Today, I am reading and commenting on  2 Kings 17-18.

King Hoshea was the last king of Israel, the Northern Kingdom.  The writer tells us that he did evil in the sight of the Lord, but not as bad as the kings who preceded him.  But God did not exile the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom because of the sins of Hoshea, or even because of the sins of the kings which preceded him.  God exiled them because of their own sins.  The writer condemns them for following the practices of the people they had displaced in the land, practices which God had explicitly told them not to follow.  He condemned them for imitating the peoples around them, which God had explicitly told them not to do.  The the writer gets into more specific complaints about their behavior.  He writes that they forsook all of God’s commands, embracing various kinds of idolatry.  They crafted two golden calves to represent God, they built an Asherah pole.  It is worth noting that Asherah was viewed as the wife of and co-creator with the male god of creation in Canaanite mythology (there are today those who want to introduce a female creator alongside God into Christianity).  They bowed down to the starry hosts and worshiped Baal.  I have always understood the worship of the starry hosts to be a form of nature worship which focuses on the splendor of the night sky.  The writer goes on to tell us that they sacrificed their children, their sons and daughters.  And he finishes off their list of sins by saying that they sold themselves to do evil.  I was going to comment on those sins, but I will allow you to think about how the writer’s condemnation of the Israelites may, or may not, apply to our society today.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.