40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Judges 9:30-10:5 (Episode 208)

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

Abimelech gets word of the drunken threats issued against him and plans an ambush. Zebul's eyesight isn't any better than his judgment. The wrath of Abimelech is thorough and includes a whole lot of salt. Jotham's fable/prophecy comes full circle and Abimelech unsuccessfully tries to avoid what he sees as an embarrassing death legacy. Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network Paul & The Resurrection Book 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. Chad, I am holding a copy of a little book that I mowed through yesterday because it's not difficult to read. It is a new book published by 1517 called Paul and the Resurrection Testing the Apostolic Testimony. So this is sort of a little bit of an apologetic work, but it's nice because it's small, And you kind of get the theology that Paul has of the resurrection coupled with the historical data and the comparative evaluation, all this kind of stuff. It's really good if you're interested in apologetics, but you think, I don't want to read that big, huge tome.

This would be a great book for you. This is by Joshua Pagan. Looks like pagan, but he's not because he believes in the resurrection. So he's not a pagan. He's Pagan. that's how this works right that's it that's it yeah i knew josh years ago when uh i was teaching at the seminary he was a student at the time super smart guy uh he's done a he's done a great job with that book it's i mean you say it's short it's only like 100 pages i mean it's it's an easy

easy quick read for not easy but i mean it's it's a quick read it's uh he deals well with the subject um and uh it's it's it's a good resource if you're looking for you know kind of a an argument for the resurrection that's not just biblically based but also uh apologetically based well here can we be honest about that i don't know maybe i'll just be honest i'll speak for myself then you can amen me if it's true chad there's times where where even as a christian where you have this thing you're like am i insane for believing that some guy rose from the dead you know i mean that you do believe it but every once in a while something some rational thing in your head like kind of comes in couple you know married up with some doubt you start listening to the words that come out of

your own mouth and you're like i sound like a lunatic what i found it did for me was when i put it down i was like i'm not crazy it once again in my case at least once again affirms that oh wait no actually believing in the resurrection based on what what we know is reasonable it's a reasonable belief yeah yeah i mean that's that's a great point uh people will sometimes discuss the question is there anything that would make you not believe in christianity yeah yeah well and the truth is yes i mean if if the resurrection could be proved to be false then our faith is null and void and we are to be pitied more than all men as paul says there so yeah i mean the resurrection is is significant and having a rational objective way to think about that to

think through the arguments for that is is important because i mean we have brains that God gave to us to think through these things and to look at the evidence, so a book like that's helpful in that regard. Yeah, so you can look it up on 1517, or you go to Amazon, wherever you buy your books, Paul and the Resurrection, Testing the Apostolic Testimony. I'll also put a link to the book in the show notes if you want to pick up a copy. Great little book. I'd encourage anyone who is interested in that sort of thing to pick it up. All right, enough about that. Where did we leave off last week in Judges? Well, we were not talking about the Resurrection, that's for sure now a whole lot of dead people instead this is true yeah yeah we've uh we're

right in the middle of a pretty gruesome uh narrative about uh our our not so friendly abimelech so just to kind of catch everybody up as to where we left off here so abimelech is the he's not the illegitimate son of gideon he's the son of gideon and his concubine That was not considered illegitimate back then. And the bad qualities that we saw in Gideon are like amplified tenfold when you get to Abimelech. It's like Abimelech looked at his dad and he's like, hmm, how can I be worse in these certain respects than my father was? And he actually achieved that, as we have already seen. He had 70 half-brothers and he killed all but one of those.

