King Solomon's Hog feat. Aaron Higashi (Transcript)

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Chris Sims: Then the young men who had grown up with him told him, “This is what you should say to the people who said to you, ‘Your father made our yoke heavy, but you, make it lighter on us!’ This is what you should say to them: ‘My little finger is thicker than my father’s loins. 2 Chronicles 10:10.

Aaron Higashi: The word of the Lord.

[Music: "My Raps (feat. Mic Mountain)" by CrDnlSn]

C: Hello friends and neighbors and welcome to Apocrypals. It's the podcast where two non-believers, and occasionally a guest, read through the bible but we try not to be jerks about it. My name is Chris Sims. With me as always is the other set of footprints Benito Cereno. Benito, how are you?

Benito Cereno: I'm good. I'm glad to be here and with me as always is a third set of footprints.

C: Not as always.

B: No, as always. Most people don't know this, because there's not a video component to this podcast, but there's usually a third person sitting in the room silently observing.

C: Jesus.

B: Yes, Jesus. It's usually Jesus, but this time it's not Jesus. I mean you know, Jesus is taking a break this time. We have a return guest, a multipal. As a dog returns to his vomit...

C: Jeepers Christmas...

B: Professor Dr. Aaron Higashi is with us again.

A: Hi guys.

B: Aaron, hello. Welcome.

A: I'm so very happy to be here. As a dog returns to his vomit, I'm happy to return to here.

C: Aaron I'm glad you're here.

A: Me too.

C: Finally, with you here, with you back, we can finally begin the alliance to end Dan McClellan.

A: Oh no. What have I signed up for? I've been ambushed.

A: There'll be none of that from me.

B: no just kidding we love Dan.

A: Just hugs. Just hugs and love.

B: Yeah also, you were on his show first. I feel anytime he has a guest before we can get them on the show it's very hard for me not to feel like we're just copying Dan, but...

A: It's hard for me to feel like I'm not copying Dan every day of my life, so...

B: Yeah right? I feel it's got to be difficult to be a public biblical scholar and not feel like you're in Dan's shadow right? Like, gosh, do you think Bart Ehrman is like, "oh man, what if? I wish I was Dan. I wish I could do this like Dan does."

A: At this point he probably does, yeah.

B: Yeah, right? Because it feels because it feels like Dan is the is the face of public facing democratized biblical scholarship.

A: And he's doing he's doing an amazing job of it.

B: He's doing so good. Since the whole Tiktok deal, he has shifted his focus now to making YouTube his home base, so a) his videos are now in landscape mode.

A: They're gorgeous.

B: Yeah, oh man, the vistas. You can see all of the framed comic book covers on his wall, but...

C: That's the part that makes me feel like he's encouraging on my territory because it's not like there's a second Dan McClellan who doesn't really know what he's talking about.

B: Uh there is his name is Dan Beecher. His name is also Dan. They did a podcast and it's two guys named Dan. Man, that's branding right there baby.

C: Why don't we talk about our guest? i know I introduced this bit–

B: With us again, Dr. Aaron Higashi.

A: Hi guys.

B: And he is an instructor at Grand Canyon University, with specialty in biblical scholarship, hermeneutics. You got a PhD in Bible?

A: Yes. Yeah. PhD in Bible from Chicago Theological Seminary. I've taught there and at Grand Canyon University here in Phoenix, Arizona, right around where I live. And for the past several years, I've been doing public-facing biblical scholarship on TikTok and a little bit on YouTube and Instagram. Coming up on 30,000 followers, not quite 900,000, but 30,000, where I'm happy to answer people's questions about the Bible and the way that we use the Bible to construct healthier theologies today.

B: You're so mellow also.

A: Am I?

B: Even as your words are destroying someone's argument, you've got such a chill vibe.

A: Well thank you.

B: Very 24-7 lo-fi biblical scholarship to study and relaxed to

A: I should open ASMR Biblical Studies with a whisper in the microphone. I've heard that.

B: Is it true you also do jujitsu? Is that correct?

A: That is true I do do jujitsu poorly, but I have for a couple years now.

B: Do you think you could beat Dan McClellan in a fight?

A: Hard to say. He'd probably throw some bibles at me and he'd make me parse some Aramaic verbs that I have not practiced in quite some time and that would allow him to get the upper hand.

B: You'll have to challenge him when he's on his book tour if he makes it to Arizona.

A: If he comes down to Arizona, I'll be happy to.

B: So the reason we have you on this episode in particular: we wanted you to... So first of all I guess I should say for listeners who haven't already picked up on it, this episode, even though we have a guest, it's not strictly a Multipals, it is a standard format episode but with a guest and we're going to be looking at Second Chronicles. And the reason we asked Aaron on is because–

C: Because this book sucks and is boring. I have not wanted to do this book for six months.

