Hey, this is Shelby and Paul. We're in Second Kings 13 through 15 today. And Paul, we see quite the list of kings in these chapters and a lot of a phrase that we've become really familiar with, which is, he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.

We've seen that repeated over and over.

But there are actually a couple of kings in today's reading who do write in the sight of the Lord as well.

So I'm excited to talk through these chapters.

Can you begin to break them down for us?

Yeah, for sure.

So initially we see in the Northern Kingdom that Israel is continuing to be oppressed by

foreign nations.

And we're kind of seeing kind of foreshadowings of maybe where they're going to end up.

We see Jehoa has pushing off the enemies just a little bit longer, paying them off

and helping them to not attack, convincing them not to attack, rather. And then, you know,

in chapter 13, we hear again from Elisha for the first time in a while, but it's actually

about his death. And in typical Elisha fashion, he goes out with a prophecy. So that's interesting. And then we get a lot more kings in

these chapters, these chapters like you mentioned. And I think it's kind of tough when we get to

later into second kings because there's so many names and so many kings. And we don't have the

Elisha narratives to break up the flow anymore. But I kind of

want to point to how that shows us something about the book. And it's that the status of these,

or the well-being, rather, of these kings is deteriorating. And the well-being of these nations is

deteriorating. Especially in the north, we have kings killing each other a lot in the last half of this

book.

And so that's why the names pop up so often.

There's so many different people that ruled during these times.

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