40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 1 Kings 2:13-35 (Episode 293)

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

Adonijah makes a foolish request that costs him his life. Solomon expels Abiathar the priest. And Chad and Daniel say goodbye to Joab. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 podcast, network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. While you're over there, make sure you check out all the other things that 1517 is doing. All the articles, we've got videos, we've got events. We've got all the things. We've got the academy. And so if you haven't just perused the website, I'd encourage you to go over there and do so.

We are in 1 Kings. We are in chapter 2. We said goodbye to David in the last episode. So David is officially laid with his fathers, as the book tells us. And now we're going to transition into the reign of Solomon and see how Solomon does with carrying out a few of the things that his father told him to do and just how he's going to be different than his father. Solomon is definitely not David 2.0.

No, and it's quite the beginning, too. What we got coming up here in 2.13 and following is like one, two, three, four different guys that he deals with and uh it's not pretty well and it's quite an ugly start to his reign in the first little bit of his reign he does a little bit seem like david 2.0 because some of this stuff you're like that sounds like something david would do yeah but it it does it does and but and he's not exactly but closely carrying out the instructions that his dad gave him on his on his deathbed you know david was like deal with this guy and deal with this guy and then you know you're smart you know how to deal with this guy too so david dies and solomon

we don't know how quickly solomon carried out some of his father's wishes but it seems to me at least judging from the way the story unfolds that he was waiting for the opportunity and the opportunity certainly did present itself at least with an unexpected problem that arose and that is his uh older brother adonijah he is not one that david addressed it wasn't like david said on his deathbed hey i want you to take your brother out he didn't he didn't address that situation but solomon taking advantage of an opportunity that adonijah afforded him did take his brother out as we'll see in a second and then that was like a platform i guess for solomon to engage in these other individuals dealing with dealing with them so anyway uh first kings 213 starts us

out by uh reintroducing us to the guy that we talked about before from the beginning of first kings the oldest living son of david a guy named adonijah who was the son of one of david's wives woman named hagith so adonijah if you remember he's the one who basically had convinced himself that he was going to be king. In fact, so much so that he threw this big party and invited some of his supporters there and a lot of his family except for Solomon. And in the middle of his coronation party, he received the bad news that Solomon instead had been declared to be king. And so all of his supporters take off. Adonijah runs to the altar, grabs a hold of the horns of the altar, and his brother Solomon assures him that all will be well, basically, as long as he

behaves. So that was kind of implicit there, where Adonijah is about to misbehave. Yeah, he's all right. He's just on probation. Yeah, he's kind of on probation. Like, hey, if you walk the straight and narrow, everything's going to be okay between us, brother. Until, as we'll see, adonijah made a uh well it seems like it's a romantic request but uh as as we'll talk about it's more political than it is romantic so adonijah the son of agith goes to not solomon he goes to solomon's mom bathsheba and i love her opening question she says do you come peacefully so you know of course she is uh she's not someone that's new to the palace she's been there for for quite a while and so she knows how these things work and so you can almost detect in

her voice a bit of of uh curiosity hesitation so are you coming here in peace or are you coming here for for some other reason and he says one word one word reply he says shalom he says peacefully. And then he says, I have something to say to you. So she responds, speak. And here's his request. Well, first of all, he makes this claim. He says to Bathsheba, you know that the kingdom was mine and that all Israel fully expected me to reign. Now that might be a bit of a hyperbole there. You know that the kingdom was mine and all Israel fully expected me to reign. It sounds a bit presumptuous on the part of Adonijah. I mean, maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but it certainly wasn't that all Israel fully expected Adonijah to be

king, because there were many who did not expect that and did not want that. But I suppose this is his way of basically saying, hey, you know, everything that your son Solomon received really is something that should have been mine but you know that didn't work out he says he goes on to say however the kingdom has turned about and has become my brothers for it was his from the lord so it's kind of like he's setting things up he's saying like uh i'm going to remind you that all this stuff should have been mine and i'm also going to say that okay i realized that it was god's will that it didn't become mine so he's he's he's setting things up to hopefully convince Bathsheba what to feel sorry for him maybe when he's about to

