Celebrating 1 million downloads and my birthday, the first Oldest Stories book releases on November 24th, 2023. Pre-order is available only for the digital editions, you will need to wait until the release date for a physical copy, but definitely at least think about it. I am very excited.

Amazon link: https://a.co/d/hKmiIrY

Today we are in a mad gallop through decades and kings, each of them having pretty short, one or two episode lives, and also mostly having the same or extremely similar names to get everything super confused. This part of Israelite history moves pretty quickly, but there are a lot of interesting things that can be pulled from relatively short mentions, plus we get the first and only artistic depiction of what an Israelite actually looked like in the Monarchy period, and it turns out they just looked like people, because they were people. Also, we look at the story of Jehu among all these kings, and he is absolutely fantastic, would make a great movie.

Today we talk about Phoenicia, overviewing where it has been since we left our bronze age Canaan series, discussing the nature of the economic prosperity it brought to the region, and talking a bit about the causes and nature of their famous trade colonies. We also actually look at Jehoshaphat, after mostly ignoring him for a few episodes. Also, even though it builds over a few centuries, the development of what gets called the iron age economies is perhaps the quickest societal advancement in human history up to this point, and people's ideas about the world are struggling to keep up, so we talk about that a bit, too.

One of the most important extra-biblical confirmations of biblical history is the Mesha Stele, written by king Mesha of Moab. But it is not only interesting for what it tells us about Israel, but also for being the only window into the otherwise enigmatic Moabites, their god, and their self-perception, at least from the highest levels. And so today we discuss the context of Kings Ahaziah and Jehoshaphat, but then switch over to read through the Mesha Stele and learn what we can of the region as a whole.

Today we look at King Ahab and the Battle of Qarqar, or Karkar, a hugely important event in which we see the emergence of a large number of new peoples and things who will come to play a role in the near east for a long time to come. The Arabs, cavalry, and of course the Assyrians themselves burst onto the scene in a big way, and we finally get a chance to compare biblical numbers to the sorts of things being claimed by the historical powers of the region.

Today we examine no fewer than three types of confusion in ancient Israel. First is the very standard political confusion of unsettled times, as king after king gets assassinated and wars of all sort rage. Next is the standard for biblical scholars confusion of what events can and can not be taken as history, ranging all the way from the extremely plausible wars and assassinations all the way to "One Million Ethiopians". Finally, we look at the most interesting confusion of all, the uncertainty as to what god the Israelites and Judahites were worshipping, and whether or not monotheism was actually a thing at this point in history. We look at kings Abijah/Abijam and Asa down in the south, and Nadab, Baasha, Elah, Zimri, and Omri up in the north.

Today we talk about God's opinion of ecumenicism, the historical issues around prophecy, and also the careers of Jeroboam, Rehoboam, as kings of Israel and Judah, the now divided kingdoms. Much of our history at this point is exclusively religious, but there are still things that we can pull out that give indications of how these small kingdoms are doing in the wider context. We finish out with an exciting military invasion, except mostly exciting for the enemies of God, because Shishak, or Shoshenq, of Egypt, may or may not have invaded one or more countries at this time in history.