followHIM - 2 Kings 17-25 -- Part 1 : Dr. Joshua M. Sears

Episode Date: July 9, 2022

How is 2 Kings like the Book of Mormon? Dr. Joshua Sears explores how the Deuteronomistic History and the Book of Mormon are parallel in theme, language, and idea. We also discuss how the Ten Tribes became lost by forgetting they are covenant Israel.Please rate and review the podcast!Show Notes (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese): https://followhim.co/old-testament/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpodcastYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FollowHimOfficialChannelThanks to the followHIM team:Steve & Shannon Sorensen: Executive ProducersDavid & Verla Sorensen: SponsorsDr. Hank Smith: Co-hostJohn Bytheway: Co-hostDavid Perry: ProducerKyle Nelson: Marketing & SponsorLisa Spice: Client Relations, Show Notes/TranscriptsJamie Neilson: Social Media, Graphic DesignWill Stoughton: Rough Video EditorAriel Cuadra: Spanish TranscriptsKrystal Roberts: French TranscriptsIgor Willians: Portuguese Transcripts"Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" by Marshall McDonaldhttps://www.marshallmcdonaldmusic.com/products/let-zion-in-her-beauty-rise-piano

Welcome to Follow Him, a weekly podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come Follow Me study. I'm Hank Smith. And I'm John, by the way. We love to learn. We love to laugh. We want to learn and laugh with you. As together, we follow Him. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Follow Him. I am your host, Hank Smith, and I am here with my co-host, and I'm going to describe him using a verse from the block of scripture we're going to study today. This is 2 Kings 23, 25. And like unto him was there no co-host before him, that turned to the Lord with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might, neither after him arose any like him. John, by the way, that describes you as a co-host.

There was no co-host before him, like unto him or after him. I can never live up to your descriptions here, Hank. So I'll just nod and smile. Yeah. That was actually a description of King Josiah, but I thought it fit you perfectly, John. We're going to be in the book of second Kings today, and we have a returning guest who is a fan favorite. John, tell everybody who's with us. We're so glad to have Dr. Joshua Sears back with us today. He grew up in Southern California, served his mission in the Chile Osono Mission, received a bachelor's in ancient Near Eastern studies from BYU. He taught at the Missionary Training Center and volunteered as an EMT. He

received a master's degree from Ohio State University and a PhD in Hebrew Bible at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include Israelite prophecy, marriage and families in the ancient world, and the publication history of Latter-day Saint scripture. He has presented at regional and national meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, BYU Education Week, the Sidney B. Sperry Symposium, and the Leonardo Museum Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls. His wife Alice is from Hong Kong and plays in the Bells at Temple Square. They live in

Linden, Utah with their five children and Dr. Sears. Joshua, we're really glad to have you back. Thanks for coming back again. Yeah, happy to be here. This is so great. John, I got to tell you, we have follow him hats and Josh was so great. He wore his to Disneyland. So as he's walking around Disneyland, he was, he was telling people about our podcast, the follow him hat. He sent me a picture. You have a lot of time in line having conversations. Yeah. Yeah. What's that hat? What's, what's that all about? Josh, I have to ask you just real quick. This just came to my head. My dad was a professional golfer, so we did a lot of golfing growing up. You are a Bible scholar.

How do you do that as a dad? Do you say, kids, gather around. We're all going to learn some Hebrew. Do you give it to your kids at all? How do you do it? Yeah, mostly we spend our time doing Star Wars and Marvel and things like that, but we do like to throw in Hebrew Bible trivia. So they've learned a song for the Greek alphabet and the Hebrew alphabet, and I'm trying to gently nudge them in that direction. That's awesome. Josh, how old are your kids? They are now 13, 11, 9, 6, and 3. That is a busy window. I will say this, John, I work with Josh. Our offices are maybe what, 10 yards apart. And he is one of the most delightful people you will ever meet. He is

kind, he's delightful, and he's brilliant. He is everything you'd hope he'd be when you watch him on our podcast going, wow, that guy's brilliant. I hope he's nice. He is nice. He is nice. We are in the latter half of Second Kings. How do you want to approach this? Well, I thought one thing that would be fun to do since we are at the end of Second Kings now might be fun to start by taking a step back and looking at the Old Testament a whole and figuring out where are we in terms of all the other books here? How is that all organized? How did this all kind of come together there and get a big picture sort of thing? In the Old Testament, we have two strings of books that tell the history of ancient Israel. And I think in order to help us understand how this was put together, it might

be helpful to actually compare it to the Book of Mormon, because a lot of us are more familiar with the way the Book of Mormon works than we are with the Old Testament. So if you start with the Book of Mormon, you can go, okay, I can see that there. And then it might make a little more sense when you turn to the Old Testament. So the Book of Mormon, we've got a very similar situation where we have two strings of books that tell the history of the Nephites. And they're written by different people, different times, and they've all kind of been put together now. So one of the strings of history we have are the books, First Nephi, Second Nephi, Jacobinus, Jeremiah. Those six books are the small plates of Nephi. And it tells kind of a history of what happened with the Nephites. Then we have

another string of history books written by Mormon. And that's Lehi, which we lost with Martin Harris in the last manuscript there. But what we still have after that is Mosiah, Alma, Helaman, 3rd Nephi, 4th Nephi, and Mormon. Right there. So two different sets of books written under different circumstances that tell the history of the Nephites. One covers more history than the other. That's okay. But they're kind of both attempting to do this, tell a record of what's going on with the Nephites there. So that's kind of comparable to what we have in the Old Testament. Again, we have two strings of books. Your first set of the history is what we've just been finishing reading. That's Deuteronomy, then Joshua, then Judges, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings.

Scholars see that as kind of a unit of books that were kind of written with similar themes by the same people, kind of telling an overarching history of ancient Israel. And then your second string of books is First Chronicles, Second Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah. And those all kind of go together as well. They're written in the same mode there. That second section is telling the same history? Yeah, not in the same way. And it's doing it for different reasons. It's written from a different point of view, but it's kind of like an alternate history to the other one you have. So you shouldn't read Kings and then go straight into Chronicles and think you're reading the same story. Someone actually started, took it from the top and restarted there, which again is similar to in

the Book of Mormon. If we still had the Book of Lehi, which Martin Harris lost, you'd be starting from Lehi and moving on through the history. But we also have 1 Nephi, 2 Nephi, taking it from the top and going through the history from a different point of view. I remember finding out that the book of Lehi was not written by Lehi, but by Mormon, and everything clicked into place for me. I was like, oh, okay, I got it. And the way these histories work is they tend to be written in stages. It's not one guy sitting down at one point and he does everything beginning to end.

For example, with Mormon, Mormon writes Lehi, Mosiah, Alma, Helaman, 3 Nephi, 4 Nephi, Mormon. You have one kind of stage there where he's got the history as he sees it. And then Mormon dies. And then it's up to someone who comes later to kind of keep the story going. So then you get an update by Moroni. He adds some chapters to the end of the little Book of Mormon there where he says, yeah, Mormon died and then this is what happened and the Nephites fell, kind of updates the story further. And then he adds his own stuff, the Book of Ether, the Book of Moroni, and he writes the title page, which then gets stuck before everything else. So you have this initial layer written by Mormon and then a later bunch of additions written by Moroni that update the story and add some

stuff. You have a similar thing going on with this history in the Old Testament, going from Deuteronomy through 2 Kings. It seems to be written in layers just like that. And scholars call that collection the Deuteronomistic history. Try saying that 10 times fast. But it gets its name from Deuteronomy because people noticed that the language and the themes and the emphasis in the book of Deuteronomy are woven noticed that the language and the themes and the emphasis in the book of Deuteronomy are woven throughout the books that follow there of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. They're just full of Deuteronomic language and ideas and themes in there. So we call this the Deuteronomistic history. And again, like I said, it seems to be written in a couple

of layers. There's an initial layer, and then there's one or more layers that are added on top of it to update the story further and add some things earlier just like you get in the book of mormon josh does the chronicles ezra nehemiah have a nice long name like deuteronomistic the chroniclers history if you want to call it something the chroniclers it's shorter right and we don't know who wrote that and so we just call them the chronicler okay. Okay. Right. Really fancy. What would you say the difference is between the two? The Deuteronomistic history, one common way of looking at it is that an initial layer is written during the reign of Josiah, which is the guy that we're going to talk about today. And then that there's an update that happens shortly after the Babylonian exile begins,

where they, like Moroni, goes back and kind of finishes up the story, you know, of the fall of the Nephites, where they say, yeah, Judah actually didn't turn into this beautiful golden age like we thought was going to happen under Josiah. Jerusalem was actually destroyed and we've been exiled. And then it kind of updates that. And then it adds some things earlier to kind of foreshadow that a little bit and tie the story together. So one popular way to interpret this is, again, that initial layer during Josiah's time, and then an update during the exile, maybe

in one or two layers. The Chronicles by contrast is written much later, maybe a couple hundred years later, like the fifth century, the fourth century. It's after the exile's already over and they've all returned home already. So they're writing from a much later perspective. And so they write things differently based on that kind of different perspective they have. And the chronicler has different kind of aims than the Deuteronomistic history. So for example, in the Deuteronomistic history, it tracks the stories of both the Northern Kingdom, Israel, and the Southern Kingdom, Judah. It bounces back and forth between those as it goes through Samuel and Kings. The chronicler doesn't care about the Northern Kingdom. So he basically takes Samuel and Kings and chops out stuff he's not interested. So he chops out all the Northern

