9-12. I & II Samuel, I & II Kings : Reviews

This is my short review of I & II Samuel and I & II Kings, the ninth through twelfth books in the Bible.

(Click here for the Intro to this series, including links to each book’s review.)

Artist’s rendition of Samuel the seer

According to Bible.com, the four books now known as I Samuel, II Samuel, I Kings, and II Kings were originally part of one long book. (“They were separated due to the length of ancient scrolls.”) It makes sense. The narrative doesn’t end/begin with the divisions between them. So I’m reviewing them together.

The series starts where Judges ended and takes the reader to the Babylonian conquest. Israel rejects rule by judges and prophets and demands a king. A long line of kings. There’s a brief pinnacle under Solomon. Then a long and grisly demise.

The pattern seen in Judges continues: Israel disobeys God, God allows them to wallow in sin and misery until they cry out, then God cleans things up for a while. The government of Israel wastes incredible resources tearing down temples and worship places to “other gods” and rebuilding the “real God” stuff, only to repeat this pattern every couple of kings.

History Of Israel

The “Book of Reigns” (as the four are sometimes called) purports to be a history of Israel. Several Christians I know believe that it is accurate history. This is not a widespread view in secular scholarship.

The actual history of Israel doesn’t start matching up to biblical “history” until well after 1,000 BCE. The Bible describes a massive united kingdom with palaces and giant temples, but archeology shows scattered towns and nomadic tribes. Eventually, some of the names found in the Bible’s list of kings start showing up in Egyptian records and elsewhere.

It should have listed the kings and a bit of info about each. Instead, it’s filled with superstition, speeches about God, and complaints about “other gods”.

Other Gods

Again the Israelites sought “other gods”. Their own God was angered. He warned them a hundred times that he would “totally destroy” them if they “prostituted” themselves to other gods, but they didn’t listen.

Fed up, he sent Babylonians to conquer Israel.

Again I was left to wonder what was so seductive about these other gods that Israelites would “lust” after them so much. If Israel’s God was real and obvious, why would anyone leave? From this I deduce that the supremacy of Israel’s God was not obvious. To the Israelites he must have seemed like any other god.

These stories don’t help my confidence (already zero) in the existence of Yahweh.

Evil Spirits From The Lord

Samuel is full of spiritualism and witchcraft. The surprising thing is how often God sends evil spirits.

King Saul — if he was a real person — probably suffered from mental illness easily diagnosable today. In the Bible, “an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him” (I Samuel 16:14). It’s mentioned several times.

I Googled and learned Christians have explanations for this that allow them to continue believing the Bible. None of them work for me. A book written by God shouldn’t need explanations.

Contradictions

More contradictions show up. For example, God “incited” King David to take a census in II Samuel 24:1. Elsewhere (I Chronicles), it says “Satan” incited the census.

Weirdly, it was the census itself that was considered a sin against God. The Bible never says why (not that I could find). God punished David for the census — which was God/Satan’s idea in the first place. And by “punished David”, I mean “killed 70,000 people that were not David” with a plague. Poor David.

Elijah goes straight to Heaven — but the Bible later says he didn’t (John 3:13). Saul killed himself in one chapter, but in another chapter someone else killed him.

Barren Mothers

I began noticing the theme of barren women having children.

It was in Genesis: Abraham’s wife, Abimelek’s “wife and his female slaves”, Isaac’s wife Rebekah, and Jacob’s wife Rachel. In Judges, it was Sampson’s mother (who saw a child-predicting angel just like Jesus’ mom).

Here, we have Hannah (Samuel’s mom) — “The Lord had closed Hannah’s womb.” She prayed hard and made promises to God, and God let her get pregnant. Then David’s wife Michal (who didn’t end up having kids). An unnamed “Shunammite woman” was barren until Elisha gave her a son (who later died, but Elisha raised him from the dead).

God uses the word “barren” a lot too, often threatening it as punishment to women. (Science says infertility is just as often found in men as in women.)

No one understood the mechanisms of procreation. Women were considered child-bearing machines. It was helpful to have large numbers of children. So I understand why barrenness was on people’s minds so often.

What I don’t understand is why God was so concerned about it. This is another indicator that the Hebrew God is a creation of men.

This keeps happening. The things God is concerned about in these books are things that are irrelevant to the alleged longterm plans of this God. They’re things that writers in Babylonian captivity would be concerned about — and that’s exactly when scholars think most of these books were penned. A book written by a timeless, perfect God with a plan of winning me over in 2017 would have written a vastly different book. An omniscient God would have known how to.

And So Much More

There’s more. “Traditional marriage” is mentioned often: multiple wives, concubines, and female slaves — have Christian conservatives ever read this? God reminds Eli of a promise he made and then declares he’ll break it. God promises to kill Hezekiah but then doesn’t.

God killed other people for dubious reasons. God killed David’s son because he was mad at David. God caused a three-year drought because a long-dead king had messed up. God killed Jeroboam’s son because Jeroboam worshiped other gods. God had some bears “maul” 42 boys who made fun of a prophet. God sent lions to kill some Assyrians who didn’t worship the Lord. Another time, God killed 185,000 Assyrians because their king had ridiculed and blasphemed God.

What a dick.

Conclusion

The constant contradictions reminded me the Bible can’t be true. The constant and pointless killing reminded me that even if this God is real, he’s a murderous asshole.

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