I got this book after reading a glowing recommendation for it by Eric Metaxas, who has written a foreword for it in a new edition just published (I wasn’t able to get that version on interlibrary loan, alas). Metaxas compares the book to C.S. Lewis’s work, and author Thomas Howard himself most graciously includes Lewis … [Read more…]
Solomon’s reign is recounted in I Kings chapters1-11 and II Chronicles chapters 1-9 (tradition holds that the author of the latter was Ezra, by the way). The accounts overlap substantially but not completely, and where they describe the same events they do so in ways that are consistent but not identical — even, disconcertingly, in … [Read more…]
At the beginning of the reign of Rehoboam, Solomon’s son and successor, the northern tribes (that is, all but Judah itself and the small tribe of Benjamin) rebelled (I Kings 12:24) because of the new king’s highhandedness, and from then through the Babylonian exile there was never again a united kingdom. The account of this … [Read more…]