make this request to to realize he's lost a lot and so he's only making one small request and so on the basis of that I should honor his honor his petition yeah yeah he's he's trying to drum up a little bit of sympathy here you know he's saying look I mean and you know he I get the argument like hey I'm I'm the oldest son I'm sitting here with nothing and that's not exactly right but I'm not asking you to like i'm gonna i'm gonna play ball i'm gonna be i'm gonna be good but uh you know it'd be nice if you had a little bit of sympathy for the situation i'm in here yeah yeah and it yeah he goes to he doesn't go to his brother he doesn't go to solomon he goes through solomon he goes through bathsheba to solomon for whatever that reason might be maybe

he thinks that you know she's going to be the one who has the best chance of convincing solomon to to go through with this well what is the request he says uh i have one request to make of you do not refuse me she says speak and he said please ask king solomon does it say please ask my brother he acknowledges that he's the king please ask king solomon he will not refuse you literally in hebrew he won't turn your face away so he's not going to say no to you to give me abishag the Shunammite as my wife? And then Bathsheba responds, very well. I will speak, well, the ESV has,

I will speak for you to the king. That preposition that translated there as for could also be translated as about. It's a little bit ambiguous there as to how we render that Hebrew into English. So I will speak for you to the king or I will speak about you to the king. So a little bit of ambiguity there.

as to exactly what Bathsheba is going to say to her son, the king. So a bit of reminder here, who is this woman that he is asking to be his wife? Well, she is the virgin, the beautiful young woman that was chosen to be David's bed warmer back in the very opening of 1 Kings. And we're told that presumably she remained a virgin because David did not have intercourse with her. So, but, you know, she would have remained as part of kind of the, what, the harem of the king, I suppose. And so this request is for Adonijah to have her as his wife.

Now, the question that's kind of between the lines here is why? On one hand, it doesn't seem like a huge request, right, on its face. You're like, well, this doesn't seem like that big a deal. This guy's like, hey, man, I'm not going to live in the palace. I'm not going to be king. but i'm crushing on this girl really hard like maybe i could you know at least if i'm gonna go live in my cottage off to the you know across town maybe at least i could have the wife that i'm like that seems like all right like i mean it's a little weird it's weird i'm i would i mean

but there's a lot of there's a lot of weird stuff in the body let's say the weirdest thing we've heard the woman that was my dad's bed warmer to be my wife i mean well it's yeah it's definitely It's definitely weird. More freaky. Not nearly the weirdest thing that we've heard, but it's a little bit weird. But also, it doesn't seem threatening. Yeah. It doesn't seem like, I'm like, oh, I see what you're doing here.

It doesn't read that way. That ain't the way that Solomon's going to hear it. But initially, I don't know what he's trying to do with this request. I have a theory, but I'm going to save it until we get to Solomon's reaction. so i've got i've got a theory as to what's going on here that uh well possibly my theory i think lines up with the way solomon interprets his brother's actions let me put it that way and then we have some other examples of this other biblical examples of of the way that solomon is evidently interpreting his brother's desire for abishag but i'm going to save that until we

get to Solomon's eruption of anger when Bathsheba comes to him about this. Well, I think that one of the things that you could say is that this is a bad idea. We don't know how soon this happens. I would assume this happens like relatively quickly. So this seems like a bad idea. Like you're on probation. Like you probably just like want to chill for like. Yeah, you should probably just pretty much stay out of everything having to do with the

palace for a while. Right. But I do think that there's a little bit, knowing what Absalom did when he got to the palace and he's like, you know, gets all the concubines up on the roof or whatever and decides that he's got to like be sleeping with the people who slept with the king is a power move. And it's to prove some kind of point there that, hey, what was my father's is now mine. Whether that's what he's doing, because there's a precedent for that, and I don't know if that's how Solomon interprets it exactly, but I think it's—maybe that's what you were going to say. I don't know, but Chad and I have not talked about it. Yeah, that's the direction I'm going. I'll explain it more in a minute, but yeah.

