Talk:Books of Kings

Need to pull quotes from Kings, do serious clean up on what was written, and find out who destroyed the Upper Kingdom. But, it's lunch time.--WaitingforGodot 11:25, 23 July 2008 (EDT)
 * And I have to reconcile all diverging theories of quantum mechanics at some point before teatime :nods: 11:27, 23 July 2008 (EDT)
 * Hm. Liberal deceit? -- 11:29, 23 July 2008 (EDT)
 * No :shakes head: 11:31, 23 July 2008 (EDT)
 * Hey, you're good with history! who destroyed the Isreal (upper kingdom).  Was it the assyrians?  I get so lost in reading what feels like 10 billion names thrown around and have no idea who led whom, who conquered whom, etc..--WaitingforGodot 11:30, 23 July 2008 (EDT)
 * As far as I remember, yes, it was the Assyrians. The Siege of Samara and all that. I think all that stuff about the fall of the two Kingdoms is in the last couple of chapters of 2 Kings. -- 11:45, 23 July 2008 (EDT)
 * Ah yes, here we are. 2 Kings ch. 17. The Assyrian King Salmaneser attacks Israel under King Hosea, who becomes a tributary vassal. But when Hosea later allies with the Egyptians and refuses to pay the tribute, Salmaneser invades again, besieges the capital at Samaria, and conquers it after three years. The people of Judea are forced to move away, and people from elsewhere in the Empire are later brought in to settled the area, apparently without much success. -- 11:53, 23 July 2008 (EDT)
 * Thankie! K & C are two of the more mind boggling books for me, as they list lots and lots of battles, and very little fun stuff...well, cept Jezebel!  she's fun. WaitingforGodot 12:01, 23 July 2008 (EDT)

Some exciting stuff happens in Kings that isn't mentioned. 2 kings 2:24 Elisha sends two bears to kill 42 children. 2kings 1:10 Elijah pulls off a if I'm holier then though so burst into flames. Also there are 19 occurrence (from control f search) of someone doing what was "evil in the sight of the LORD". So I thought it might be worth mentioning how very slow witted these Kings were. Haven'tmadeanaccountyet 2:10, 22 July 2009

Accounts of the Siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE
So we start off with this: "The siege was in the twenty-seventh year of Hezekiah, not the fifteenth.) Was besieged by Sennacherib in 701 BCE, for refusing to pay tribute. Sennacherib describes the campaign in quite boasting (yet, painfully true) terms", painful for whom? The Jewish and Christian fundies since their fantastical account doesn't withstand scrutiny? Or the biblical minimalists who insist that the Kingdom of Judah was nothing more than an insignificant tribal chiefdom despite the King of the most powerful country in the world at the time boasting in his archives and on his palace walls about how he almost destroyed it? Anyway there are three basic accounts of this siege, the Bible says that the army was destroyed by a bad-ass Angel after the Assyrians took Hezekiah's bribe but advanced on Jerusalem anyway, the Assyrian account says that the army left because of Hezekiah's bribe, and Josephus quoting a Babylonian scholar says that the Assyrian army outside Jerusalem was wiped out by disease and that this sufficiently spooked Sennacherib (whose army in Egypt, according to Herodotus, was also stopped by divine intervention in the form of a plague of field mice) enough to force a retreat. I am actually inclined to believe the basic story that the Book of Kings, Josephus and Berossus give, i.e. that the army was destroyed by a plague outside Jerusalem which caused the Assyrians to retreat. I object to the implication here that what the Assyrians wrote about this event is somehow more objective than the account of siege given by Josephus and Berossus and to a lesser extant the Bible. The Assyrians were well known for writing propaganda, and while their enemies, like the authors of the Bible, Josephus and Berossus (a Babylonian priest who likely thought no more highly of Assyria than the Jews did), also wrote propaganda, the basic circumstances of this particular event favor the Jewish and Babylonian account over the Assyrian one. The reason for this is because the Assyrian account of the siege has a hole in it, looking at Assyrian history it is difficult to believe that tribute alone would be enough to deter Sennacherib from finishing off the rebellious ruler of a kingdom which he had basically already destroyed. Simply put historians just find it more plausible that the actual reason why he left Judah was because his army was decimated by disease. Alsto003 (talk) 05:29, 27 March 2015 (UTC) Alex