Kingdom stories. So that's why there's no Elijah, for example, in Chronicles. They just want to focus on the Southern Kingdom of Judah and its ups and downs. There's other ways in which Chronicles takes the history in Kings and kind of revises it. So here's just one more example. Deuteronomy and in the books that follow, they teach the principle that as you keep the commandments of the Lord, he'll bless you and prosper you. And if you don't, then he'll hinder your way. So it teaches that in principle, but there's a bunch of stories in the Deuteronomistic history that show contrary examples. Because like we all know, real life is kind of messy. The bad guys don't always get punished right away.

And good people sometimes have really rough lives where it doesn't live up to what you might think is the ideal based on that principle. Deuteronomistic history is comfortable showing those kind of messy real world examples. In Chronicles, by contrast, whoever wrote it apparently was really uncomfortable with these examples that don't show the principle working. So they go through and tweak all the stories so that bad guys always get their comeuppance right away and good guys always get blessed. And it modifies the story so that they better align with the ideal theology.

So you see a bunch of little differences like that in Chronicles where they're trying to show those kinds of things. Chronicles is also really big on David and Solomon being like the ultimate heroes. And so it goes through and takes out anything negative about those two guys. So there's no Bathsheba in Chronicles and there's no Solomon marrying the foreign wives in Chronicles. They can do no wrong. So there's ways like that in which you can see the Chronicles as things they're very sensitive about, and they're trying to kind of tweak the history to show what they want to emphasize. And then it used to be thought that maybe the same person who wrote Chronicles also wrote Ezra and Nehemiah. Today's scholarship

has kind of moved away from that, but at least they still say Ezra and Nehemiah are building off of Chronicles and responding to Chronicles and kind of written the same mindset as Chronicles. So you can kind of see those as an overarching big unit too. Kind of like the small plates of Nephi, again, is the Book of Mormon. An alternate history kind of presenting things from a different point of view. Got it. Josh, this is really helpful. Yeah. Those who compiled our Come Follow Me manual chose to stay with Kings instead of Chronicles. We are getting it where sometimes the good guy goes through troubles and sometimes the bad guy gets away with it for a while. And Chronicles does have amazing things to add. I hope everyone reads it at one point in their life.

It does have some stories that are not in Kings. It is meant to be an alternative history. It takes it from the top, starts with Adam and Eve, and then quickly covers the history up to the King Saul and then slows down again right there. It is meant to kind of take it from the top and give an alternate reading and understanding of Israel's history. And then the irony is whoever brought together our canon of the entire Old Testament then took the Deuteronomistic history and the chronicler's history and stuck them all under the same cover. So now we get both versions of the history all together, just like in the Book of Mormon, right? You get the small plates history and you get Mormon's history and they're all kind of together there. Yeah. I wonder what the chronicler would say if I said, hey, we got them all and you come second. And he's like, oh.

And we skip you. Yeah, because we already covered that. It's like, oh, I gave you a better version. And then after that, after Ezra and Nehemiah, do we come back together? And then we have Esther, then... The way that everything is organized in our Christian Bibles is that we get a bunch of history books. So we'll get the Samuel and the Kings and the Chronicles. And then we move on. It's kind of organized by the type of writing. So you'll get a bunch of books that are things like Psalms and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. And then you get a bunch of prophet books that are just all organized together.

So the organization is definitely not chronological. The way it is, though, it's kind of nice. You can read, you know, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and get that historical framework. And then when you get to the prophetic books like Isaiah or Jeremiah, those prophet books take place, you know, at different points of the history. But if you have the historical framework in mind and then figure out where this prophet lives, it can help you kind of situate yourself.

They're not in chronological order. So you can take these prophetic books, come back to your history and say, where does this fit in exactly in the history? Do you want to jump in now, Josh? What do you want to do? So we're at the very end of second Kings here, which means we're at the end of the Deuteronomistic history. And I really love these chapters. I'm glad I get to do this today because the two main Kings we're going to talk about are Hezekiah and Josiah. And you should know in the Sears family, our firstborn son, we named him Josiah after this guy here. And my brother, Mark, and his wife, Kimberly Sears, they named their first child Hezekiah after this guy here. So in the Sears family, these two kings

are really big. I like to tell my son, Hezekiah is both your cousin and he's your great, great, great grandfather. Just have that kind of joke there. That's fantastic. I'll confess my first scriptural love is not the Old Testament. It's the Book of Mormon. One reason that I took all these degrees in the Old Testament is because you can't get a degree in the Book of Mormon. And I thought this was the closest you can get to that. It's taking to an Old Testament degrees. And there's so many connections to the Book of Mormon we can find in these stories, because the history that we're going to cover right here is exactly where the Book of Mormon opens in the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah. So it's both going to set the

background for Lehi and Nephi and what was going on in Jerusalem when they started. And later in the Book of Mormon, you get to the, in second Nephi, that huge Isaiah block from second Nephi 12 through 24. And that's daunting for a lot of people Nephi, that huge Isaiah block from second Nephi 12 through 24. And that's daunting for a lot of people. And the reason that Isaiah block is daunting is because it's hard to make sense of what is he talking about? But those Isaiah chapters, most of them are a poetic description of the story of Hezekiah that we're getting right here. And if you know the story in kind of the simple way of telling it, the prose text here from Kings, then you get to the poetic retelling of it in Isaiah. And it makes a lot more sense if you know what the background story is. So a few points here, I think I'll draw those

connections. I'll go to second Nephi really quick and be like, Oh, see, that's what this is talking about. And then you go, Oh, that makes a lot more sense now. Great. So I think that's a lot of fun. This can help us, you know, understand the Book of Mormon even better, which I'm always a big fan of. So. Absolutely. Since we're wrapping up, let's just do a quick Israelite history for anyone who's saying, oh, I could, I could use a review. So we came out of Egypt. Joshua leads us into the promised land. We have that book of judges, which was really fun and kind of crazy. Then Samuel comes along as the prophet and Israel decides they want a king. And we had our three monarchs, Saul, David, and Solomon. And then Josh, what happens after that? So you had some tensions between the tribes in the north

and tribes in the bottom up to this point. And then kind of everything broke loose when Solomon died. Solomon's son couldn't keep it together. So there's a civil war and they split into two countries. They're all Israelites and they all are obeying the law of Moses and they're all worshiping Jehovah, but they have such political differences that they have separate governments. And for a few hundred years, these two kingdoms coexist. I kind of like to call them frenemies. They're sometimes friends, sometimes enemies. When they have a common enemy to fight, they'll kind of team up.

And sometimes they're peaceful with each other, but a lot of times they're in conflict, right? So it's like a cousin at a family reunion that you just, you know, every time you see him, you know, this isn't going to end well. A little feud. So you have the northern kingdom called Israel and the southern kingdom called Judah. In the book of Kings here, we've been bouncing back and forth between, okay, here's what's going on in the North.

Now back down to the South here. It's what's going on in North and now back on the South. So it's always kind of overlapping a little bit. So at the point where we open up here in second King 17, we're at the point where the Northern kingdom is about to go down. It's about to be destroyed and be no more. The Southern kingdom is going to last for about a hundred years more, but by the end of the book, that's going to go down too. So these chapters cover some huge major drama happening and a lot of death and destruction

as the, both of these kingdoms kind of collapse on each other. And we get the scattering of Israel and all that is right here. So these are really some pivotal moments. One of the reasons I brought that up, Josh, is because you talked about the Isaiah chapters and just understanding that the Northern kingdom is brought up in Isaiah and it's usually called Ephraim. Yeah. Isaiah, he'll call it Israel. He'll call it Ephraim, like he said, or he'll call it Samaria because that's their capital.

