’s also comparative value among all of them.
Anyway I was thinking about that while I was reading the Lord’s promise to David in seventeen because that chapter breaks the Uniform Equivalency Rule for me. It seems really important. Maybe more important than any other chapter in the book.
The Lord promised David a number of things – I counted about a dozen. I can’t guarantee that number but however many there are they break down into three categories – promises about David’s own near-future, promises about Solomon in the middle-future, and promises about David’s dynasty in the distant-future. The forecast for David’s distant-future has no expiry date: your dynasty and your kingdom will continue for all time before me, and your throne will be secure forever.
To be true a prophecy has to come true. So a bible-reader is going to be looking for a line of Davidic DNA travelling down through the years to see whether an ancestor of David continued a kingdom of some kind that has lasted right down to 2021.

Note: quote from 2 Samuel 7:16 (NLT). The two versions of the promise are in 1 Chronicles 17:3-14 and 2 Samuel 7:8-17.

Week 18 1 Chronicles

Last year on April 28 I was reading chapter 16 and noticed that the chronicler more or less quoted Psalm 105:1-15. This year I noticed that right after quoting Psalm 105 the chronicler more or less quotes a chunk of Psalm 96. So chapter 16 looks like this – Introduction + Psalm 105 + Psalm 96 + Conclusion. But it’s mostly two psalms celebrating the Lord.
I also noticed that on the big day when the ark was taken to Jerusalem musical instruments were used to accompany the psalms: Asaph…sounded the cymbals. His assistants…played the harps and lyres. The priests…played the trumpets. I think I noticed the instruments today because I noticed them yesterday too – singers musicians lyres harps bronze cymbals trumpets.
Near the end of the chapter I noticed one other thing . The ark is home in Jerusalem now and David gives the Asaph Levites a job: to minister regularly before the ark of the Lord’s covenant, doing whatever needed to be done each day. Minister & ministry & ministering are funny words. They usually give me the feeling of doing something religious – like praying in public for example. But the chronicler seems to include in ministry just doing the things that needed doing from day to day. Doing good things that need doing is ministry too.

Note: quotes from 1 Chronicles 16:5-6 (plus see where music is talked about in 15:16-22) & 16:37 (NLT)

Week 18 1 Chronicles

Starting from chapter eleven the chronicler spends more than five hundred verses talking about David (out of all the thousands of people named no one is more important than king David).
The chapter begins this way: then all Israel went to David at Hebron and told him “We are all members of your family. For a long time, even when Saul was our king, you were the one who really led Israel…”
One thing I notice is that the writer uses the phrase All Israel. The name Israel means different things. The Lord named Jacob Israel. It also meant all twelve tribes – people of Israel, tribes of Israel, Israelites, and like that. And it was the name used by Jeroboam’s ten breakaway tribes – Israel came to mean the rebellious northern kingdom.
The chronicler was writing to the exiles in Babylon – Judah-South – but I get the sense that for him the Golden Age was David’s undivided Israel. I don’t know if he’s angling for  an inclusive Israel. I do remember that last year I saw a similar thing when he mentioned the other tribes in chapters 5-6-7-8. Not just Judah-Benjamin. Sure…the north is an alien and an enemy now. But remember when we were All Israel under the great king.
In spite of the bad blood I wonder if the chronicler is holding the door open for wayward northerners.

Note: quote from 1 Chronicles 11:1-2 (NLT). Disclosure: Dan & Zebulun weren’t included in chapters 5-6-7-8. Don’t ask me why.

Week 18 1 Chronicles

Yesterday the chronicler was making editorial choices – exclusions and inclusions – and he’s at it again today.
Saul is killed on the battlefield in chapter ten. The chronicler says nothing else about Saul’s life story. Just the battle and his death. Which means king Saul gets a fourteen-verse mention in Chronicles. I page forward and see that David gets the next nineteen chapters. So the chronicler is saying that he has bigger priorities than Saul. He’s laid his Priority-People Cards on the table, interested in some and not others. He’s very interested in David.

Side Note: the last two verses about Saul are pretty heavy: Saul died because he was unfaithful to the Lord. He failed to obey the Lord’s command, and he even consulted a medium instead of asking the Lord for guidance. So the Lord killed him (1 Chronicles 10:13-14 NLT). The last phrase really wakes me up: the Lord killed him. I think about it. Does that make Bible-God a Murderer? I doubt it. Just a couple of days ago I read: all (the Lord) does is just and good (Psalm 111:7 NLT). So it reminds me that however I try to dope out the action the Lord took at the end of Saul’s life it can’t really exclude other things I’ve already read. The sentence says the Lord killed Saul. Now I have to figure out just what that means and how it fits.

Week 18 1 Chronicles

The first nine chapters of Chronicles are one massive list of names – a kind of bible-reader’s Namibian Desert. Fortunately I’ve been here before and I’m not totally surprised.
I notice that the chronicler expands on some things and not others. I noticed that last year when the families of Judah and Levi were spotlighted but the other tribes weren’t.
Now I notice that all along the way the writer makes other selection & de-selection choices that I’m not sure what to do with. For example as soon as I get to Noah’s family – Noah is the tenth name in the book – I see the chronicler starting to skip some things. One of Noah’s sons was Japheth and Japheth had seven sons: Gomer Magog Madai Javan Tubal Meshech and Tiras. The chronicler names Gomer’s three sons and Javan’s four sons. But he doesn’t say anything more about Magog Madai Tubal Meshech and Tiras. So I wonder what’s behind the omissions.
Then in chapter seven the writer tells a story about the Ephraim family: Ephraim’s sons Ezer and Elead were killed trying to steal livestock from the local farmers near Gath…Ephraim mourned for them a long time. Afterward Ephraim slept with his wife, and she…gave birth to a son. Ephraim named him Beriah because of the tragedy his family had suffered. It’s an unhappy family story and I wonder what’s behind the inclusion.

Note: quote from 1 Chronicles 1:5 & 7:20-23 (NLT). My margin note says Beriah means Misfortune.

Week 17 1 Chronicles

Twelve days ago I sat looking at 1 Chronicles 1. I’d just finished reading about 180 pages of the Samuels & Kings histories and – whatever was going on in my psychic-self – thinking about starting another history that day loomed as a big Bible-Reader’s Impediment. So I started reading Isaiah instead.
Fortunately I was in a different frame of mind today as I started Chronicles…which was my good fortune since there’s about 240 mostly unrecognizable foreign names in chapter one –  and I know there’s more to come.
I start reading the names but I’m also trying to dope out what the author’s doing with them. I see that he mentions Noah’s three sons – Shem Ham & Japheth. Then he looks at each one – but in reverse order.
Japheth and his seven sons.
Then Ham and his four sons.
Finally Shem…because the author is tracking Shem’s family: Shem Arpachshad Shelah Eber Peleg Reu Serug Nahor Terah Abram – Abraham!
So the Chronicler is making some choices. Other families are important (otherwise I don’t guess they’d be mentioned). But Abraham is the key and I can figure that it’s a safe bet that I’ll be seeing familiar names like Isaac & Jacob and Jacob’s twelve boys soon enough.

Note: the Shem-Abraham list is in 1 Chronicles 1:24-27. Added Note: I ran my end-of-April numbers. I’ve read 44.4 % of the text in 33.3% of the year. Reading Isaiah in twelve days really helped my speed but it blurred my focus a bit. So I paid a price.