Wednesday Bible Study: Genocide for God

The story in Chapter 13 is not told in Kings. Kings does have the general idea that Judah and the northern kingdom, a.k.a. Israel, were at war, and that the King of Israel Jeroboam was apostate -- that he created golden calves as idols and allowed non-Levites to perform the sacrifices. (The golden calf motif, of course, first occurs in Exodus.) Remember that Chronicles was compiled (I say compiled rather than written because it is likely that little of it is actually original) after the destruction of the northern kingdom and the restoration of Judah following the Babylonian exile. The Chronicler was presumably a Levite priest, and his purpose is to promote religious orthodoxy, and most importantly the privileges of the hereditary priesthood; and to champion the kingdom of Judah as maintaining the covenant with Yahweh.In this story, despite Israel achieving tactical surprise, God gives Judah the victory and the ensuing slaughter of 500,000 Israelites. Of course, if this battle really happened, the entire army of Israel would not have been 1/10th as large. But this is not history as we understand the word today, an honest effort to recreate the story of past events. It is a fable, a morality tale, intended as a polemic. This is what you get for worshiping golden calves and letting people who are not Levites perform the sacrifice. Note that the final measure of Abijah ' s greatness is that he had 14 wives.13 In the eighteenth year of the reign of Jeroboam, Abijah became ki...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs