When I was a child, memorizing the books of the Bible got you points (and weird looks) from the adults at your church. I had trouble with the Old Testament order of the history books: Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. So I came up with the memory aid Sam Kicks Cats.

Yeah, I know. But it worked.

I’ve been rereading these books because now seemed like a good time to read about a period of tyrannical instability in politics. One of the first thing commentators will tell you is DO NOT READ THESE BOOKS AS METAPHOR FOR CURRENT POLITICS. The first significant European scholar to publish in the 1600s said that, as did the breakaway guy in America in the 1700s, and a whole bunch of hangers-on since.

There’s a useful chart by a guy named Jacob Edson on Bible Gateway, based on an earlier chart by Craig T. Owens. It gives you the years and whose reign overlapped once Israel and Judah split from each other. Also whether the kings (and one queen) were evil or good at the start and end of their reigns.

This gets interesting.

There may be more about this in coming weeks, but the bottom line of reading this mess of who was killing who is a frightening awareness of how little being evil resulted in a short reign.

Awhile back a bunch of YWAMers (that’s Youth With a Mission) graduates talked to each other via Facebook messenger. The group broke up because a bunch believed Trump was God’s golden boy (think David) while a handful of others thought he was Ahab. (Check Israel about 2/3 down on that chart.)

Yeah, don’t impose today on then and look for symbols. That way lies madness. The point is, we came to the conclusion that a bunch of us with prayer lives and that magic phrase “after God’s own heart” (which is why God established David’s kingdom as the one Jesus would descend from) thought God had completely different plans in politics.

And since we all believed we were hearing from God about what to do and what to think that became so problematic we broke up, with promises to pray for each other that sounded a lot like insults.

How long people reigned (from 7 days to 55 years, if you’re interested, and the longest reign wasn’t David; it was this guy named Manasseh ruling over just Judah) doesn’t align with who was tearing down the high places and ending sacrifices to other gods; it has a lot to do with who was nice to neighboring kings.

Women aren’t supposed to have political opinions and we’re sure not supposed to know who was doing what in the Bible more than men, or it makes everyone embarrassed. (Anyone else ever been told they need to rid themselves of the ‘Spirit of Jezebel’?)

So I’ll just say that I’m looking forward to looking at the prophetic books that have to do with this history period. The whole Old Testament, once you get past Abraham’s grandkids, pretty much keeps telling this same story from different perspectives: Israel and Judah from Saul down to Babylonian exile.

Because the way they told us these stories in Sunday School, back when we memorized those troublesome minor prophets with no understanding of what they were up against or everything that came before, those were whitewashed. This story is full of death and sex and ambition and confusion and a bunch of people on the ground trying to survive while high flyers tried to stay in power.

I’m no longer convinced God is all that interested in who’s in power. Which makes people really edgy because someone who says that must not care about important issues of equity. That’s not true either. Life is complicated.

Almost as complicated as sorting through what happened in Israel and Judah, king by king, betrayal by betrayal.