Right. And you pick that up. And then the other one he'll call Judah or Jerusalem, right? If you can pick that up, that will help you understand Isaiah. If you just understand there's a Northern and Southern kingdom and that Isaiah has different names for them both, you'll go, oh, I know who he's talking to. Yeah. And Isaiah, he's not an abstract observer of all these events. He's going to be in these stories as a character. Usually we don't think of Isaiah as a character. He's more like this vague, important, powerful prophet who wrote

the book that's hard. But he's a character here. He lived exactly at the time when the northern kingdom is getting destroyed and the southern kingdom almost gets destroyed and manages to squeak by and make it that other hundred years. But he's witnessing lots of crisis, lots of trauma. And that comes out both in the book of Isaiah and in these chapters here. Our listeners may have heard the phrase the divided kingdom. So that's a good way to, after King Solomon, Israel, 10 tribes in the north, Judah, two tribes in the south and frenemies. I like that. And who is Isaiah?

An advisor to kings of Judah. Is that right? So he's living in the southern kingdom and advising kings of Judah, but he's there and knows what's going on. Yeah. And you can see that in the book of Isaiah, most of his discussions are about the southern kingdom of Judah. He will occasionally single out the north and talk to them, but he's mostly addressing the people he lives with, southern kingdom. So when you recognize that he lives in Jerusalem, Isaiah has some close proximity to the kings. There's a Jewish tradition. He actually married the king's daughter. We don't have that in the scripture. So take that for what you will, but the kings talk to him, he goes and talks to them. So he seems to be very tied to the royal court. It's always a little bit funny to me when they want a king and Samuel says,

this is a bad idea. They end up having three kings and it is a bad idea all three times. And then instead of going back to the Lord, they're like, why don't we do two kings at once? We'll just have a king in the North and a king in the south. Like, let's make it- Yeah, double trouble. How about we make it worse? And on that, Hank, one important thing that's important to understand in these stories is way back in 2 Samuel 7, God had made this special covenant with David that we call the Davidic covenant. A lot of what he told him there is going to drive the way it describes these

stories. So if we can jump back there just to read a couple of verses again, remind ourselves what happened in 2 Samuel 7. This is where David says, hey, Lord, I want to build a house for you, meaning a temple, right? And then God gives him a revelation back that plays on this word house with different meanings right there. So God says, no, you're not going to build me a house. You won't build me a temple that your son Solomon's going to do that. But here's what I'll do for you, David. And so this is second Samuel seven, verse 12. And when thy days be fulfilled and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee, which shall proceed out of thy bowels. And I will establish his kingdom. He shall build an house for my name.

So this is Solomon building the house for God, the temple, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father and he shall be my son. And this is going to be language we'll see elsewhere in the Old Testament where God is like a father figure to the king in Jerusalem and the king in Jerusalem is a son figure to God. They have a very close working relationship there. And if he commit iniquity, I will chase in him with the rod of men and with the stripes of the children of men. But my mercy shall not depart away from him as I took it from Saul,

whom I put away before thee. So what he's saying there is, you know, Saul, he messed up and not only did he lose his throne, but his dynasty lost the throne. There's no dynasty that follows Saul where his son and grandson stay as kings. But he's saying, even if Solomon messes up, I'll chastise him personally, but I'm not

going to take away the dynasty from his line. They will keep ruling. And then he continues, thy house. So now to David, we got a word play in house here. House meaning your dynasty. Thy house and thy kingdom shall be established forever before thee, thy throne shall be established forever. So you get this promise here that David's dynasty is going to continue on the throne of Judah forever. And

you see this dramatically play out in the history of the two kingdoms. In the north, they've got dynasties galore. Usually a dynasty lasts two, three generations max, and then someone kills the king and takes over and starts a new dynasty. So it's always in chaos. Tons of different family lines that are ruling the northern kingdom. In the south, by contrast, it's always the Davidic heir. It's a Davidic king, someone from David's line that's ruling over the southern kingdom of Judah. And then that's going to become a really important issue at the end of second king. So we'll hold that thought and kind of come back to it. That's interesting. I didn't even know that. So kings always could trace back to David in the Southern kingdom.

Yeah. In the South, but not in the North. Interesting. Sometimes I read scripture this way. I read it and I say, don't do this. Go back to God. Don't have kings. Go back to the way the Lord wanted to do it. And every time I read it, they keep having kings. Well, I figured my ancestors in heaven looking down at me being like, what are you doing? I've seen this up again. So what goes around comes around, Hank. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's definitely true. I'll tell you that. So now 2 Kings 17 opens up. Are we going to be focusing on the Southern kingdom then? Well, 2 Kings 17 is the fall of the Northern kingdom. So that's what we're

starting with today. So it opens with this last King of Israel, Hosea, and he comes on, but, and here's the background of why the Northern king falls. We're at a point in history now where Israel's prospects are always going to be tied up into these big, bad, powerful empires over in Mesopotamia in the East there. So right now, the big bad empire is Assyria. The way Assyria does its empire thing is they want to go and conquer smaller kingdoms around them and make them vassal states, which is a fancy way of saying they make a contract, a treaty, they call it a covenant. And the small kingdom has to promise to send them a boatload of money every year, the taxes. And in return, Assyria promises not to destroy you. You pay us the

money each year, we'll make sure nothing bad happens to you. And Assyria has got a huge military. And so they kind of enforce this. Every year they're kind of expanding and adding new people, making these vassal things, and they get this cash cow coming from all these places. So that's how Assyria works. And so they have previously conquered the Northern Kingdom to the point where they say, okay, you've got to agree now, pay us a bunch of money and we'll leave you alone. Israel agreed to do this, but when Hoshea comes to the throne, he rebels against the vassal treaty. This is in 17 verse 4.

The king of Assyria found conspiracy in Hoshea. He's plotting against Assyria, even though he had agreed before he's going to do what they say. And the thing with the vassal treaties is they have a clause at the end that says, if you break the vassal treaty, we will come destroy you. That's the threat hanging over their heads. So Assyria decides to do exactly that. So in verse five, then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land and went up to Samaria, that's the capital city, and besieged it three years. In the ninth year of Hosea, the king of Assyria took Samaria, that's the capital city, and besieged it three years. In the ninth year of Hosea,

the king of Assyria took Samaria and carried Israel away into Assyria and placed them in Hala and in Habor by the river Gozan and in the city of the Medes. What that's talking about is Assyria would, if you just wipe out every man, woman, and child, that's not the best move for them economically for Assyria. So what they do is they destroy your country, but then they'll scoop up a bunch of the population and resettle them somewhere else in the Assyrian empire where they can plant crops and kind of grow again. But now that they're not in their homeland, the kind of oomph to revel is kind of taken out of them. They got the wind taken out of their sails. So they're just going to grow their crops, try to get by, give the Assyrians

some money and everybody's happy, right? So they have this process of exile, of relocating people. And so they shuffle people all around the Assyrian empire. So they get a huge chunk of the Israelites here and resettle them in other places. And I've sometimes heard people say, oh, we don't know where the lost 10 tribes went. Well, we do at least initially, it tells us right here. Hala is over by Nineveh in Assyria. Habor is in northeastern Syria. And then the cities of the Medes is like somewhere in modern Iran over there. So they settle in various places. And it historical reality is that they just, they lose themselves is what ends up happening. They lose their identity. They forget that they're Israelites. They integrate with the local populations and they just forget the God of Israel and they kind of just lose their covenant identity. They just diffuse out there. This is the origin story for what we call the lost 10 tribes. Like these people are out there now kind of scattered and spread among all the nations of the earth eventually. So I think most of our listeners, they've probably

have heard the Babylonian captivity, but this is before that. And we generally call it Assyrian captivity, what, 722, 721 BC? Yeah, this is about 722 or so. This is when the 10 tribes get carried away. The Babylonian captivity is coming later, which is what Lehi prophesied about before he left. Exactly. So this is when the northern kingdom is destroyed. The southern kingdom pretty soon here we'll see is almost destroyed, but they do manage to survive another hundred years. And then Babylon will be the big bad empire then that will destroy the southern kingdom. Assyrians first, then Babylonians.