but because of all that whether or not like me again he might just like be like have a huge crush on this girl because she's very beautiful or whatever and maybe that's clouded his judgment but what he should be thinking is well i can't do that because that will look like maybe i'm trying to possess something that belong at once belong to the king and this is like the beginnings of a new coup yeah so if if if this was exclusively for romantic reasons then uh he certainly should have been thinking more politically than he was romantically put it that way so uh Bathsheba says she'll speak either for him to the king or concerning him to the king now this isn't Bathsheba's first rodeo. She knows palace politics. So I suspect that she has already anticipated how

her son is going to react when she makes this request. So that's my suspicion anyway, that that's the reason she agrees so readily to do this. So verse 19, that's what she does. Bathsheba goes to King Solomon to speak to him. Well, it says on behalf of again, but this could also be translated as concerning adonijah and the king rose to meet her bowed down to her she sat he sat on his throne and he had a seat brought for the king's mother and she sat on his right so this is kind of a big formality type deal there's a king on his throne there is the king's mother sitting there beside him and she said i have one small request to make of you do not refuse me and the king said to her make your request my mother for i will not refuse you and again this is kind of

formal sounding language here i'd like to ask you something yes please ask me whatever you need i will take care of it and then she she puts forward the request she said let abishag the shunammite be given to adonijah your brother as his wife now solomon just said to his mom make your request because i will not refuse you and then he turns right around and very vehemently refuses her request the idea that a son is not going to refuse his mother seemed to be like the thing that everybody was thinking and you have to wonder if batsheba does batsheba want this to happen but it seems more likely that hey i'm going to make this request and i'm going to do it sort of earnestly and that's going to draw out a certain response from you i think batsheba knew

exactly how her son was going to respond to this. I suspect that both she and her son were going to interpret this particular request of Adonijah the exact same way. Bathsheba knows that sometimes it's better to let an idea belong to somebody

else. So you can want someone to respond a certain way or to do something. It's always better if you can convince them it was their idea. Yeah, that's exactly what's happening here. So she makes a request fully knowing he's going to say no she doesn't come and say solomon you will not believe yeah what your brother just asked me to do no she just puts forward the request well she doesn't want to

present it in such a way as like you won't you won't even believe the request that was made of me to make of you you have to do something let me tell you what you think i think you should do because she doesn't want solomon sitting there fresh king to be like listen i'm the king i'll make the decisions here i'll decide like i don't need you telling me what i'm going to do no she's and be like here's the request what do you say my lord and let him just fly off the handle yeah which is what he does so verse 22 king solomon answered his mother and why do you ask abishag the shunammite for adonijah and they'll listen to this line ask for him the kingdom also for he's my older brother and on his side or abiathar the priest and joab the son of zayuraya so that

That fell apart rather quickly. It's a pretty big jump that Solomon makes. He's asking for this woman. Why don't we just give them the whole kingdom? Yeah, we'll just give everything to them. Whoa now. So let me finish this out, and then we'll go back and talk about what's going on here. King Solomon swore by the Lord, verse 23.

So he's serious. He is very serious about this. swore by the lord saying god do so to me and more also if this word does not cost adonijah his life now therefore the lord lives who has established me and place me on the throne of david my father and who has made me a house as he promised adonijah shall be put to death today and verse 25, wrapping up this section, says that's what happened. King Solomon sent Benaiah. We're going to encounter him quite a bit in these next few verses. King Solomon sent Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, and he struck him down, and he died. So that was not a wise request, needless to say.