B: Yes, we have been putting this one off because it is perhaps a more challenging read than some others, and so we wanted to bring on an expert, and you are an expert because you have, in fact, written a book about chronicles which is forthcoming...

A: Forthcoming, yes.

B: ...in the year 2025. But you have already written a book about 1 and 2 Samuel for the Bible for Normal People, which is an excellent organization. It's not just a podcast. It's a whole multimedia endeavor. And now they're releasing Bible commentaries for normal people. And there are, looks like, eight in the line so far, maybe?

A: Yeah. That sounds right.

B: Genesis, Exodus, 1 and 2 Samuel, Psalms, Jonah, John, Romans, and Revelation. Gosh, how do you get a whole book out of Jonah? Gosh.

A: That's difficult. Yeah. Four chapters.

B: Your book is part of this line and takes a look at 1 and 2 Samuel, which of course, as we mentioned on our own episode about that, was originally one book talking about the beginning of the monarchy in the possibly ahistorical united kingdom of Israel and Judah. And yeah, and so now you're working on one for Chronicles.

A: Yeah. I just finished it last month. So it needs to go through a process of editing and getting some blurbs for it and picking out a cover and all that fancy stuff. But I've heard it's supposed to come out early this summer. That's what we're shooting for.

B: Extremely cool. And I do hope our listeners will check that out. The full title of the Samuel book, "1 and 2 Samuel for Normal People, A Guide to Prophets, Kings, and Some Pretty Terrible Men."

A: Yes.

B: Which sounds correct. Do you have a, you got a subtitle for the Chronicles one?

A: A tentative subtitle is, "A guide to the boldest, but least popular books in the Bible."

B: Wow. Okay.

A: I mean, look.

B: So yeah, the secret real motivation of having you on the show is: can you convince Chris that Chronicles is good, actually?

A: I can sure try.

B: Can you convince him that it is not just a less good rehash of Samuel and Kings?

A: I can probably do that. It is more than a less good rehash of Samuel and Kings. It's true, and we should probably start by saying, in many ways it is a less good rehash of Samuel and Kings. So that part is not false. The part that may be missing here is that it's also more than that. So I think that a lot of people, when they come to 1 and 2 Chronicles, especially where it's located in a Christian Bible, if you're reading it, it comes immediately after 1 and 2 Kings. So not only is this material repetitive, but you literally just read it, right? And you literally just read better versions of these same stories, more exciting stories of David's rise to power, more exotic stories about Solomon and his wealth and his wisdom, more exciting stories about these enigmatic prophet figures like Elijah and Elisha. So you've already read more exciting versions of these same stories.

A: And then you get to Chronicles. And not only do you have to first slam your way through the Bible's longest genealogy, nine chapters of names that you don't care at all about and that will never be mentioned again, But then as soon as you turn the page past that, you get into material that you just read, more boring versions of material you just read. Less interesting stories about David, less interesting stories about Solomon, less interesting stories about the rest of the history of the monarchy in ancient Israel. So that's true. And I think that has to be recognized. If you're going to talk to somebody about this, you can't lie and be like, that's not what's there. That's clearly what's there.

A: What's interesting about 1 and 2 Chronicles, to me, and this is the case that I try and make in my commentary, is not what it's saying. What it's saying is boring. What is interesting is what it accomplishes in saying what it says. So in saying what it says, in the way that it copies Samuel and Kings, in the way it changes Samuel and Kings, adds to it, subtracts from it, we get to see truly a revolution in biblical theology. The author of Chronicles is rewriting the history of the monarchy in light of new theological principles. And that's the power of the text. It's in the friction between the sometimes subtle, sometimes significant differences between Chronicles' version of the history of the monarchy and Samuel and Kings' version of the history of the monarchy.

A: In sort of the same way that the Gospels are interesting when you compare and contrast them, sure it's the same general story, it's about the life, death, and the putative resurrection of Jesus, but they differ, and they differ in ways that are emblematic of individual authors' theology and rhetorical agenda. Same thing with Chronicles, there's differences that are emblematic of the author's new theology and new rhetorical agenda. And it really gives the biblical reader, I think, license or at least a biblical precedent for taking biblical texts in the past and dramatically reinterpreting them for new audiences.

B: I'm already applying what you just said, you know, on top of the material that we have read. And so I'm looking forward to our more detailed discussion on it. But first, just as a reminder for our listeners because it's been a minute since we did the episode on 1 Chronicles, and Aaron, please, if you have anything to correct or interject at any point, please do, but I'm just going to give a brief rundown on the composition history of Chronicles.