It's an alphabetical order. If that helps. That does help. That's good. Josh, we learn in the Book of Mormon, and I don't know if it shows up as much in the Bible. You can let us know. If you read Jacob 5, the Lord says, I'm going to scatter Israel in order to save it. Does that idea come up here, or does it just look like pure punishment for them turning away? Well, I'm really glad you brought that up up because the way that we understand the Abrahamic covenant is God assigned this family line, Israel,

that in thee and in thy seed, all the nations of the earth will be blessed. Nephi makes this point explicitly in 1 Nephi 22. God cannot bless all the nations of the earth unless Israel goes to all the nations of the earth. Especially, you know, this is pre-internet, pre-phone, pre-everything. It's all missionary work is all face-to-face contact in close proximity. So here's an important point. Scattering is always the plan. Israel has to move to all the nations

of the earth, but there's two ways you can get scattered. It's as if God is saying, hey, Israel, we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way. And the easy way is that you're righteous, you're keeping your covenants, and God moves you peacefully to another part of the world to set up an Israelite colony and then go bless Gentiles in your midst. Our model for this is Lehi's family in the Book of Mormon. So, for example, in verse Nephi 22, Nephi sets himself kind of in this framework. He describes that they're participating in this process of God moving Israel out to different places. So like verse, first Nephi 22, verse three, Nephi says, the house of Israel sooner or later. So again, this is inevitable, will be scattered upon all

the face of the earth and also among all nations. Verse four, and behold, there are many who are already lost from the knowledge of those who are at Jerusalem. Remember the scattering of the Northern tribes is a hundred years before Nephi. So this is very close to his day. And he says, yay, the more part of all the tribes have been led away and they're scattered to and fro upon the aisles of the sea. And whether they are, none of us know it, save we know that they have been led away. And he sets his own family story in this dynamic. They're part of this process. But for Lehi, he's not scattered because he's wicked and getting punished. He's scattered because he's righteous. And so even though

they did have some bumps along the way, because Laman and Lemuel's murmuring and all that, it was generally a nicer process than it was for some of their cousins back in Jerusalem. However, the other way you can get scattered is because you're wicked. You've lost the protection that God normally offers you if you're being righteous and God lets your enemies conquer you and carry you away forcibly to other places. That's the kind of, here's the hard way to do the scattering thing. And the book of Mormon teaches us about the good way and models that, but the Bible usually focuses on scattering in the bad way as a punishment. So I'm glad you brought out that contrast there because the Book of Mormon does shed some additional light on this and show

us that scattering is inevitable. It's got to happen. It's part of the Lord's purposes, but the choice is up to them, whether they're keeping their covenants and working with God, or whether they're going to go kicking and screaming into the other places and do it the bad way. With my classes, I hope I'm saying this right. I like to call it a fortunate scattering because it's the way that God is going to bless all the families of the world, like you said in the Abrahamic covenant. But the Lehi seed was scattered to preserve a remnant of the seed of Joseph, a different reason for scattering. But either way, it's going to bless the families of the world. This is helpful. And the Book of Mormon, if you read carefully, a lot of people made the case that part of why

Lehi's led to the Americas in the first place is to set up this little mini Israel, an Israelite colony, and do missionary work. If you read between the lines in the Book of Mormon, it seems pretty clear that there were people when they arrived, Native American Gentiles. We know archaeologically too. We know that there's people living from Canada, Chile by the time Lehi's family gets there. And there's places in the Book of Mormon that if you read carefully, hints that they're doing this. So for example, 2 Nephi 6-10 has Jacob's speech that he gives to the Nephites in the city of Nephi. A lot of the dynamic of the Isaiah quotes that he uses in the discussion he has is on the relationship between Israelites and Gentiles and the blessings that Gentiles can receive as

they're adopted into the house of Israel, gathered into Israel. If you think about it, the speech makes no sense if everyone in the audience is an Israelite. Maybe thousands of years in the future, this is a theory maybe, but it makes a lot of sense if you assume he's got a mixed audience and part of what he's doing is saying, hey, you Gentiles that we've met here, come join us. Get the blessings of the covenant that you can have by being numbered with the house of Israel, which is us. You'll help us out. We'll help you out. And this will be a great thing. So the Nephites are kind of fulfilling their Abrahamic role as they do that there. Excellent. Josh, I also remember as a kid reading the article of

faith, number 10, and it said, we believe in the literal gathering of Israel and the restoration of the 10 tribes. And I remember thinking, I thought there was 12. And I didn't realize that the 10 were the Northern kingdom of Israel and the two were kind of set apart from each other. The way that the Northern kingdom responds to their scattering and the way the Southern kingdom responds to their scattering ends up being a little bit different. Like we said, the Northern Kingdom, they lose themselves. They lose their identity. They get lost and just kind of adopt local cultures and customs and languages. And after a few generations, they appear to forget they're even Israelites. In contrast, at least a lot of the people, the Jews, the people of the

Southern Kingdom, when they get exiled to Babylon, they hang on to that identity. They say, we are of Israel. We keep the law of Moses. We worship Jehovah. And so when they go back to Jerusalem and rebuild, they've managed to hang on to that through their exile experience. And even down through the centuries, the people, the descendants of that Southern Kingdom managed to hang on to that. So that's why in the scriptures, we often categorize those 10 tribes as one situation where we got to remind these to that. So that's why in the scriptures, we often categorize those 10 tribes as one situation where we got to remind these guys that they're even part of Israel, whereas the situation of the descendants of the Southern Kingdom is a little bit different because you don't have to remind them they're Israel. They know that. You might have to teach

them other things, but they have that identity at least. So it's a little bit of a different situation than these 10 tribes where you got to take it from the top. Excellent. I feel like we got a great background here. The Jews never seem to have lost their identity as part of the house of Israel, where everybody else is lost, like you said, not necessarily geographically, but they don't know who they are. And we get our patriarchal blessings and we discover we are part of the house of Israel. And again, it's not inevitable that they lose their identity,

but eventually a lot of them do. Like the Nephites hang on to that identity for a thousand years, but then at the end of the Book of Mormon, they go all wicked. I'm guessing it's not very long before these Lamanites are no longer saying, oh, we're children of the covenant and part of house of Israel. They just lose that. They forget. And eventually that's what happens to all of these. But the scattering again has to happen because the only way for God to gather all nations into Israel is for you have to scatter in order to gather. God's playing a very long game here. Ooh, I like that. Josh, let me ask you something. Even the Nephites themselves, they seem to lose it a little bit and Jesus has to remind them because you have Nephi talking about the scattering and the gathering. You have Jacob talking about the scattering and the gathering, You have Jacob talking about the scattering and

the gathering. And then it really doesn't come up again until third Nephi, where Jesus kind of has to remind them, oh yeah, you're scattered Israel. Do you see the Book of Mormon that way? People notice that, that in first and second Nephi, beginning of the Book of Mormon, Nephi's big on Isaiah and Jews and Gentiles and scattering and gathering. The middle part of the Book of Mormon hardly ever mentions any of that. And then at the end of the Book of Mormon, that last third with Jesus, yeah, there's a big re-emphasis on those ideas there. And part of that is all honestly to who their audience is.

Nephi knows that he's writing to people in the last days and Jesus knows that he's giving this to the Nephites to write down for people in the last days. So apparently they felt this is something we in the last days especially need to understand. That's where you get that focus. And I love that. Is it third Nephi 21 was here's, I'm going to give you a sign that you will know that the gathering has commenced and the sign is the coming forth of the book of Mormon. Yep. So we're living it. That's important for us to know. This is it.

Yeah. One thing that I repeat to my students, why is Isaiah so interested in the scattering and gathering? Why is Nephi so interested in the scattering? Why is Jacob? Why is Lehi? Because they're living it. They're right in the middle of it. To them, it's the scattering they're a part of. They're excited for that future gathering. For us, we need to know about the scattering so we can be excited to be part of the gathering. Exactly. You remember how devastated Nephi is when he sees that the Nephite civilization is going to collapse and his descendants are all going to go into apostasy. He says, I considered mine afflictions that were great above all. He's just crushed that they can't hang on to that identity all the way, but he's got a lot of hope. And he tells his brothers

about this again, first Nephi 22 in the last days, these Gentiles are going to bring this record and they're going to gather our descendants back to the covenant and they'll be restored. And he was so excited about that. I think that's what helped him get through all his grief at the bad stuff that was going to happen in the middle, knowing that these Gentiles in the last days, we're going to bring the book of Mormon back to his descendants. That gave him such hope. When I hear president Nelson calling for more missionaries and how seriously we've got to take missionary work and gather Israel, all the hopes and dreams of these prophets for thousands of years, they're pinned on us. They were counting on us to go save their children.

So it's such an amazing responsibility that we have. I hope everybody in the church has heard President Nelson talk about this. Let me just throw out a quick quote from him. He says, you can be part of something big, something grand, something majestic. You were sent to earth at this precise time, the most crucial time in the history of the world to help gather Israel. There is nothing happening on this earth right now that is more important than that. This is the mission for which you were sent to earth. He's excited. Yeah, it was so great. I first talk, I think the April 2022 general conference was that call to prepare to serve a mission. President Ballard got up and kind of repeated the same thing. It was great to hear that emphasis on gathering again.

