King James Version · The divided kingdom
1 Kings 14
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At that time the son of fell sick. And said to his wife, Arise, I thee, and disguise thyself, that thou be not known to be the wife of ; and get thee to : behold, there is the , which told me that I should be king over this people. And take with thee ten loaves, and cracknels, and a cruse of honey, and go to him: he shall tell thee what shall become of the child. And ’s wife did so, and arose, and went to , and came to the house of . But could not see; for his eyes were set by reason of his age. And said unto , Behold, the wife of cometh to ask a thing of thee for her son; for he is sick: thus and thus shalt thou say unto her: for it shall be, when she cometh in, that she shall feign herself to be another woman. And it was so, when heard the sound of her feet, as she came in at the door, that he said, Come in, thou wife of ; why feignest thou thyself to be another? for I am sent to thee with heavy tidings. Go, tell , Thus saith of Israel, Forasmuch as I exalted thee from among the people, and made thee prince over my people Israel, And rent away from the house of , and gave it thee: and yet thou hast not been as my servant , who kept my , and who followed me with all , to do that only which was right in mine eyes; But hast done evil above all that were before thee: for thou hast gone and made thee other gods, and , to provoke me to , and hast cast me behind thy back: Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of , and will him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel, and will take away of the house of , as a man taketh away dung, till it be all gone. Him that dieth of in the city shall the dogs eat; and him that dieth in the field shall the fowls of the air eat: for hath spoken it. Arise thou therefore, get thee to thine own house: and when thy feet enter into the city, the child shall . And all Israel shall mourn for him, and bury him: for he only of shall come to the , because in him there is found some good thing toward of Israel in the house of . Moreover shall raise him up a king over Israel, who shall the house of that day: but what? even now. For shall smite Israel, as a reed is shaken in the water, and he shall root up Israel out of this good land, which he gave to their fathers, and shall scatter them beyond the river, because they have made their groves, provoking to . And he shall give Israel up because of the of , who did , and who made Israel to . And ’s wife arose, and departed, and came to : and when she came to the threshold of the door, the child ; And they ; and all Israel mourned for him, according to the word of , which he spake by the hand of his servant the . And the rest of the acts of , how he warred, and how he reigned, behold, they are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel. And the days which reigned were two and twenty years: and he slept with his fathers, and his son reigned in his stead. And the son of reigned in Judah. was forty and one years old when he began to reign, and he reigned seventeen years in , the city which did choose out of all the tribes of Israel, to put his name there. And his mother’s name was an Ammonitess. And Judah did evil in the sight of , and they provoked him to with their which they had committed, above all that their fathers had done. For they also built them , and , and groves, on every high hill, and . And there were also sodomites in the land: and they did according to all the of the nations which cast out before the . And it came to pass in the fifth year of king , that king of came up against : And he took away the of the , and the of the king’s house; he even took away all: and he took away all the shields of gold which had made. And king made in their stead brasen shields, and committed them unto the hands of the chief of the guard, which kept the door of the king’s house. And it was so, when the king went into the , that the guard them, and brought them back into the guard chamber. Now the rest of the acts of , and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? And there was war between and all their days. And slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers in . And his mother’s name was an Ammonitess. And his son reigned in his stead.
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · The divided kingdom, 931 BC to 745 BC ›
Israel in the north and Judah in the south, often at odds, with Aram of Damascus as the immediate threat and Assyria growing in the distance.
- Aram of Damascus
- The immediate enemy for most of two centuries, close enough to raid every campaigning season and strong enough to take territory. Most of the wars in Kings that read like national emergencies are border wars with Damascus.
- Assyria
- Growing steadily in the distance. Shalmaneser III fights a coalition at Qarqar in 853 BC and his own inscription lists King Ahab of Israel among his opponents with two thousand chariots, the earliest Assyrian mention of an Israelite king. A later monument shows Jehu bowing and paying tribute. Assyria is not yet the destroyer, but it is already taking notes.
- Egypt
- Divided and unreliable, capable of the occasional raid, such as Shishak stripping the temple in Rehoboam's fifth year, but no longer an empire that governs the Levant.
- Further afield
- The Greeks adopt the alphabet, hold the first Olympiad by tradition in 776 BC, and begin to compose the Homeric poems. Rome is founded by tradition in 753 BC, a village of huts at this point. This is the century in which the classical world begins.