And if you're just reading it, it seems like an extreme reaction, right? yeah yeah if you're if you're just kind of reading this and you're thinking god man what's why did he blow up his brother just asked if he could have this one girl for his wife it's not like you're lacking in girls around the palace i mean david had a harem solomon has is gonna end up with a with a vast harem all these wives all these concubines so what's one girl well here's Here is my theory based upon other biblical stories of what actually is going on here. So if you go all the way back to the book of Genesis, Genesis 35, 22, this is the first time we encounter something like this. This is when you have the joy of Jacob and his growing family.

and we learn that Jacob's firstborn son, Reuben, lay with his father's concubine or his co-wife, Bilhah. So if you remember that story way back in Genesis, what happened as a result of that is that Reuben lost his right to be the recipient of the blessing of the firstborn. Now, why did he do that? Well, chances are Reuben slept with his father's co-wife or concubine because this was his way of trying to basically claim

that he was now the top dog, the leader of the family. So this was not so much of a sexual move as it was a power move on the part of Reuben, trying to say that, yeah, the old man's around, but I'm really the one who's going to be the leader of the family. And he did this by sleeping with, as a sort of a power move, sleeping with his father's concubine, co-wife. So now, as you referenced earlier, Dan, we have another example of this. You've got Absalom, who as soon as he is successful in his coup, what does he do? He takes his dad's, David's concubines up onto the roof of the palace. He has intercourse with them.

Again, not because, you know, this was some sort of sexual, lustful move, but this was a political move. It was calculated to demonstrate via this intercourse that he was now the one who was in charge. He was now the king, no longer his father, David. So we have two occasions earlier in the scriptures where a man without as much authority as another man is trying to basically usurp that authority by sleeping with a concubine or a co-wife who belonged to that man, both cases their father. Now, my theory is that that's exactly what's happening here with Adonijah. So Adonijah was not able to be the king that he wanted to be. It was given to his brother. So what he's trying to do is he's trying to take one of his dad's concubines, Abishag,

and by marrying her, this will be, as it were, his foot in the door to try and restart his bid to become king in place of his brother, Solomon. Solomon. Now, whether that is exactly what he intended is up for debate. That Solomon interpreted it that way, I think is beyond dispute. Yeah. Because nothing else explains why Solomon would react as violently as he did, so much so that he doesn't just get upset, he kills him. So he basically, by his actions, is saying, listen, it's pretty clear to me that Adonijah wants my throne. He wants me out of kingship, and he wants to take my place. He wants to take the kingdom, basically. And not only that, but he's already got Abiathar the priest and Joab the

son of Zeariah on his side, as we've learned earlier. So this is his bid to become the powerful one. So he, the lesser, that is to say, Abiathar, excuse me, Adonijah the lesser, is trying to make a power move to take control by going through by means of this concubine that belonged to his father david to to do something whether or not that's what adonijah is means to do but we don't know that it seems like it's an insane move to make that it's so early uh just in general i mean i mean you're talking about a guy who when he found out that psalm was king was was holding on to the horns of the altar scared to death that solomon was going to come kill him and then to turn around and do something like this with that intention just seems crazy like

why why would why would you do that unless of course uh so you have two options here one is that he's so power hungry and upset that he just does something stupid or he didn't didn't wasn't thinking that way at all and just didn't and and was really really wanted this woman to be his wife and also wasn't thinking and did something really stupid. Either way, he did a really stupid thing, whether that was because he was trying to get power or just because he was too obsessed with this girl and it clouded his judgment.

But either way, it was a really dumb move. And a move that doesn't make any sense based on how scared he was that Solomon was going to kill him in the first place. Yeah. Either way, romance can be blinding. Ambition can be blinding. And it makes people make all sorts of very bad moves,

very, in fact, sometimes fatal decisions. And that's precisely what happened here. I mean, you can see Solomon being like, oh, this is like the ultimate power move. What he's going to do is he's going to take this girl. Dad couldn't even get himself pulled together enough to sleep with this young, beautiful woman. And the move that he's going to make is like,

the old man couldn't, but I can. It makes sense No way I'm letting you do that Well this was A bad decision Whatever the motives were We certainly know the way that Solomon And I suspect also Bathsheba interpreted

