Hey, this is A Year in the Bible with Daily Grace.

This is Shelby and Paul.

Today we are jumping into the book of Second Kings.

And so if you've been following along with us, you know that First Kings is really just

continuing on into this second book, Second

Kings. But Paul, we'd still love if you could give us just a little bit of an intro since we're

starting a new book. Yeah. So like you said, there's a lot of continuity here. And I've mentioned

this before, but First and Second Kings were once one book, or they are considered one book in the

Hebrew Bible. And so it's usually

considered to be one author that wrote the whole thing. But what we're going to see here is in

Second Kings, an increasing deterioration of these two kingdoms. And so that's kind of the big theme

from Second Kings that's not as present in First first kings and then also we're going to see a

whole lot more of elisha particular narratives of elisha doing prophetic activity throughout the kingdoms

yeah great so i know that there's a really peculiar story in this book. Yes.

Can you walk us through that? Because it might have been alarming to read if you haven't read it before.

It's definitely difficult to understand, but it involves Elisha, a group of young kids and bears.

Yes.

Yeah.

So the context for this comes from chapter two. So we have what's basically this narrative of passing the torch from Elijah to Elisha, where he, the mantle of prophecy passes to Elisha. And Elijah actually ascends into heaven and doesn't really die necessarily. He ascends, kind of like Enoch in Genesis.

And so that's essential context here. And there's another piece of important context in

2nd Kings 1-8 that describes Elijah's appearance as being a hairy man with a leather belt

around his waist. So then we get Elijah's mantle passing to Elisha. And so he encounters

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