At least one major stage of this, second King 17, you see those lost tribes hit off and this isn't necessarily the first time he's moved them around, but it's definitely a big moment. And so it comes back to this. All right, if we want to move on now, the rest of 2 Kings 17, so about verse 7 to the end of the chapter, really, it's about what happens to the Israelites that are left in the northern kingdom, because not all of them were exiled. And what it goes through is it first explains why it is that the Northern Kingdom fell. So from verse seven to about 23, it's talking about all their sins and the things they did wrong and that this is what led them to get destroyed. And then verse 24 through 41, get into what happens to those people who remain. And the story

it tells here is that the Assyrians, since they're shuffling people around the empire, they brought in a whole bunch of foreigners from other places and that they settle in the land here and they intermarry with the Israelites that are left. And then it goes on to describe that they don't just mix cultures, that they mix religions, that they still honor the Lord Jehovah, but they're also worshiping the gods of other lands and they're perverting the law of Moses and doing a twisted version of it. And it repeats until this day, they still do this all wrong until this day, they're still carrying on all these sins. And these people are like, I've really messed everything up. And to put this in. So to some historical context here, we've got to keep in mind that the Deuteronomistic history of which this is a part is written

in the Southern kingdom in Jerusalem. And here they're describing the people that are in the northern kingdom. So first observation is we've got to recognize that for a long time, people in the south have not liked the people in the north. They all worship the same God and they live the law of Moses, but they understand it differently. And they're always accusing each other of doing it wrong. The Jews have their temple in Jerusalem. The people in the north have a different temple, Mount Gerizim, up there, and they have different ideas about all sorts of issues here. And look at verse 29. There's a term here that it introduces for the first time. You guys see what that is? Samaritans.

Samaritans. Yeah. Samaritans, meaning the descendants of the people whose country used to have the capital Samaria, the Northern kingdom right here. And we're more familiar with Samaritans, meaning the descendants of the people whose country used to have the capital Samaria, the Northern Kingdom right here. And we're more familiar with Samaritans from the New Testament, right? You've got the Jews and Samaritans, and we know they don't like each other. That's why Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. And right there, that's a scandalous title because a Samaritan who's good, what? The good enemy. Yeah. And the Jews in the New Testament are the descendants of these people from the Southern kingdom. And the Samaritans are the descendants of these people from the Northern kingdom. So we got to understand in the New Testament, they don't like each other,

but that goes back centuries clear to here to our frenemy status in the Old Testament. And these accusations they're making about each other that, so you can see later that in the New Testament, when they say, oh, the Samaritans are unclean, the Samaritans are dirty, the Samaritans do things wrong. That's just echoes of what you have right here in 2 Kings 17. They're already saying those things about the Northerners right here. Except this time, it's like the perspective of the scriptural author is saying that. He's a Jew writing from the South. In the Come Follow Me manual, I'm assuming readers have seen that every few chapters, it's got this little insert called Thoughts to keep in mind that gives some background. It's easy to skip those because they're kind of in between lessons, but I hope that you're reading those because they're all

excellent. And one of them that appears around here is called thoughts to keep in mind the historical books of the old Testament. It talks about how we've got to watch out for the perspective of the authors of some of these stories, because these stories are not always like the pure perspective of God watching everything, right? It's from the perspective of people in a context. So here's what it says in the Come Follow Me manual. This is for the for Individuals and Families edition, page 94. It says, these stories are told from certain points of view, or just as it's impossible to look at them from more than one angle at a time, it's inevitable that a historical account will reflect the perspective of the person or group of people writing it. This perspective includes the writer's national or ethnic ties and their

cultural norms and beliefs. They made certain assumptions that others might not have made, and they came to conclusions based on those details and assumptions. When we read a description like in 2 Kings 17 about how nasty and bad the Northerners were, I'm sure there's some truth to that. I'm not saying it's all made up, but we do have to understand that this is written from the Southern point of view and these guys really don't like each other. So I think there might also be some bias coming through here where they're making accusations about these Samaritans in the North that may not be entirely fair, but it's coming from the,

like Come Follow Me says, from the national and ethnic ties of the writers. This is how they see it at the time. Yeah. I think what you've just done for us also helps us make sense of some of the interactions Jesus has with Samaritans, such as the woman at the well, she's a Samaritan. She said, our fathers worshiped in this mountain, meaning Gerizim, but you say in Jerusalem is where men ought to worship. Now you read that and you go, oh, I know what she's talking about. She's a Samaritan. She has her history in that area. And these divides, again, they go back centuries clear into the Old Testament. You see that divide very sharply right here, and they still haven't gotten along by the New Testament, you know, 600 years later. Does Nephi carry some of these biases, do you think, for the North? Is there any hint of that, that he's like, nah, those Northerners, they don't know what

they're doing? I don't think he really talks about them all that much. I think you see some kinship with the North, actually, because, well, here's one thing. Lehi is a descendant of Manasseh, and his tribe was from up North. What happens is when the Northern Kingdom is destroyed, you get a whole bunch of refugees from down there swarm down to the southern kingdom and live there. So it's no longer a 10 tribes, two tribes sort of thing. There's people from every tribe living in the south now. So a Jew at this point is a citizen of Judah, not from the tribe of Judah. It's got everybody. So these people are family for one. And the other thing is Nephi,

he talks a lot about remnants, these small groups of Israelites, branches of the tree. And he talks about remnants of Israel that are scattered all around the world. And he sees himself, his family is one of these remnants. So he sees a lot in common between what he's doing in the Americas and these remnant groups that are in other places. So he feels a lot of kinship with them. Whereas the Jews that stay back at home base in Jerusalem, he sees them as kind of doing their own thing. Nephi actually feels a lot of connection with the other groups that also had to leave home base and are awaiting restoration there. Really helpful. If someone can see, Josh, this might be the first time for them that they see the Book of Mormon fits perfectly like a puzzle piece right into this part of the Bible. Chapter 18 then moves on. We're back in the South now. The Northern Kingdom's done, so we're not going to talk about them again. The rest of Second Kings is just the Southern Kingdom.

And this is where we get the King Hezekiah, who it describes as one of the most righteous kings that we have. Again, so shout out to my nephew who's carrying on that name of Hezekiah. Did the Northern Kingdom ever have any good kings? Yeah. As far as the righteousness of the kings, it's a mixed bag. You do have some super righteous kings in the North, but there's a caveat. Kings is written by the perspective of the South. And what the first king of the North, Jeroboam I did was since he didn't have access to the temple in Jerusalem, he built these worship sites at Dan and Bethel, which is the top of the North and the bottom of the North. And so the Israelites are coming there and they're worshiping Jehovah, but not at the place that from the Southern perspective where you should be worshiping, which is only at the

Jerusalem temple. So Kings, what it does is every single Northern King, it evaluates them based on one criteria. Are you going to worship at the South? Like you should, or are you going to worship out those Dan and Bethel sites? Like you shouldn't? And you have some kings that are super zealous for Jehovah and they'll get rid of idol worship. And they're just big all-time Jehovah fans, but they're always in the end evaluated negatively because they didn't destroy those shrines at Dan and Bethel. Now, from the perspective of the people in the North, you don't need to. It's only the Southerners who claim that you can only worship at their place. So that's one of these divides.

So you do have some really good kings, but they ultimately always fail the test because of that difference there. And then you have kings in the south. You have righteous kings and wicked kings. But the righteous kings can actually be all the way good because, of course, they're worshiping at Jerusalem, which is what you should do. So again, the people in the North would have evaluated themselves differently, but because we're reading the Southern take on this, the Northern Kings ultimately always fail. We don't have any record of the North from the North. Yeah, that would be interesting.

Okay. Because they're like, we're actually pretty good guys up here. Is there scripturally something that says the temple has to be in one place? It's a matter of interpretation. So remember how Deuteronomy is kind of the founding book for the Deuteronomistic history, because the language of Deuteronomy, the themes of Deuteronomy and the specific laws of Deuteronomy, they're the ones that are assumed in the rest of the Deuteronomistic history. And Deuteronomy, unlike Exodus or Leviticus or Numbers, is really big on this idea of what we, the fancy term is centralization of worship. And it's the idea you should only worship God in one

place. That's the only place for sacrifice. That's the only place for festivals, one place. And this makes Deuteronomy different than some of the laws assumed earlier in other iterations of the law of Moses presented. Like in Exodus, Passover, you have in your house. It's the dad and mom and kids, and they're eating together. And the kid's supposed to go, why is this night different from all nights? And the dad responds, it's his family setting. Deuteronomy, that's a big no-no. You come and worship Passover at the one spot that's been picked for worship. So Deuteronomy never says where that spot is. It's really coy about that. It just says the one spot that God's going to choose. But of course, everyone is going to assume later that that spot is the Jerusalem temple.