This and so It all went very poorly For the oldest son of David And so we end up with the first person Dead in this chapter No more Adonijah No more threat to Solomon's throne So

what happens next? Well, the next case is not a case of Solomon actually making sure that somebody dies. There is a veiled threat here, but he's going to exile somebody else. It's one of the priests. Verse 26 through 27 is the next section of this chapter. We're told to Abiathar, the priest, King Solomon said this, go to Anathoth, to your estate, literally just to your field or to your to your land for you deserve death but i will not at this time notice that little caveat that i will not at this time put you to death because you carried the ark of the lord god before david my father and because you shared in all my father's affliction so solomon expelled Abiathar. The Hebrew verb there is garash. That garash is what's used when God expelled or kicked

out or exiled Adam and Eve from the garden, Genesis 3. Garash is also the verb used for when Cain was kicked out from hanging out with his family anymore. He was exiled, expelled. And it's the same verb that's often used in connection with the Exodus too, that the Israelites were kicked out of they were exiled from the place of exile they were garaged from the land of egypt they were expelled so this is solomon basically saying to abiathar you are now exiled from jerusalem you're exiled from the priesthood you are going to go and live on your own land in anathoth that that estate that you have there the state's probably a little bit too fancy a word but your your land where uh where you live that land of your family because you're not going to be a

priest anymore and we're told at the end of verse 27 this fulfilled the word of the lord that he had spoken concerning the house of eli at shiloh now that's a hearkening back to way early in in the book of samuel i want to get to that just secondly back up back up just a minute so abiathar has been with david's family for a long time yeah we first first met him back in oh what was that chapter uh first samuel 22 so abiathar is the is the guy that brought news to david when david was on the run from from saul that saul by means of that evil guy doeg had killed all those priests so abiathar shows up and brings this bad news to david and then he's with david all this time like solomon even says you know you were the one who shared in all my father's

afflictions you were with him all this time and you carry the ark of god so why is he expelling him why is he exiling him because he is the one who was a supporter of solomon's older brother adonijah and so he's perceived then to be someone who i guess if not a threat maybe someone who could at least undermine solomon's authority should there be any kind of you know political upheaval in Jerusalem. This whole thing is very confusing as far as the way this

reads now is if there were like two claims to the throne and people took sides and stuff like that. But that's not how it reads when you're actually reading the account. It just seems like one guy's presumptuous and

that's it. It also seems and this is just us not knowing, but you know if Joab or anyone else doesn't know that Solomon's supposed to be king which we're not told that anyone knows that you know other than Bathsheba and Nathan like doing their thing like we have we don't have a record of David saying that obviously he might have but was this and maybe even if he did was this common knowledge that there was all the all the sort of inside people know this because solomon acts as though hey we had like we had a usurper going on there

was someone that was trying to like get in on my position it's very hard to tell exactly how this is playing out because you can see this priest being like i just assumed like that was the way it was going to be like i didn't know anything yeah i mean i was it wasn't like i was pro adonijah anti-solomon right yeah i just thought that was the next guy well it's the king's oldest son so oh, I assume he's going to be the next king. So it does seem way... Solomon seems hypersensitive about this and kind of overly threatened by everything going on,

so much so that he's killing his brother, he's expelling this priest. Well, and once David names Solomon king, it's not as though we have these records of a bunch of people pushing back or anything. it just seems like this is not at all accepted by everyone uh so yeah it just it is weird overreaction to on on my part on solomon uh like he's going above and beyond anything necessary to be to ensure that there's going to be no possible threat whatsoever to to his throne but we're told

that you know there's always kind of a mixture of of uh of human motives which are always a mixed bag of good and bad and then divine providence going on here because the divine providence part comes into the end of verse 27 so Solomon he exiles Abiathar from being priest to the Lord and then we're told this fulfilled the word of the Lord that he had spoken concerning the house of Eli in Shiloh now what this is referring to is something that was prophesied way back in the second chapter of first Samuel this is when you had Eli you remember he was an old man. He had two sons who were corrupt priests. And we're told in 1 Samuel 2, 35 and 36, this prophecy that God will raise up for himself a faithful priest who will do according to what

is in my heart and in my mind. I will build him a sure house. He should go in and out before my anointed forever. And then it goes on to say, everybody who's left in your house, Eli, shall come to implore him for a piece of silver or a loaf of bread and shall say, please put me in one of the priest's places that I may eat a morsel of bread. So the prophecy is that in the future, God is going to take the priesthood from the house of Eli and is going to give it to another priestly family, put another priestly family in charge. And then this is fulfilled generations later in Solomon, this faithful priest that's going to be Zadok. He's going to be the one who replaces Abiathar. And this anointed that's referred to is Solomon. So this actually,

