Relevant Passages: 2 Kings 18-20; 2 Chronicles 32 Hezekiah had the challenge of being the king of the southern kingdom of Judah at the at the time the kingdom of Israel just to the north...
The Last Five Kings of Judah
October 10, 2015
Elijah we see a prophet to the king and the northern kingdom of Israel. A powerful figure, he brings both king and renegade nation to repentance for national sins. Ahab the king had married Jezebel,...
Relevant Passages: 1 Kings 8; 2 Chronicles 6 When the first Temple in Jerusalem was built a service of consecration was held at which King Solomon contributed a major prayer. In the ancient Middle East...
Relevant Passages: Psalms 32, 51, 130; 2 Samuel 11, 12 1. David King David committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, a loyal soldier away at battle. When she tells David she is pregnant,...
Relevant Passages: 1 Samuel 1-2; Luke 1 1. Hannah Hannah was praying for a son in the sacred tent at Shiloh. Because she was childless, she lived under constant ridicule from her husband’s other wife....
Relevant Passages: Psalm 90 Psalm 90, a somber and elegant psalm directed towards God consists of three parts: (1) The contrast between “You,” the eternal God, and “we”, his ephemeral creatures, vs. 1-6; (2) Our...
To embrace the vast book of Job in one study is impossible. So we limit ourselves to Job’s words directed to God, and to a final prayer Job offered on behalf of his accusers. You...
1. Jesus’ Practice of Prayer Among the Gospels, Luke gives the most sustained attention to the praying Jesus. Only Luke records the story Jesus told to urge his disciples to always pray and not lose...
Background and Literary Considerations The verses we study this week have occasioned significant debate as to their authorship. Some have argued that everything belongs to the eighth-century prophet who finally got around to some positive...
Background and Literary Considerations Having come now to the last of the five vision reports, we need to ask how they connect with each other and the impact of the whole collection. What is the...
Background and Literary Considerations The fourth vision report in Amos brings us to another literary feature of the prophet’s preaching: puns. While we miss most of these in English translations, the Bible is replete with...
Background and Literary Considerations Again, we come in this lesson to a “vision report,” the third in a series of five. Given Amos’ penchant for surprising us with reversals of expectations, how should we prepare...
Background and Literary Considerations Review the comments in the previous lesson about “vision reports.” What was the main purpose of these in general and how specifically does Amos use them–individually and the five of them...
Background and Literary Considerations We are introduced in this lesson to “vision reports,” another in the vast repertoire of Amos’ speech forms. These appear throughout the Bible and are typically introduced in the Old Testament...
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