So people from the South then are looking at Deuteronomy as the scriptural basis for this. And even though it never says Jerusalem in Deuteronomy, they're assuming that Jerusalem is that spot and therefore anywhere else is bad. That's why the shrines at Dan and Bethel are big no-nos because of how they're reading Deuteronomy there. Thank you. That's helpful. Okay. So what happens to the South? Okay. So we get Hezekiah here. Two kinds of things for background for Hezekiah. One is the religious stuff he does. And the other, we're going to get into the politics of what happens here. So chapter 18 starts off by saying that Hezekiah, he's like the best King ever. So look at verse three. He did that which

was right in the sight of the Lord, according to all that David, his father did. And this is very standard Deuteronomistic history language, comparing the king back to David. And David's always held up as the model, not because he was great in everything he did, but because he never worshiped idols. He only worshiped Jehovah. And that's the standard we're comparing. So Hezekiah is not an idol worshiper. That's what we're saying. In verse four, he removed the high places. So that's these kind of worship shrines that are separate from the temple. And he break the images, the idols, cut down the groves. That's these poles for the goddess Asherah. And he break in pieces, the brazen serpent that Moses had made. Our assumption here is that it says the Israelites

burned incense to it. So apparently they had kept that bronze serpent that Moses made and they're worshiping it as an idol. So to stop that, he broke it up. We call this Hezekiah's reform where he arrives in a time of apostasy. People are doing bad stuff and he's going through and kind of purging the bad things out of there. And again, the stuff he's doing, it has the effect of you're only going to worship here in Jerusalem. And he's going to all these other places and getting rid of that stuff. So he does this reform. And then verses 5 and 6 and 7 talk about his character here. He trusted in the Lord God of Israel.

And I wanted to pause and highlight that line because trust is going to be a theme of this chapter. So we're going to come back to the issue of trust, but that's key that that's introducing him as someone who trusts in Jehovah. So that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah and either any that were before him. For he claimed to the Lord

and departed not from following him, but kept his commandments. And the Lord was with him and he prospered whithersoever he went forth. So we get this introduction. So religiously, the authors of the book, see him as getting rid of the bad worship practices that are everywhere to other gods and the idols. And he's centralizing worship at the temple in Jerusalem.

And he's trusting in the Lord and keeping all his commandments. So wonderful, righteous King here. Is the writer going to say the same thing about Josiah? Yeah. Josiah also says that none like him before and none like him after were the same, right? So you get the language again there. You're my favorite king. No, you're my favorite king. Now, in the second half of verse 7, we get into the political situation. It says, he rebelled against the king of Assyria and served him not. For that,

we got to back up a little bit into what was set up in previous chapters before 2 Kings 17. Hezekiah's father was a bad king named Ahaz that we've covered in previous weeks. And we actually know more about Ahaz from the book of Isaiah than we do here from Kings because Isaiah adds in chapter 7, which is quoted in 2 Nephi 17, a whole story about Ahaz and what he did that was bad. So the quick recap of that is this. In the days of Ahaz, you've got, again, the Assyrians are conquering all these kingdoms and making them vassal states,

so they have to send all the money. And as the Assyrians move further and further west, the small kingdoms along the Mediterranean there are getting really jittery. Oh no, it's just a matter of time before the Assyrians come and get all of us. Bunch of the kings want to get together and form an anti-Assyrian coalition to be a team and fight the Assyrians back. They think

we got to stand together or we're all going to fall separately. But there's one of these little kingdoms that decides they do not want to join the coalition and that's Ahaz and Judah. He decides that fighting the Assyrians is suicide. So he's like, thanks, but no thanks. You guys have fun fighting them. From the other king's perspective, this makes Ahaz look pretty petty because if they win, good for him. And if they lose, good for him. It's a win-win for Ahaz to stay out of this. But the other kings are really mad about that. So they decide to invade Judah, kill Ahaz, and put a new guy on the throne that will work with them. We call this the Syro-Ephraimite War. This is about 735 BC. Isaiah chapter 7, again, quoted in 2 Nephi 17, talks about this conflict where you've got the northern Israelites and the country Syria next to them, and they're

together invading the southern kingdom, again, to put a new king on the throne. This is bad for Judah now because they've got these two invaders. God sends Isaiah to Ahaz, this is again Isaiah 7, not in Kings, and tells him, don't worry. Jehovah's going to protect Judah. You're not going to be killed. Things are going to work out fine. Just trust him and don't do anything stupid. That's basically Isaiah's message. The short version is Ahaz being bad and not liking Isaiah decides, oh, I do. I cannot just stomach it sitting here and trusting in God to save me. So he decides to take matters into his own hands, which is what Isaiah said not to do. And Ahaz sends messengers to Tiglath-Pileser III, who's the Syrian king and says, hey, Tiglath, my buddy, how about this? I got a proposition for you. These two kings, my neighbors to the north are invading me. If you will speed up your timetable

and come take them out right now, I will voluntarily make Judah a vassal to you. And you don't even have to conquer us. That's the bargain he makes. It's a deal with the devil. So then from the Assyrians perspective, this is a win-win because they were going to go conquer them later anyway. He obliges the Assyrians come, they destroy Syria, Damascus, and they conquer the Northern kingdom. And that's the beginning of the downfall of north. So Ahaz really stabs his northern brothers in the back. I mean, he was getting invaded too, so what goes around comes around. But because of that, Ahaz made Judah a vassal to the Assyrians voluntarily, and now they've got to pay a boatload of money each year.

So when Hezekiah comes to the throne, he inherits this vassal status that his dad had put into place. When it says here in 2 Kings 18.7 that he rebelled against the king of Assyria and served him not, that's saying he broke the vassal treaty. He stopped sending the money and he broke the terms of the contract. Now, the historical context for that might be this, that at this point in Hezekiah's reign happens to be the same year that you have a king switching to a new king over in Assyria. So the old powerful king is gone and you have a new fresh king on the throne. And this was a typical time for vassal states to try to rebel because they figure the new king might not be strong enough to keep up the strength of

the old king. He might've seen an opportunity here to try to get out of this because his country's probably being bled dry by all the taxes. However, this ends up backfiring because remember what the vassal treaty stipulates. If you break the vassal treaty, we're going to come destroy you. It's this mob vengeance here. Skip down now to verse 13. Now in the 14th year of King Hezekiah did Sennacherib, king of Assyria. So that's the new king here. Sennacherib came up against all the fenced cities of Judah and took them. And there is a world of drama in that very simple line. In fact, I almost wonder if the writer is keeping this simple on purpose because this was a hard thing to write there. Fenced cities is all your fortified cities. The one have walls, military units and everything.

And how many of those cities did he take yeah all of them all is a pretty high percentage word yes this was devastating the vast majority of judah is ravished this is bad in fact we have outside sources outside the bible that give us an even bigger picture of how bad this was so the next verse verse mentions Assyria sieging Judah's second most fortified spot besides Jerusalem, and that's Lachish right there. So it's mentioned in verse 14. And you can go to Lachish today and there's the ruins and you can still find the arrowheads and all the signs of the devastation that the Assyrians did there.

Over in Sennacherib's palace in Nineveh, he was so pleased with conquering Lachish that he has this like hundred foot wall relief dramatizing the destruction of the city. And it's in the British Museum in London today. It is so dramatic and striking. And you can just Google this and see the images online. Since there was no movies in the ancient world, they would carve these images on stone with these reliefs, and it shows like a frozen moment in time. And it's kind of like Where's Waldo, where there's a zillion things happening at once, and you can spend forever looking at it because there's always something new to find. So this Lachish scene, you've got like arrows and flaming torches frozen in midair that the people in the wall are throwing down at the Assyrians. And you've got the Assyrian siege tanks stopped mid-pose as they're breaking down the wall. You've got depictions of Assyrian soldiers piking Judahite prisoners.

You've got a part where there's like piles of hands that they have cut off from the prisoners. They have no more hands. There's images of Judahites being led away into captivity. So it's just like this frozen moment just showing all the drama of this scene here. So it's the closest you can get to like an ancient movie of this. It's an awkward, but he loved his moment so much. He made a movie. Yes, exactly. And the Syrians, when they conquered you, if you broke the vassal treaty, they were brutal because they want to send a message to everyone else. Don't you dare rebel

and stop sending us money because we'll do the same thing to you. So that's why they're putting people up on pikes and why they're leaving piles of body parts. It's so that rumors will spread and people will know and nobody else will dare do this. So this is what he's doing to the kingdom of Judah. So he conquers all the small places. And we also have not just Sennacherib's pictures of this, but we have his written records. So there's one called the Sennacherib Prism.

It's like a block of stone like this, and it has writing all the way around it, like in a big circle written in this cuneiform script. And he describes it and he names more than 100,000 Judahites that he carried into captivity and exile. He talks about all the animals that he stole from Judah, all the booty and plunder that he took. And he talks about sieging Jerusalem and trapping Hezekiah in Jerusalem. He says, I trapped him in Jerusalem like a bird in a cage. It's a really great line. So Sennacherib was quite pleased with his military victories here. How long after the destruction of the north was this? Was this pretty soon after he had taken the northern kingdom?