and that one that escaped, the youngest, Jotham, he's the one who gave us that fable about the trees who are looking for someone to reign over them. They go to the olive tree and the fig tree and the vine, and they all say no, and so they finally get the bramble to reign over them. So that is Abimelech. Abimelech is the bramble king, and Jotham finishes out that little prophetic fable by saying, basically, here's what's going to happen, or here's what I want God to make happen. I want Shechem to destroy Abimelech, and I want Abimelech himself to be destroyed as well. And as we'll see, that's precisely what is going to happen. And that's kind of where we left off last time. So what happened is God sends this evil spirit, the kind of a spirit of rivalry and

jealousy between the Shechemites and their would-be ruler Abimelech. And the Shechemites begin to harass people on the road to ambush them and making life difficult for abimelech and then where we specifically left off there was just a symposium a symposium in the old sense is a a drinking party so in the old greek symposia you actually got together and you you had a party you you drank and uh that's what was happening lutherans still have these symposiums yes yeah we do yeah there's there's a there is a quite it's quite etymologically correct for there to be drinking at a symposium that's that's what happens uh and that's what was happening in the town of shechem it says they uh they had gathered the grapes of the vineyard and they had this

festival and they go into the the temple of their god and they eat and they drink and they curse to bemelech i think you know things just haven't changed a whole lot yeah when people eat and drink they tend to like really get angry and say a lot of things about their bosses or their political leaders or whoever they don't happen to like at the moment right yeah that's that's when the uh the the truth comes out and the unemployment line gets full yeah in vino veritas right so that's what's happening here so you got these guys they're cursing bemelech and one of them i would read this with like a drunken accent but i don't know if i could pull it off i mean i was i was thinking this morning i could read verse 28 you know like i was three

sheets of the wind but i'm not even gonna attempt it but i'm sure that's what was happening here because this guy named gaal which ironically means redeemer he wasn't redemptive at all but that's what his name is so gaal his dad's name is ebed he stands up and he's like who is abimelech and who is Shechem that we should serve him? Isn't he the son of Yerubbaal and is Zabul not his lieutenant? Serve the men of Hamor, the father or the founder of Shechem, but why should we serve him? And then he's kind of emboldened himself with this drunken speech about why should we be serving Abimelech? And so he has an idea. He's like, here's what we should do. I should be in charge would that this people were under my authority i'd get rid of abimelech and then he

uh abimelech's not there but he like addresses him as if he as if he were there and he's like increase your army had come out so gaal drunk boasting full of uh full of all kinds of bravado is uh saying hey you should put me in charge i'm the guy who should be running this show not Abimelech so we're going to see how well that works out for him the next day that's kind of where we left off so one of the guys who's there this fellow named Zebul he's kind of the co-regent I guess you could say of Abimelech anyway he's in charge of this city of Shechem well he hears this and and as you might expect he's not very happy about it it says his nose got hot that's verse 30 which in a Hebrew idiom that means he's mad he's mad so when

somebody's we see what do we say in english uh somebody got got heated right right yeah something like that in hebrew they'd say their their nose got hot they're mad so his anger burned is the way my translation has it and so he decides he can deal with this so he sends these secret messengers to abimelech telling him everything it just went down so look this uh this loud mouth name you go all he and his relatives have come here and they're stirring up trouble against you in the city. And he's not only going to report, he's got a plan he's going to give to Abimelech. So he says, here's what I think you should do. So come by night, so sneak in under cover of darkness, you and your guys, and just hide out there in the field while it's dark. So get

yourself all situated under cover of darkness and just wait. Then he says, verse 33, when the sun comes up here's what you need to do you rise early and you rush the city and then when he talking about gaal when he and the people who are with him come out against you well then you can do them whatever you want so you can you could have your uh military bloodthirsty fun with them so anyway that's the message that he sends with uh his messengers to abimelech well verse 34 i guess i guess that was a good good plan says abimelech all the people were with him they got up and snuck in by night and they split into four different companies and they laid in wait around the city of shechem now it's kind of strange what happens next verse uh verse 35

there's just like this dialogue between gaal and zabul between the loud mouth and the co-regent there at the city of shechem says they got up in the morning and go all he goes out there and he's like stretching standing there by the the gate of the city and and uh abimelech and the people who were with him see it and they get up out of their ambush and i don't know if like maybe gaal had uh eyesight issues like he couldn't quite he couldn't quite tell what's going on because uh gaal he sees like the people coming and he says to zabul he's like uh look people are coming from the top of the mountains and zabul says to him oh no man you're seeing the shadow of the mountains like they're men's does the bull i guess is like trying to convince him no you're just you're seeing stuff

