Wednesday Bible Study: Fantasyland

Chapter 9 starts with yet another repetition of the motif that has appeared maybe a hundred times since Exodus: God tells Solomon that if the people stay faithful to him, he ' ll reward them with great power and riches, but if they stray, he ' ll destroy them. Yeah, we got that.Then we get more absurd claims about Solomon ' s wealth and power. Hiram had given Solmon 120 talents of gold, which would be four metric tons. Sure. (That happens to be what the Queen of Sheba will give him in the next chapter.) This is despite Hiram, for some reason, not liking the cities Solomon had given him. Solomon then enslaves the  Amorites, the Hittites, the Per ′izzites, the Hivites, and the Jeb′usites, who are Israel ' s slaves " to this day, " although, as we know, by the time this is actually written the temple has been destroyed and the Israelite elite exiled to Babylon. But whatever. The preposterous alliance between Solomon and Pharaoh continues, with Pharaoh capturing a city and giving it to his daughter who is Solomon ' s wife. No. That is historically absurd. Solomon then builds a navy and uses it to steal (presumably) 15 metric tons of gold from a city called Ophir. We ' re talking Fort Knox here. Anyway, here it is. 9 When Solomon had finished building the house of theLord and the king ’s house and all that Solomon desired to build,2 theLord appeared to Solomon a second time, as he had appeared to him at Gibeon.3 And theLord said to him, “I have hea...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs