This is the Bamo podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host Brent Billings. Today we begin our journey to understanding the historical record of the United Kingdom of Israel by taking a look at the two sources comprising this biblical narrative.

Yeah, this is a... this is a... I don't know what you would call this. This is a big part of our study.

This is a huge deal. Like, this is probably... hmm, well, gosh, there's so many... there's so many great things we talk about.

But this particular study really opened up a huge portion of the Bible to me that I did not find accessible previously.

Yeah, this was... it was the same way for me. I remember I was pretty late into my study of the scriptures.

I was towards the end or probably even post Bible college before I really had a grasp on what was happening in this portion of biblical history.

And I don't know how many people are like me, but when I read this portion, I get into first-second Samuel, first-second Keynes, first-second Chronicles.

Everything just starts to swirl. And I have a hard time staying engaged. I have a hard time.

I have a very hard time keeping track of everything that's going on.

There is a lot going on in that historical record. And when I finally understood why it seemed so confusing to me, it really, really helped.

So we're gonna... we're gonna talk a little about that today. But before we do, it would be who of us and be very fitting for this podcast if we did some reviews.

So we have a presentation for you. You can find that, our typical PDF. And we're gonna start on that first slide there, just kind of walking through a review to help set up

where we're gonna be in our story. So you can see there. Obviously, our review of Genesis. In the green, it's a setup to the narrative.

We have a large narrative that God's telling and God's gonna set it up with a preface and an introduction. That preface, which chapters 1 through 11, is gonna be really describing who he is and what his world is like in the nature of all those things and how they all work together.

And then we get to apply that. We get to actually see that applied in a family, the family of God, people like Avram, Yitzhak, Jatoko, Viosafe. These are people in that patriarchal family of God. This sets up the narrative. Like the big narrative, the big idea is that God's telling a tale of two kingdoms, two kingdoms of empire and shalom.

Two narratives that are always at war with each other. Always pushing and jockeying for position, always calling for our attention. One narrative of self-preservation and another narrative of self-sacrifice.

And whether we see it in the Old Testament or on through the prophets or into the days of Jesus or on even to the end of the New Testament, this is gonna be the nature of this narrative.

It's empire and shalom battling for position, the order of life, the order of death and how those things interact.

So that narrative really begins in Exodus where God rescues his people out of empire. He rescues them out of Egypt in the story of the Passover.

He takes them to Mount Sinai where he marries them, invites them into a unique covenant relationship.

And the whole rest of Exodus is gonna be about building this tabernacle. And the tabernacle is going to be a honeymoon suite, if we think of it as wedding.

If we really examine the literature and analyze the literary aspects of the story, it's gonna be a retelling of Genesis 1 through 3.

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