JOHN180 - How Not to Get Rid of Man-Eating Lions

Hey my friends, Matt Whitman, the host of the program. You're listening to right now, the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. I'm sorry, I'm all disconflubulated. I got the phone's ringing. What's Ah, it's Jeff Foote. I'm going to ignore him. Jeff Foote, for those of you who don't know, is the gentleman who edits the podcast and makes the music for it.

He's great. He comes in here and does bonus episodes with me after we finish chapters of the books of the Bible we're working on. We kind of game it out and he tells me what I got wrong. It's very fun. Also, this isn't the time where I talk with Jeff Foote. This is the time where I talk with you. So you should feel important because I just blew off a really talented, good friend so that we could talk about lion infestations.

Because that's what's on the docket for today. We have lion infestations in my neighborhood. It's a thing here where I live. I live in the mountains of South Dakota. Some of you didn't know that that's where the mountains start in the western United States. But it's true. I live in the first mountain range of the mountains as you go west after a whole lot of prairie coming from back east.

And it's beautiful, and there are big animals, and the weather's pretty cool. And there's pine trees and trout, and you got the big horned sheep. And as I mentioned, you got the mountain lions. And they live in my neighborhood. I don't really see them. I've seen evidence of them. I've seen footage on ring doorbells and trail cams.

But my understanding is that most years are down years for lions in our neighborhood. I don't think a mountain lion has attacked any people around here. No, not that I've heard of. I've heard rumors unsubstantiated that maybe a pet or two got hauled away by a mountain lion, but I don't even know if that's true.

But they're here. And the story goes that every few years, they're kind of on a cycle. Every few years, the little nooks and crannies and caves and the cliffs and all of that stuff will just fill up with more mountain lions than usual, and we'll have a good old-fashioned lion plague. And when that happens, the people who monitor things like this, so the story goes, I don't know, I haven't why I don't why I've never seen this happen with my own eyes.

But the story goes that they come in here, maybe with like a little black van or something, and they got guns that maybe shoot bullet bullets, or maybe they got guns that shoot sleepy time bullets, and they go up there into all the caves and nooks and crannies, and they smoke out the mountain lions and they get them, and then maybe they cull them back down to the population level they want to keep the mountain lions at, or maybe they make them go to sleepy time and then they relocate them to somewhere else.

I don't know. But my understanding is that the lion population in my neighborhood ebbs and flows from year to year. But you know what? They never ever ever do to get rid of the lion infestation in my neighborhood? Bring in a whole bunch of weird priests who don't really even understand their own religion to teach everybody things to make the lions go away.

But that, my friend, was exactly the plan of kings Shalmaneser and Sargon II of Assyria in 722, and maybe on into 721, 720 BC, after they conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and its capital Samaria, and then relocated a whole bunch of people from around their large empire to come and repopulate this newly wiped out land of Israel with total foreigners to disrupt everything and shake up the ant farm of the ancient world.

When that happened, there was an oft-forgotten and overlooked plague of lions that occurred, as recorded in 2 Kings 17. And when that happened, they didn't know how to get rid of the lions. And so the newly populated foreigners who suddenly lived in Israel and Samaria, they started writing back home to the king and the king's men and being like, They got they got lions here now.

It's a lion plague. They're eating everybody. And we're pretty sure that the problem is that, quote, the people you deported and resettled in the towns of Samaria do not know what the God of that country requires. He has sent lions among them, which are killing them off because the people, once again, do not know what he requires.

Then the king of Assyria, my guess is that that's probably Sargon II at this point, gave the following order. 2 Kings 17, 27. Have one of the priests you took captive from Samaria go back to live there and teach the people what the God of the land requires. So one of the priests who'd been exiled from Samaria came to live in Bethel and taught them how to worship the Lord.

Now, this probably sounds very exciting to you if you are rooting for the things of God to win out through the Bible, as I am. On its surface, this kind of seems like a stroke of luck or the providence of God that now we're going to get a faithful priest of the true God of all gods, the I mean the D God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, a true and faithful priest descended from Levi clear back in the day, is going to come back.

He's going to be repatriated back into the land that God promised to Abraham and his descendants. And he's going to teach all of these foreigners who know nothing of the God of Abraham, who've been moved by force into Samaria. He's going to teach them all how to worship God properly. Like he'll probably set up a new sacrificial system and just get everything going the right way.

So this is very, very exciting. But that's not what happened. Because all of the priests from the northern kingdom were as crappy as all of the kings from the northern kingdom. And the king of Assyria doesn't know that. He doesn't know the difference between true worshipers of Yahweh in Judah, the Southern Kingdom, and the fake garbagey ones who ostensibly worship Yahweh as well as a hundred other regional deities.

He has no idea. He's just uninformed about it. He's like, we just got rid of these lions. What do you do when you have a lion plague? Oh, I know, sir. Send hunters to get rid of the lions? No. What? No, you go and get a garbagey, low-rent priest to teach people that we moved in from other parts of the empire how to do the local religion of the God who just like lives there.

That god doesn't really affect anything else, but he lives right there. He kind of haunts Israel. And uh, we just got to go to priest to solve this. Well, of course, it doesn't work. It says, Nevertheless, each national group made its own gods in the several towns where they settled and set them up in the shrines the people of Samaria had made at the high places.

This is just an absolute disaster. So the Israelites had made pagan worship sites to false gods. Then you get this priest, whichever priest it was, I mean, we'll keep reading here in a minute, that they brought back in to be like, teach them the ways of worshiping Yahweh, the God of Abraham. And so he comes in, and apparently the result of his work it didn't cover, like, you know, monotheism, which is kind of important in the worship of the God of Abraham.