there's not really like military might that's coming down to to take you out and then go all this was before glasses so maybe this guy's just impaired a little bit yeah i mean i have great sympathy because if i take i've had glasses since i was 18 if i took my glasses off yeah it would not be good yeah i know you've got like perfect eyesight i i i do i don't have i don't have the glasses but i can imagine if you lost your glasses and then there we were chad and you said is that a bunch of guys over there and i said no chad that is that's just shadows man and then you you wouldn't argue you just be like oh gosh man my eyesight is terrible yeah yeah that would pretty much be what would happen you know anytime i travel i carry an extra pair of glasses with me

because i have this like phobia like if i get somewhere i'm across the country i'm speaking so pennsylvania whatever and my glasses break man i am in a world of hurt so i feel like i'd be in bed i just i could like walk it's not like i'm walking into things but you get any signs more than five ten yards away from me and they are unreadable yeah you have to you got to get out your phone to read from your thing just blow the text up now this i'd be like be taking pictures constantly trying to read them so i carry my extra glass with me just just in case so i have sympathy a little bit of sympathy for gaal even though he was just kind of a drunken blowhard but he sees uh so he sees what he thinks are men and they actually are but

zabul commits them otherwise and then he says oh no no no no then i get to get close enough he's like people are coming from the highest part of the land and one company is coming by way of the diviner's oak so he sees like two of the companies heading toward him well zabul at this time decides it's time to rub it a little bit. So literally he says, ah, where's your mouth now? Which my translation is, where's your boasting now? But you were speaking all courageously and boastfully last night. So where are your words now? Because you were saying, who is Abimelech that we should serve him? Is this not the people whom you despised? So go out and fight with him. so that's what happened uh says that gaal actually did he uh he went out before the

leaders of shechem and he fought with abimelech but things did not go well with gaal we don't know for sure i don't i think he just like disappears from the story after this the only thing we know it says abimelech chased him it's not a good way to go out chased him and he fled before him and it says many fell wounded at the entrance of the gate i mean this this kind of went down the way to expect right i mean we don't know anything about gall he was drunk he was just full of himself he would just you know like drunk people ordinarily do just saying a saying a bunch of stuff and when it came time for uh for the fight he uh ended up getting trounced so maybe he died maybe he got wounded who knows what happened but i pretty sure that that is the

very last we're going to hear of our friend Gaal but it's not the last we hear of Abimelech you know this is a turning point in the story you kind of think about where we've been up to this point with Abimelech so he went to the city

of Shechem and he convinced them that it would be better for him just as an individual to rule over them than his seventy half brothers and they're like that's cool with us we'll uh we'll even pay you from the temple treasury to for you to pay the uh you know the good for nothings that are in your crew to go and kill

your brothers so they pay him these 70 shekels so there's you know from the very beginning it's like he wants to have this reign over the city of shechem and they want him to reign over them. So they have kind of this pact together. But as we've seen, this begins to crumble and it's really going to crumble from verse 42 on because Abimelech wasn't satisfied simply with taking out Gaal. He decides he's going to take out the entire city. So beginning with verse 42 down to verse 49, we have a complete annihilation of the city of Shechem because he goes out in 42 and there's some people in the field he divides his soldiers up and in three companies they lay in wait they ambush these people and they slay them left and right and then they run to the city

gate of course the city gate was was was the the main weakness of any place i mean if you took the gate you took the city so they run to the city gate and it says that they were killing people left and right fought against the city all day finally burst 45 captures the city kills the people who are in the city and still that's not enough he he raises it that's r-a-z he tears it down flattens it and as if that's not enough he sows it with salt i mean abimelexa he's an overachiever he's gonna make sure you know i'm not gonna kill everybody and i'm not just gonna tear it down i'm gonna make sure this place is so dead that the nothing's gonna grow in the soil i'm gonna sow salt in the soil yeah sowing salt is an interesting thing isn't it so in other words