we're going to see this multiple times. Kings, first, second Kings is very much concerned with the fulfillment of prophecy. And this is, we've already seen it somewhat when God promised David that a king one of his seed would sit on his throne and lo and behold it's fulfilled in Solomon at least partially fulfilled in Solomon now this prophecy back in first Samuel 2 35 and 36 is being fulfilled when Abiathar is exiled and then Zadok takes his place so and we'll see more examples of this as we work our way along so there's kind of this uh uh this this this understanding on the part of the author of kings that many of the things that are happening are a fulfillment of what had been foretold earlier,

like in 1 and 2 Samuel. Yeah, and we've talked about before, just because God gives a prophecy, God tells you something's going to happen, that doesn't mean that, therefore, Solomon's reaction is completely normal and correct. It doesn't mean that. It just means that God knew that this is how this was going to play out,

and that this is a fulfillment of the word that he had spoken. Yeah, certainly. I mean, that's the case with all kinds of prophetic fulfillments, where you see that the people actually carrying out the fulfillment probably more times than not are acting in a terrible way. I mean, there was a lot of times when God said, hey, such and such is going to happen. And when it did, it was carried out by very violent, evil people. Yeah. I mean, we have that with the Babylonians, for instance. And what, just look at the crucifixion of Jesus. That was prophesied. Well, who carried it out? Well, a lot of very corrupt people carried it out.

so it was the fulfillment of god's prophecy but at the same time it was fulfilled by the hands of sinful men you always kind of have this mixed bag of like i said earlier these human motivations many of which are sinful and then the fulfillment of what god himself had had foretold so that's adonijah and then that is abiathar both of those are taken care of one is put to death when he's exiled. Next, we have our friend Joab. What's going to happen to him? When the news came to Joab, we're told, because Joab had supported Adonijah, although he had not supported Absalom. So it's a bit of a parenthetical comment about where Joab stood in relationship to earlier people who wanted the throne. So he had supported Adonijah. He had not supported Absalom.

Obviously, he killed Absalom. He put him to death. When Joab heard this, he fled to the tent of the Lord and caught hold of the horns of the altar. So he's doing the same thing, of course, that Adonijah had done earlier. Probably thinking, well, it turned out pretty well for Adonijah at first, so maybe it'll turn out well for me as well. He's like, if I can get the same thing Adonijah got,

I can just not make a stupid request like he did, and I'll be all right. Yeah. i won't ask for a girl and i'll be i'll be fine well yeah i think he's not going to turn out as well for him so it was told to king solomon what he had done that he had fled to the to the tent of the lord and that he was beside the altar solomon says to benaiah the son of jehoiada and i've called joab david's fixture and we're about to see that benaiah is going to be solomon's fixture. He's the one who carries out all the dirty work of Solomon. Solomon sends Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, saying, go strike him down, period. Not go take him away from the altar,

not, hey, go talk to him, not bring him to me, nothing. Just basically go kill him. Well, Benaiah goes to the Lord's tent, and he doesn't do that right away. He doesn't carry out the explicit instructions of the king. Instead, he says to him, the king commands, come out. Well, that's not what the king commanded. The king said, go kill him. And when Benaiah gets there, he says, the king commanded, come out. No, he just said to kill you. So presumably what's happening here is Benaiah is a bit hesitant to go up to the very altar of God and to murder a man right there beside the lord's altar so and benaiah has got to be a dude knowing what we what what kind of role he plays going forward i mean he ain't like he doesn't know who joab is i mean

if we don't know this but joab like you're talking about two guys that play the very a very similar role this would seem like a difficult thing for him to go do right there the older guy be like i'm like killing just the older version of myself here pretty much yeah yeah because who joab is exactly who uh benaiah is going to is going to become and you know he doesn't he has some scruples he doesn't want to carry out this act of bloodshed right there beside the the holy altar of god well you're not supposed to do that when someone's like grabbing hold of the horns of the altar that's the whole point that's the whole point yeah this was a place of asylum. So Joab responds, no. He says, I will die right here. I'm not moving. So Benaiah goes back