This is a good like 20 years later. So they had been here before. Well, the Assyrians had never had to conquer Judah before because remember Ahaz did it voluntarily, but they had been to the north and conquered that already. It's hard to say why Hezekiah decided to break the vassal treaty and bring all this upon him. Maybe the taxes were bleeding him dry and he thought we just got to risk it. Maybe he thought he could take advantage of the new king being on the throne. Maybe he thought that since he's being so righteous that God would keep this from happening. I think it's coming in 2 Kings 19.

So he took all these cities in Judah, but he never took Jerusalem. That's coming up. Yeah, that's coming up. And in the Sennacherib prism, that text, he never claims to conquer Jerusalem. He just says that he surrounded it, but he never claims to destroy it, which matches what we have in the Bible here. The book of Isaiah gives a lot of insight on this because at the beginning of the book is Isaiah talking about all this stuff. So Isaiah chapters one, two, three, four, five is Isaiah talking to his contemporaries in Jerusalem and Judah and saying, you guys are wicked. And the day of the Lord is coming. If you don't shape up, destruction is happening. And as Isaiah talks in those first several chapters, he gets more and more specific as he goes about what the destruction is going

to look like. So it starts off very generic, destruction's coming. And then in Isaiah chapter three, he mentions your men are going to fall by the sword. So we get a hint there, this is going to be a war. And then at the end of Isaiah five, it talks about God calling a foreign nation to come with horses and arrows and, you know, capturing them and killing them and bringing them away. So now we know it's a foreign invader. And then when you get to Isaiah seven, it finally names who the foreign invader is. And it's the king of Assyria that for Judah, Judah's wickedness and rebellion, Assyria is going to come get them. Josh, doesn't he say the king of Assyria is going to come like a flood and it's going to go all the way to your neck, right? Not over your head.

Exactly. He, there's a bunch of images. he is. He talks about flooding up your neck. He talks about Assyria being like bees that are going to swarm you everywhere, shaving you like a razor. He says the hair and the beard and the feet, which is a euphemism for the genital hair. So it's like a close shave all over the place, very uncomfortable in your intimate space that the Assyrians are going to get right up to there so close. They won't actually kill you, but they're really, it's going to be super close. So Isaiah has very graphic imagery that he uses to describe how devastating this Assyrian assault is going to be. But Isaiah also introduces the thing that a righteous remnant is going to survive. So this comes up in Isaiah 4, and this comes up in a little snippet in Isaiah 10,

a bunch of little places he'll pause for a little moment of hope. Righteous remnant is going to barely survive this. In Isaiah 6, he calls it a 10th. A 10th is going to make it through here. The seed, holy seed that's going to regrow after the tree of Judah is chopped down here. Some of these chapters end up in the Book of Mormon, right? Exactly. So that's what a lot of these Isaiah chapters in that big chunk in 2 Nephi are all about this. It mentions the Assyrians. It mentions all these other things going on. So when you know this story, you can go back and read those and things make a little more sense why he's talking about this so much. Back to our story there, 2 Kings 18.

We get this devastation in the countryside. And then starting in verse 17, well, the Assyrian king Sennacherib is busy sieging Lachish. He sends an initial group to surround Jerusalem to keep anybody from going in or out because they're the next siege. And he's got a representative, a royal official called the Rabshakeh, who goes to talk to the people in Jerusalem. In the King James translation, it looks like it's the guy's name, Rabshakeh. We know that that's actually in Akkadian, that's the title of a royal official. So I'm going to say the Rabshakeh just because it's not his actual name. It's like it means royal steward or something. You have these Syrians.

They now have surrounded Jerusalem. From Jerusalem, they could see the fire from Lachish. They knew that that was going down, right? And they could see the fires from elsewhere. You can just imagine what this is like for the people now trapped inside the city, like the terror that you are next. Jerusalem was the last place to be attacked. You've got the Rabshakeh and he goes outside the wall. Hezekiah sends some of his royal ambassadors outside the wall and they're

going to have this conversation right there. And the rest of the chapter is this conversation they had and it's full of lots of drama here. And the Rabshakeh, he shouts so that all the people of Jerusalem who are up on the walls watching this, they can hear the conversation. And the Rabshakeh, he shouts so that all the people of Jerusalem who are up on the walls watching this, they can hear the conversation. And in verse 19, he starts talking and the Rabshakeh sit unto them, speak ye now to Hezekiah, thus saith the great King, the King of Assyria. What confidence is this wherein thou trustest? And I told you to watch out for that word trust, because that's going to be the theme of his speech is trust right here. And he's going to go through the rest of his speech.

He's trying to demoralize everyone. This is classic political propaganda. Your enemy fights not as well if they're demoralized. They have no hope. So he's trying to get them. And the interesting thing about this guy is he knows how to get him where it hurts. We don't know if maybe he was an ambassador here earlier. I don't know what his personal experience is,

but he knows how to get these people. We find out later, he's not speaking the international language of diplomacy, Aramaic. He's speaking Hebrew, the Judahite dialect of Hebrew, exactly what all the people in the city speak so that they can understand him.

He knows about Hezekiah's reforms. He knows that Hezekiah has gotten rid of all their high places and said, you should only worship in Jerusalem. He knows about Jehovah and how Jehovah operates. He knows these people well enough that he knows just where it's going to hurt. So in verse 20, he says, thou sayest, but they are vain words. I have counsel and strength for war. Now on whom does thou trust that thou rebellest against me? Now behold, thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, even upon Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go through his hand and pierce it. So is Pharaoh king of Egypt unto all that trust in him. Apparently Judah hadn't tried to make an alliance or something with Egypt that maybe Egypt would come help them out against this invasion. And this guy now, for anyone in Jerusalem who's still holding out any hope that Egypt might come

rescue them, he's going, ha. It's not going to happen. Egypt is like a stick where if you're leaning on the stick, it's going to break and like cut your hand. Pharaoh's not going to save you. So you can't trust in that. So now he's moving to religious concerns, verse 22. But if ye shall say, well, we trust in the Lord our God, in Jehovah. And then the rapture case is this. Is not that he, Jehovah, whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah hath taken away, and hath said to Judah and Jerusalem, ye shall worship before this altar in Jerusalem only? So in other words, you know, people who are worshiping at these other places

beyond Jerusalem, a lot of them were worshiping Jehovah, but from Hezekiah's perspective, it was an illicit worship of Jehovah. So now he's playing against people who think, what if Hezekiah got it wrong? What if that was okay to worship Jehovah those places? And now because our leader got it wrong, we've actually acted against God by getting rid of all these worship sites. So he knows that well enough to play to any lingering fears people have about Hezekiah's approach there. So they're trying to get them to rebel against their own king, right? Yeah. He's casting, showing these seeds of doubt. What if Hezekiah is not carrying out Jehovah's will and that by following him, you've actually been acting against Jehovah. And so Jehovah is not going to save you now. And then in verse 23, he just gets

a schoolyard taunts here. Now, therefore I pray thee give pledges to my Lord, the King of Assyria, and I will deliver the 2000 horses. If that'll be able to, on my part, set riders upon them. In other words, Hey, we'll help you guys out. We'll give you a 2000 horses. If you can find enough people left to ride them, ha ha ha. But you don't, right? It's just mean. He's pointing out how few soldiers they have left. In verse 24, he brings up the Egypt thing again.

How then will thou turn away from the face of one captain of the least of my master's servants and put thy trust on Egypt for chariots and for horsemen? And then in verse 25, he does a new tactic. So he's trying all sorts of stuff here. So if one thing doesn't scare you, maybe another thing will. Verse 25, am I now come up without the Lord, without Jehovah against this place to destroy it? Like, he's like, do you think I'm coming here apart from Jehovah's will?

He says, the Lord Jehovah said to me, go up against this land and destroy it. So he's claiming that Jehovah's on his side. He might be just making up stuff. You might think who's going to believe that, but he's figuring maybe he'll get somebody. If he's really familiar with what's been going on in Jerusalem, he might be actually playing into a subcurrent here because remember what in Isaiah chapter five, Isaiah has this verse where he says, The Lord, Jehovah, is going to raise an ensign to a nation from far, a flag or a banner, and call them swiftly to come and attack you. So in other words, you've got this image that Isaiah paints of Jehovah waving a flag to a foreign nation going,

Yoo-hoo, over here, come destroy my people right here. And then they come and destroy them. So Isaiah has been clearly saying that Assyria is going to kind of work as Jehovah's tool to punish the wicked here. I almost wonder if this guy is aware of some of that talk and he's kind of twisting it, you know, into something here that Jehovah is totally backing them up in all the bad things that they do, but basing it off of something that the prophet has actually said, whether it's destroying these people's confidence in Egypt for military aid, or it's destroying their confidence that Hezekiah really was carrying out the will of God, or having them question at all that Jehovah really is on their side.