scattered salt as if it were seed yeah that way uh it's dead right this was this this was not unknown in the ancient world that if in fact this is talked about in deuteronomy i think it's part of the threats of what could happen to israel some of the curses if they abandon the covenant this was not unusual in the ancient world for i mean it was like this wasn't done at every time or like if you really wanted to wipe out for good a city you you burned it and then you took salt and you spread it everywhere because of course nothing's going to grow so it was like uh i don't know what you'd call it it's more than adding insult to injury i mean it's just like stamping out any future life in this particular place salt in the wound man salt in the wound yeah i whenever

whenever you read the details of something like this like i can't help but think okay so you go in like what a what a massive undertaking like you know the way about the city and then what you're bringing wagons of salt like how much salt is a city man like how much how much salt I just seeded my front yard, and so I wanted to make sure I had enough. So I bought seed. I didn't buy nearly enough. I had to go get more. It took so much seed for me to do my front yard, to seed my front yard,

just bags and bags of seed. This is not a big yard. I mean, I live in a regular neighborhood. This is not a big yard. How much salt do you need to sow salt on this city? i mean a lot of salt i'm assuming a lot of salt yeah yeah and it just shows the intensity too of uh i don't know if it's hatred or if it's just uh uh meanness or what it is on the part of bimelec it's a it's clinging to power man like you're just willing to do whatever it takes to

keep it you think you have it and you're willing to go to just extreme lengths to make sure that Because this kind of thing seems like not just a, like, okay, I'm really, obviously you're really angry about this. And so this is your, this is sort of your wrath being poured out. But whenever this sort of stuff happens, you also have to think that this is also is supposed to serve as a deterrent from anybody else that gets a similar idea, right? So you go all out the first time so that if anyone else has any ideas when they're drunk about doing anything, they'll think twice about it. They're like, well, that went crazy last time. We don't want that. Yeah. This is like the Roman version of crucifixion, right?

That was the reason they crucified people as a deterrent. So this is, yeah, it's probably, in Abimelech's mind, He's probably thinking, yeah, you know, I've got a long future ahead of me, and I'm going to be conquering more cities. So I want to make sure that I send a message. You go against me, I'm going to tear you down. I'm going to sow salt in your fields. And that's certainly a powerful message. You know, one thing that is a little bit unclear at this point, I mean, not unclear,

But you get the impression that at this point, everything, everything around the city is gone. But as we as we continue to read, we learn that there was actually one part of the city that still remained. So we're going to we'll finish out with that. And this is this is where part of Jotham's fable comes true. It says that so that the leaders of Shechem, they'd gone into the tower. So a lot of cities had these towers, and I guess this was connected with the temple, the temple of the god El-Berit, the god of the covenant, which is elsewhere called Baal-Berit. So Baal-Berit, El-Berit, whatever, same pantheon, they go into the tower because they're trying to get away, of course, from the fighting. They're trying to save themselves.

So Abimelech finds out that they're at the tower of Shechem. so abimelech says to his men follow me and they go to this place that's unidentifiable it's called mount zalmon zalmon is uh the word for like deep darkness it's connected with like when we say the valley of the shadow of death it's connected with that particular word so we don't know where it was anyway some mountain around there which had uh which had trees and he uh he takes his axe and cuts down a branch from the trees puts it on his shoulder and he says to his guys you do what i do and hurry up about it so all these guys take their axes they cut down these branches and then they follow abimelech and they stack these branches around the inner chamber of the

of the temple slash tower and they set them on fire and of course you know the rest of the story everybody in the Tower of Shechem is dead, either from flames or from smoke inhalation. It says here that about a thousand men and women died. Now, keep in mind that this particular death is a match for the prophetic fable that Jotham told, because he finished that up after he told his fable, and he's haranguing the people of Shechem for choosing a bramble king to reign over them. He finishes that up by saying, let fire come out from Abimelech and consume the men of Shechem. So that's precisely what happened. These guys die in their tower and they're killed by the very, well, there's also irony here.