to the king and he says, this is what Joab said. And the king replies to him, well, do what he said, strike him down and bury him. And then Solomon says this, this is just, this just kills me. thus take away from me and from my father's house the guilt for the blood that joab shed without cause the lord will bring back his bloody deeds on his own head because without the knowledge of my father david he attacked and killed with the sword two men more righteous and better than himself abner the son of nair commander of the army of israel and amasa the son of jether commander of the army of judah so shall their blood come back on the head of joab and on the head of his descendants forever but for david and for his descendants and for his house and for his

throne there shall be peace from the lord forevermore so just to wrap up that section benaiah did it he goes up strikes down joab puts him to death joab is buried in his own house in the wilderness and then benaiah gets placed over the army in place of joab and then zadok the priest is in place of aviathar now the reason this just kills me is because this is hypocrisy taken up to a whole new level yeah this is so you're telling me wild language this is such this is perhaps this ranks as one of the in my opinion one of the highest hypocritical statements in the entirety of the scripture so you're accusing joab of shedding innocent blood blood without cause without cause yeah well how about taking a look at your dad yeah who threw joab

who sent a letter who penned a letter to joab the very person you're accusing of shedding innocent blood penned a letter to joab and said hey make sure that uriah who had done nothing wrong absolutely nothing wrong make sure that uriah gets killed in battle yeah by the way this innocent blood innocent i'm using air quotes here innocent like that's up for debate it's very much i mean that's not i asked joe if he thought that was innocent blood i don't think he agrees with that that with that description no because it would be fully in accord actually with both of these deaths that joe have carried out be fully in accord at least culturally to understand that Joab was within his rights to take out both of these guys.

Now, maybe he did it in a very sneaky, sinister sort of way, but one of the guys had killed his brother. So he was the avenger of blood in taking out this guy that had killed his brother. And the other guy had been the general of Absalom's coup. Yeah, that guy's totally innocent. What are you talking about? so the whole without cause here is is stretching that beyond beyond imagination so that's why i

this this speech of solomon seems to me just a complete act of self-justification he's wanting to take out joab because he perceived joab to be a threat to him and he probably and realistically he probably was uh because you know joab had a lot of power we know that from that whole second half of second samuel but the the just the way he justified this by saying you know joab is guilty of innocent blood well come on i mean basically look at your own house he tries to contrast the houses too it's not just that he says he's guilty of innocent blood so we gotta take him out unlike the how like you gotta rid my my spotlessly clean house of this stain like what in the world We won't have to deal with just this horrible shedding of innocent blood,

and we can just have peace reign forever in our house. Like, dude, God said specifically of your house that the sword was never going to depart from it because of how much bloodshed there was. And keep in mind, too, that Solomon is whose son? Yeah. Bathsheba. Yeah, I sound like he's on a— Bathsheba, that is the former widow of Uriah.

Uriah being dead because David commanded Joab to make sure that he was dead on the battlefield yeah this was just a mess I know that you and I are partial to Joab I think that we've come to that conclusion during this journey

and I do have to say this feels like an extremely unfitting death for Joab yeah it is David wanted his gray hairs to go down the show with blood on them and that's what happened But it does not seem to be an end that is befitting of Joab.

But a man of violence, I guess he ended up dying a violent death. The best we can say is that at least they gave him a proper burial. They made sure that he was buried in his own house in the wilderness. But not the end that I would have wanted for Joab. for Joab. Certainly not with this kind of self-justifying actions and words on behalf of Solomon. And that's where we're going to leave it.

We are well out of time, so Solomon has carried out the things that his father has requested him to do, at least some of them. But next week, we'll pick it up and we'll get into Solomon making one of his most famous requests. I wish he would have asked for this earlier.

Would have been good. Could have used some wisdom. All right, Chad, I'll see you next week. All right, see you then.