It's right at the front end of the Ten Commandments. And I'm the one true God. I'm the you can't have any other gods before me. I'm the one and only. That didn't come up on the part of the priest. That's like being someone who's brought into a place to teach people about America, and you've never heard of like freedom or the bill of rights.

How do you whiff on that? So whoever this corrupt, garbagey priest was, uh I mean, he was terrible at his job. And clearly the king of Assyria had no taste, no discernment ability to know who to bring in. It's like when politicians were like, we need to get some of them Christians to vote for us. I'm gonna who has the most clicks?

All right, well, I'm gonna bring in that Christian leader, and I'm gonna just have them uh say some Christian stuff at the Christian folk. We'll call them folks, and we'll have them use words like the Lord in really sincere tones and talk about prayer, and it'll sound, you know, Christian-like. And then they'll vote for us.

I mean, surely you have felt patronized at some point by politicians doing that. And the king of Assyria finds some guy. It's like, I'll shine the sheet of paper. We got to get rid of these lions. You're telling me this will do it. Great. It goes on the men from Babylon made Suckoth Benoth, the men from Kuthah made Nergal, and the men from Hamath made Ashimah.

The Avites, and it goes on for a little bit to talk about all the different sacrifices they set up and the fake gods they worshiped. And it says, they worship the Lord in verse 32 of 2 Kings 17. So that's nice. But they also appointed all sorts of their own people to officiate for them as priests in the shrines at the high places.

They worship the Lord, it goes on, but they also served their own gods in accordance with the customs of the nations from which they'd been brought. Then 2 Kings 17 offers this verdict from verse 34 toward the end of the chapter here. It says, To this day they persist in their former practices, they neither worship the Lord nor adhere to the decrees and ordinances, the laws and commandments that the Lord gave the descendants of Jacob, whom he named Israel.

When the Lord made a covenant with the Israelites, he commanded them, Do not worship any other gods or bow down to them, serve them or sacrifice them. But the Lord who brought you up out of Egypt with mighty power and outstretched arm is the one you must worship to him. You shall bow down and to him offer sacrifices.

You must always be careful to keep the decrees and ordinances, the laws and commands he wrote for you. Do not worship other gods, do not forget the covenant I have made with you, and do not worship other gods. If that sounded redundant, that wasn't a typo. I'm just reading what's in the text here. Rather, worship the Lord your God.

It is he who will deliver you from the hand of all your enemies. Now, what I just read you was a bunch of just the smoking gun quotes from Exodus and Deuteronomy that would have been baked into the minds of the followers of the God of Abraham that should have known all of this stuff. Do not worship other gods.

Well, here's the way it wraps up. They would not listen, however, but persisted in their former practices. Even while these people were worshiping the Lord, they were serving their idols. To this day, that being when Second Kings was written, their children and grandchildren continue to do as their fathers did.

All right. Some of you just got here, and this is your first day ever on the podcast, and you are hopefully enchanted and intrigued by all the fun we've had. But also, maybe you're scratching your head a little bit, like, what are we doing here? This says John on it. Why are we in 2 Kings 17? Who are these people?

We're talking about what is going on. Well, it's gonna make a lot more sense if you listen to the last couple episodes, but let me just answer that on the way out the door today. We are in John 4.4, where it says, now he, Jesus, had to go through Samaria. Very simple verse, just looks like an itinerary.

But to the original audience, this would conjure awareness of the bitter blood feud between the Samaritans and the Jews. And this blood feud had been going on for north of 700 years by the time we get to Jesus in the first century A.D. And what I read to you today is where it started. The Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and its capital of Samaria, which lends its name to the Samaritans.

Then they moved out almost all of the Jewish people and scattered them to the four corners of their empire so that they could be lost to history, forgotten, culturally, genetically absorbed, and they replaced the Israelites with people who had nothing to do with Israel or the god of Israel from modern day Syria and modern day Iraq.

And they just sort of threw them into Samaria and the historic stomping grounds of Israel. And then, of course, as we talked about, there's plague of lions, and they were like, we gotta get rid of the lions, and then everybody was like, Well, why would there be a plague of lions? Well, it's because we don't know how to satisfy their angry local deity who haunts this place, paraphrases mine, but it's a good paraphrase.

So we gotta fire up just a little bit of their religion. Now, the people never totally accept it. We moved them in from Babylon and from Syria. They don't want to be Jews, they don't want to worship Yahweh, they just want the lions to go away. So we'll bring in a priest who can kind of, you know, do a little bit of like the God of Abraham thing, but mixed with all the other pagan deities or whatever these people worship, just enough to get the lions under control.

So that's how they play it. They bring in this priest, and you get this weird mingling of Babylonian, Syrian, and Abrahamic Judaism, historic Hebrew religion, and the result is a mess. The author of Kings is telling us in the commentary I just read to you this is a disaster. This is not the historic faith.

This is some weird mutation of it, a weird mingling of it. This isn't devoted to God. God occasionally comes up, but it's just one among many. Do not mistake whatever this gross thing that happened in Samaria after 722. Do not mistake it for the true historic faithful remnant of the people of God. It isn't that.

And that right there, the stuff we've looked at in 2 Kings over the last couple of days, that is the origin of the ancient blood feud between the Samaritans who were Jewish-ish and the Jewish people who are just Jewish. Tomorrow we're going to trace this tension through the centuries toward the time of Jesus and look more closely at how these two traditions really veered apart from this point in 722 BC.

If you end up with a plague of lions, I do not recommend bringing in a priest who used to live in your neighborhood and having him do something vaguely religious. I recommend guns. And if you're not into that, I recommend bear spray. And in all cases, I recommend calling the professionals who know exactly what to do to deal with your lion plague.

Don't make the same mistake Sargon II did. You're better than that. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.

JOHN180 - How Not to Get Rid of Man-Eating Lions

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