So they're killed by the very one they chose to be their king. And they're also killed in the very temple from which they took the money to pay him to kill his half brothers so he could be their king i mean this is all kind of a i mean we can talk about this in a minute once we finish the story but i mean this is all just a great example of of very often the bad stuff that happens to us happens to us because of the very situations that we willingly created right yeah this is a it's kind of a romans once a kind of situation right god just kind of hands them over this is what you wanted okay you can have it and now look what happens you would think that the children of israel later on i know i keep going

back to this uh but it's my show so you would think that when the time comes for them to ask for a king that they'd be like you know what there was a time where we sort of had like a a setup leader guy and man that was not great did not go well that was not great so maybe we should maybe we should think about this for a second but it shows you i mean obviously this is generations later but it shows you that you can be pretty ignorant of your history and uh because i you know i mean i read this and i'm like man this would make you think we're not doing this king thing ever yeah yeah well i'd get all political on you and uh use some modern modern examples of people's short-term memory but uh people can draw their own conclusions there but man isn't that

true though i mean it does not take it doesn't take 200 years or 100 years or 400 years uh for people to forget oh that was a bad idea yeah let's try it again yeah yeah it's a man if uh you know people define insanity by like doing the same thing over and over and uh expecting a different result if that is the true definition of insanity then humanity is insane because that's exactly what we do yeah and it's not i mean what's interesting about it is actually it mirrors what happens when Israel gets a king in a lot of ways as far as you've got siblings rising up against siblings trying to take people out so they can get ahead in the lineage and this kind of stuff happens all over the place then after this yeah yeah I mean it's a yeah it's kind of

like the book of judges just sets the pattern and the book of kings just continues it over and over and over again I mean we've got long hair to Absalom he he's taken out a brother or half brother uh you've got all sorts of intrigue in in the palace after that yeah it's uh you got queens taking out sons uh around the time of josiah anyway just yeah one thing after another there's a lot of bloodshed because well as we talked about last time that's what happens with power right yep when you're thirsty for when you're thirsty for power then uh you're thirsty for poison and you see what happens with that okay so let's uh let's take out abimelech it's Time for Abimelech to die.

So he's going to die at a place called Thebez. That's where he goes next. We don't know why. I'm assuming because he just destroyed Shechem. He's like, oh, you know what? I need some more people to rule over. I just killed all those people. So I'm going to go capture this city.

So he does. But we have a repeat of the tower situation. There's a strong tower in this city, too. And everybody runs into it. shut themselves in and they go up on the roof of the tower and here's where things get interesting so remember like he's he thought well that pretty worked pretty well at shechem so i guess i'll do that again it says he he tried to burn it down too but what he was not counting on was a uh a certain woman with uh some some pretty good biceps on her because she was able to pick up

an upper millstone which was uh which was no no small stone i mean these things are these things are pretty heavy so she picks this up and uh hurls it over the side and it lands on a bimbleback's head crushing his skull now evidently this was like he didn't die immediately so i mean don't get the don't get the impression or the image in your head he's just like you know gruesomely his brains are all over the place he's he's injured seriously injured he's gonna die but he didn't die immediately from this so he doesn't want his memory to be that he was killed by a woman so he calls he's got this armor bearer close by and he says to him take out your sword and kill me lest it be said of me a woman slew me and so the young guy did

what he asked this is this is a sword this is something i just can't understand at all i mean i mean can you imagine like having such a fragile ego that that you're that as you're like you're as you like i think i'm gonna die cannot have it be said that a woman killed me that is that is crazy yeah that is crazy well it just it's like it's an insight into this personality right he's all abimelech is all about abimelech i mean there's really nobody else uh that we can tell from anywhere in his story that he's concerned about besides himself and his oversized ego but and by the way uh this this did not work yeah instead of being known as the guy that got assassinated by his armor bearer or something uh instead he's known as the guy who