He's introducing all these ways that he might demoralize these people and get them not to trust either in Hezekiah or to trust in the Lord. He's going to say later, don't let Hezekiah deceive you. He cannot deliver you. Yeah. And then in verse 26, the ambassadors say, please stop speaking in Judahite, speak in the international language of the diplomats here. We can understand that. But then he taunts them back and says in verse 27, I'm not here just to talk to you. I'm here to talk to everyone up on the wall there, all the people there. And then in verse 28, he cries even louder to all the people to be able to hear. He says to all the people in the city, hear the

word of the great King, the King of Assyria. And then he continues in the next line of attack. Let not Hezekiah deceive you for he shall not be able to deliver you out of his hand. Neither let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord, saying, the Lord will surely deliver us, and the city will not be delivered into the hand of the king of Assyria. So there he's mocking, you know, Hezekiah has apparently been telling the people, trust in the Lord and he'll protect you. And now this guy is mocking that. Verse 31, hearken not to Hezekiah. Then down, let's jump to verse 33 through 35. He makes this argument. Have any of the gods of the nations delivered at all his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Like we've conquered a lot of places already and we have had unmitigated success. We have a perfect track record. 34, where are the gods of Hamath and of Arphad?

Where are the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Iva? Have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? Who are they among all the gods of the countries that have delivered their country out of my hand that the Lord should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand? You're going to be just like them. And that's kind of brutal logic because he's got a point. Every nation has its gods, even Samaria, which worshipped the same God the people of Judah do. And every single one of them has fallen. So who are you to think that your gods can be any different? And by the way, I talked about Book of Mormon Connections.

So this is one of them. Once you know this story here, it's easy to recognize what's going on in the Isaiah chapters in 2 Nephi. Because for example, 2 Nephi chapter 20, which is quoting Isaiah chapter 10, is describing all this drama, and it's got the Rabshakeh speech here in a very short form. So like 2 Nephi 20 verse 8, for he saith, this is now the Assyrians, or maybe even the Rabshakeh specifically, are not my princes altogether kings? Like princes in Assyria are as good as kings everywhere else. Is not Kalno as Carchemish? Is not Hamath as Arphod? Is not Samaria as Damascus? As my hand hath founded the kingdoms of the idols, and whose graven images did excel them of

Jerusalem and of Samaria, shall not I, as I have done unto Samaria and to her idols, do so to Jerusalem and to her idols? It's the same idea and some of the same wording as the Rabshakeh speech over here that just like I've destroyed all the other gods and all the other cities, including Samaria and its gods, I'm going to do the same thing to Jerusalem and its gods. So here, Isaiah is kind of doing a poetic kind of summary of the Assyrians attitude here. And the logic really is brutal because he's got a point. He's right. This would be scary, Josh. This would be like, okay, I believe him. Because one, you've doubt in the king. Now you've got me doubting God.

President Benson might call this the evil design strategies and doctrines of the devil, right? This is how he works. I'm going to place doubt in your heart about everything you thought was true. The trust is so important because, again, that's the motif of your trust. Who are you going to trust? That's how he opens the speech. What confidence is this wherein thou trustest? And I think for all of us today, that is a great question to really ponder as you live your life of faith. What confidence is this wherein thou trustest? What do you trust in? And today you're reading the news a lot about how, whether it's Americans or members of the church, that there's a crisis of institutional trust. People don't trust the government. People don't trust each other. People don't trust scientists. People don't trust the first presidency in the 12th. A lot of people have talked about a trust these voices in the world that are actively working

to undermine trust, whether that's in the prophet, your church leaders, in God. And they're doing it very strategically where they know it's going to hurt you the most, just like this guy. He's speaking their language. He knows the history that they've had. He knows religious weak spots and vulnerable points, and he targets those so precisely. And I think today about all the voices that are saying, you can't trust the prophet. You can't trust the first presidency. You can't trust God. And they'll use a lot of logic and a lot of really good reasons to try to build this case that God and his servants and the institutions are untrustworthy. And it provokes

this real big moment you have. You have to figure out what voice am I going to listen to here? This could easily become a crisis of faith for a Judahite in Jerusalem. Chapter 19 is about Hezekiah's reaction to this. It doesn't talk about the other people, but I'm imagining similar things are going through their own heads. Hezekiah is not there at the wall, but messengers bring him the report of what the Reb Shekeh said. What Hezekiah does in 19 verse 3 is he sends messengers to the prophet, to Hezekiah, to say, well, what's your take on this? He's going to Isaiah, correct? Isaiah and Hezekiah are very close, and Hezekiah goes to him for advice.

The Jewish tradition is that Isaiah married Hezekiah's daughter. So if that's true, they're also father-in-law, son-in-law. So whatever it is, they've got a close relationship here. So Hezekiah sends a message to Isaiah in verses three and four to say, this is what the Rav Shekeh said. What does the Lord have to say about this? And then the servants of Hezekiah go back to Isaiah and Isaiah has got this very short two verse revelation to give his take on this. So in verse six has the revelation thus say at the Lord, be not afraid of the words, which thou has heard with which the servants of the King of Assyria have blasphemed me. Behold, I will send a blast upon him and he shall hear a rumor and she'll return to his own land.

And I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land. Be not afraid. It's very short compared to the long speech the Rabshakeh gave, but it's saying, don't worry. He's not going to win. He's going to flee. And the king of Assyria is going to die there. I love that small little response, Josh. Long, long taunt.

Don't worry about it. And then interestingly enough, the rabshakeh is not done in the speech in the previous chapter was to all the people in jerusalem but now in verses like 8 9 10 and 11 12 and 13 the rabshakeh sends a letter to hezekiah addressing him personally and it's a personalized version of that speech to hezekiah So this is what it says in verse 10. Thus shall you speak to Hezekiah, king of Judah, saying, let not thy God in whom thou trustest deceive thee, saying, Jerusalem shall not be delivered into the hand of the king of Assyria. So before it was telling the people, don't trust Hezekiah when he says God will save you. And now he's saying to Hezekiah

directly, you shouldn't trust in Jehovah when he says he'll save you. I should laugh at this, but this is intense. It is. Now, 11, 12, 13, he has just a little mini version of the speech with the same logic. He lists all the places they've already destroyed and says, we have a perfect track record here. Why would you think you're the exception? We got to pause here and just appreciate the gravity of this moment because they've surrounded them. We're kind of in a situation where we're in the last night of the siege, right? Tomorrow is going to be the battle and this is it. And Hezekiah has to

decide now, I've got this revelation from Isaiah. I've got this letter from the Repsheke. Which one am I going to trust? That's the crisis moment he faces. And we've got to imagine here, I don't think it's a situation where it's either why I'm going to trust the Lord and sit here and do nothing, or I'm not going to trust the Lord and sit here and do nothing. He probably had some actions he could take. They're going to have very serious consequences. And the reason I think that is because why else is the Rabshakeh sending him one final letter on the eve before the battle, trying to implore him to make a on the eve before the battle, trying to implore him to make a decision? Reading between the lines, I think maybe the Assyrians have left

an offer on the table like, hey, give yourself up and your family and we'll kill you guys, but maybe we'll spare the rest of the city. Something like that. Standard procedure, if you're going to conquer a government, you got to kill the royal family. So maybe they've made some kind of offer, but we'll spare the others. So he's got real, real consequences weighing on him. Should he trust in the Lord and everybody might live, or should he sacrifice his own wife and kids to get killed and save everybody else? What should he do? But people are going to die if he makes the wrong move. So that is just weighing on him. When I teach this to my class, I say, the Golden State Warriors are coming to play Provo High. And Isaiah is saying, play them, you'll win, you'll be fine. So I'm writing this in my scriptures. Will Hezekiah believe Isaiah

and the Lord or Rabshakeh? Isaiah is not very specific. It's not just play them, you'll win. It's just, don't be afraid. He doesn't say how this is going to happen at all. It's not just play and you'll win. It's just don't be afraid. He doesn't say how this is going to happen at all. It's just, well, can you give us more detail, Isaiah? Why shouldn't I be afraid? Yeah. Is it going to be a flood, a hailstorm? If Egyptians finally going to come, what is this going to be? He doesn't say. It's in 2 Nephi 20, which is Isaiah 10, the same thing. Be not afraid of the Assyrians. And then the rest of 2 Nephi 20 is, here they come.

And it lists the cities in order. They're getting closer and closer. So these chapters in 2 Nephi are always flipping between talking about how bad the Assyrians will destroy you, but also don't be afraid because you'll be saved. They've taken all those fenced cities in Judah, but don't be afraid. Please join us for part two of this podcast.