Canter Bridge

The two histories of Israel focus upon the kings of Judah and Israel, lending special attention to questions of royal conduct. Did this or that king do what is just and right in the sight of YHWH? Or did he not?

The verdicts pronounced on this score are concise. No doubt each one summarizes in a simple sentence moral complexities whose nuance and detail would fill libraries.

Some of the kings whose lives and governance are summarized in this way receive a mixed evaluation. At times this is because the Deuteronomistic historian and the Chronicler detect a change in a midcourse correction in a king’s behavior before the twin burdens of David’s legacy and YHWH’s oversight. Sometimes a king ‘did what was just not with a whole heart’. At others, a monarch started well but became overconfident for all his success and departed from right ways. Let Amaziah serve as example:

From the time that Amaziah turned away from the LORD they made a conspiracy against him in Jerusalem, and he fled to Lachish. But they sent after him to Lachish, and killed him there. They brought him back on horses; he was buried with his ancestors in the city of David.

The record does not hesitate to speak of a ‘time’ or a ‘moment’ when Amaziah ‘turned away from the Lord’. Yet one rarely does such things in a moment. Course corrections, though they appear sudden from an historian’s distance, are normally conclusions rather than beginnings. That is, by the time an Amaziah ‘turns from the Lord’ in any distinguishable way, his heart has accumulated the debris of a thousand small decisions that point in the direction his external edicts and conduct will eventually signal as his set will.

The human heart is not often practiced at radical zig-zagging. It turns incrementally in the directions I will move, quietly, invisibly, privately, in the next five minutes. Departure, in the way historians and prophets articulate reality, results eventually.