was whose ego was was so fragile that he had to have his armor bearer kill him so that this actually this actually backfires because we're talking yeah we're talking about him right now did not work yeah abimelech in his wildest nightmares could not a dream that two guys uh millennia later on a podcast be pointing out that yeah well you really did get killed by a woman like sorry so your your fragile ego just gonna have to take the hit And, you know, this story was remembered in Israel because, this is probably something that some of you have come upon, much later in the time of David, after David gets Bathsheba pregnant, sorry. Of course, he sends the note about Uriah to have Uriah stationed near the city wall. Then Uriah is killed.

Well, when the general is sending the messenger back with this particular description of what happens, he actually refers to this incident. It's his first in the second Samuel chapter, chapter 11. So when the general sends a messenger back and he's describing what he wants him to tell David, he says, look, these things happen, right? Remember what happened to Abimelech? He was close to the city wall. and a woman threw a millstone down, and it crushed his head.

Now, this is kind of an aside. I think that the general suspected what was happening back in Jerusalem and used that particular example of Abimelech being killed by a woman as kind of a jab at David because this whole situation had been created because of his lust after a woman. Yeah, you could be wrong. It's a conjecture on my part, but it's a little bit of an irony there in 2 Samuel 11. But anyway, my main point there was that this incident was remembered,

and Abimelech will, for the rest of history, be remembered as a bloodthirsty, brother-murdering, really fragile, egoed megalomania who got killed by a woman throwing a millstone down. So far in Judges, we do see women doing the Lord's work when it comes to taking out some guys. Because the text goes on to say, Thus God returned the evil of Abimelech, which he had committed against his father in killing his seventy brothers. So God sort of takes credit for this wiping out of Abimelech. So this woman was not just someone who didn't like Abimelech,

and this is how the story went, but we're told in the text that this was the Lord's work. So we don't know about this woman, but apparently, much like driving a tent peg through someone's head, this says, watch your head around these women, man. If you're out there doing nonsense, God will send a woman just to take you out.

Yeah. I wrote a, when was that? About three weeks ago? Anyway, I wrote an article for 1517, about three weeks ago, something like that. I can't remember the exact title, but something like, where's the picture of Jesus crushing skulls? I don't know. If you're interested, you can check it out.

But I refer to this particular story because I realized this a while back, that if you trace through the biblical story, all the instances of people getting their heads crushed, or not just people, but even like Leviathan gets his head crushed in the Psalms, they're always the enemies of God's people. and sometimes of course women are the ones who are who are doing this but it all it all begins in genesis 3 15 right the seed's going to crush the head of the serpent and if we know anything about the enemies of god's people throughout the scriptures these enemies are just basically the mask of the devil so the devil is using these people like abimelech or like pharaoh or like uh the the guy that jail took out uh god is using them i mean the devil is using him to to fight against god's people and they're all basically when they're when when each of them dies it's kind of a uh it's kind of a small picture of the bigger picture of what god is going to do through

the messiah when he crushes the head of the serpent yeah i mean even and even the promise given that you know the seed will crush the head of the serpent there's obviously a woman involved so it's not surprising that many times God uses a woman to do this because God is in fact going the promise is actually made to a woman and certainly God is going to

have a woman involved in this bringing about the seed to crush the head of the ultimate serpent which is death and the devil right so it's not really we shouldn't be surprised that God's sort of commissioning women to carry this out

sometimes because ultimately he is going to commission a woman to bring forth the seed yeah yeah i mean we have that in genesis 3 15 right yeah when he's talking he's talking specifically to eve i mean when he says you know her seed he's talking about about eve yeah he ain't talking to adam no he ain't talking to adam yeah so it's it's pretty cool uh i i love things like that because it these are small examples of how everything is woven together. And when you begin to see the big picture, you can see the little pictures

and the place that they take up in that bigger picture. All right, we got about four minutes left. So what I want to do is we're going to cover two more judges. Believe it or not, we're going to cover the entire story of two more judges in the remaining four minutes do it so so hang on here we go it won't take long actually so we got two more people we've already encountered a couple of these people earlier on you know some of these judges sometimes are called minor judges minor only in the sense that a minor amount of the

story is devoted to them so one judge is tola he uh he had kind of a strange name uh tola means worm so i don't know what his mom was thinking but don't yeah tola means worm so she was a little agitated maybe it was a she's a little agitated maybe it was a bad bad pregnancy yeah maybe it was the child birth didn't go well and she's like call him worm yeah not a playground safe name but that's that was what it was called maybe that's you know maybe grew up tough who knows but it is after abimelech uh tola who uh was the son of puah the son of dodo we have all sorts of strange names here tola puah dodo and they're of the tribe of issachar so he tola he arose to save israel that's probably why he's saved he's probably a tough dude he's like the boy named

sue right he just grew up tough with a name like worm you're gonna be tough when you're when you're when you grow up yeah he's got he's got dodo in his lineage too so that's not that's not the greatest no no well anyway we don't know anything about this guy except uh where he lived lived in shamir in the hill country of ephraim and he was a tribe of issachar and he judged israel for 23 years and then he died and he was buried this might be that's all we know this might be the best way to be the more details you get the worse it is so so we with this guy you can just assume that everything must have been okay yeah yeah i mean if i was gonna be a judge that's all i'd want to be said about me yeah yeah you don't want chad the son of carson lived in texas

and he judged israel then he died he was buried that's it that's it that's all we need to know and then uh it's so much different we have a little more detail when the next guy's name is uh ja ear or yacht ear in in hebrews way we'd say that and he's from gilead and he judged uh just one year less than his predecessor 22 years but get this this guy was never able to keep his refrigerator full because he had 30 sons i mean when my son my son's 19 now uh but when he was uh like well he still eats a lot when he was like 16 17 he could like consume 200 of groceries in a single afternoon it's like he never ever got full well imagine having 30 30 sons well anyway this guy has 30 sons which you know of course he would have had multiple wives

and they have 30 donkeys okay it's good one donkey for each son and they had 30 cities so each i guess each son they divvied up the cities you get a city and you get a donkey and you get a city you get a donkey and all of these together it's kind of a uh i don't know like a confederation of cities i suppose they were called uh which just means the the towns of your ear and then he died and he was and he was was buried by the way this is important uh we'll finish here this is important background this isn't the only verse but like when we get to palm sunday and you hear about jesus riding into jerusalem on the back of a donkey uh that was how rulers rode very often so this is one of those verses that alofka quoted for kind of the the

eastern background of the use of donkeys so the riding on the donkey was not like was not uh the the visualization of someone who wasn't a king but actually that was what kings rode on they didn't ride on war horses so yeah yeah because if you're just reading this you might think this reads kind of strange because you're like 30 sons who rode on 30 donkeys and had 30 cities and you're like wow okay one of these things is not like the other this is right we went from like they all had donkeys and they all had cities and you're like okay uh and it doesn't and and this is why you know to your point it doesn't say that they all that they had 30 donkeys it says it says that they rode on 30 donkeys and so like sort of baked into that sentence is that

they that they were regarded as rulers of these cities then right yeah that's it that's it so he kind of spread out his rule among his uh among his sons and that's uh well that's 40 minutes and that's all we know about those two guys we're going to pick up uh next week with uh israel's sins imagine that yeah strange topic never talked about that before yeah i've got a great header uh for next week right here and and my translation here it just says the further disobedience and oppression that seems accurate seems pretty accurate all right i guess we'll find out what it says all right guys uh if you have enjoyed the podcast it's been helpful to you you can go to 1517.org go to the donate page you can become a contributor makes it all possible thank you so

much to those of you who do that uh also if you're interested in uh in the book paul and the resurrection testing the apostolic testimony bolster up uh your faith in the resurrection uh you can get that i'll put a link in the show notes just released from 1517 all right chad i will see you next week all right we'll be here We'll see you next time.