B: We're looking at a text from... it's got to be no earlier than the Persian period because it talks about Cyrus and the return from exile. So we're looking at a text that is from the post-exilic period. And traditionally, scholars refer to the author as the Chronicler. It is generally considered that the books of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, were by either the same author or the same community of authors, possibly even a single text at one time. Tradition, Jewish and Christian tradition, attributes that chronicler to being Ezra himself. That does not seem particularly likely, but that is the traditional view.

B: And it either uses Samuel and Kings as a source or uses the same sources that Samuel and Kings use because it is frequently... it is often word for word or just a streamlined, kind of condensed version of events from Samuel and Kings. The major changes that we've seen so far are the account of the life of David, and we'll see that this continues. But David especially has been sanitized and idealized. All of the things that make David an interesting, flawed character that we see in Samuel have all been completely wiped out and none of the stuff where you might go, "oh, David, what are you doing?" None of that stuff is there. It's all like David is good the whole way.

B: And as we'll see in 2 Chronicles, which essentially covers the same material as 1 and 2 Kings, and you might go, well, how does one book manage to cover all the same material as what is elsewhere collected as two books? And the answer to that is, a) you cut out all of the interesting stuff and b) you just never talk about the northern kingdom at all.

A: It's true.

B: And so that's what we'll see in this. And then also in the in the Hebrew scriptures, in the Tanakh, Chronicles is the last book of the Bible. It's not in the middle of the old testament like Christian reckoning has it. It is it is the last piece of writing in the Writings, the Ketuvim, and so the the last words of Second Chronicles which we'll look at, and again just like Samuel and Kings, Chronicles is one is one book in the Tanakh and not two that... Where did that separation happen? Is it the Septuagint where Samuel, Kings and Chronicles get split in two?

A: Yes. Yeah.

B: And so, yeah, the Book of Chronicles is the end of the Tanakh. So, I don't know, did I miss anything important?

A: No, I don't think so. I think it used to be 60, 70 years ago or so, the general consensus was that the author of 1st and 2nd Chronicles, the Chronicler, was also the author of Ezra and Nehemiah. Since 1970 or so, especially, that consensus has broken down a lot, and many biblical scholars think that they are different. There was a prominent study done by a scholar named Sara Japhet that many people think is sort of the knockdown argument against them having the same author. There's still some biblical scholars who hold to them being the same, but it's a less prominent.

B: Where do you fall on it? Do you have an opinion?

A: I think it's a different, I follow Sara Japhet very closely in most things that she does. So I also think that the Chronicler is a separate author from Ezra Nehemiah. Although I do think that the author of Chronicles had access to Ezra and Nehemiah, I do think they are writing in a similar social and historical context, and they are both affiliated with the temple in a similar sort of way. So I think that accounts for some of the similarities in the text. But they have some very unique things, both about their ideology and about just the linguistic style of their writing that I think makes them unlikely to be the same person.

B: Thank you for correcting me live so I don't have to hear about it on BlueSky.

A: I doubt anybody's going to come for you.

C: Oh, you would be surprised.

B: Oh, you would be surprised.

A: Really?

B: Any little thing. One time we made a... Okay, so a couple episodes ago we were looking at the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity, and we made a joke about like, "can you imagine being killed by a cow?" Do you know how many people emailed me statistics on "death by cow" after that episode? It was a lot. It was a lot. We were making a joke about imagine being killed by a sweet old dairy cow and people were like, "no actually, more people die by cow than by shark" and it's like well...

A: My Uncle was!

B: Yeah, yeah, somebody's, "My uncle was killed by a raging dairy cow in the Coliseum for his long-held beliefs."

C: Which is weird because that happened in like 1987.

B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was secret underground Christian persecutions. It's a whole like John Wick kind of scenario. There's a shadow world that we don't know about where people are still being thrown ad bestias.

C: Hang on. I'm really into this new premise of the podcast where we explored the John Wick world of the emperors of Rome.

B: Yeah, that's the real secret empire, not that stuff with Cap hailing Hydra etc.

C: All right if that is the background that we have, and Aaron that is the background that you want to establish, anything else about about Chronicles that you want to get into before we actually get into the names of pillars?

A: The names of pillars. There are a couple named pillars. Well, maybe it might be helpful to talk about the three biggest theological differences between Chronicles and Samuel and Kings. That way, when we get into the text and we start talking about them, I can refer back to these general differences.

B: Yeah, that's a good idea. Let's do that.

A: So there are three big differences in the theology of Chronicles from the theology of Samuel and Kings. Samuel and Kings really emphasizes human agency in its stories. A lot of the stories are driven by human ambition, human desires, human lusts, human foibles. Chronicles is much more interested in presenting a story that has a very tightly regimented narrative governed by divine sovereignty. So human agency is frequently downplayed. And so human capacities, human abilities are frequently downplayed in exchange for really hyping up how God is in control of everything.

A: Number two, Samuel and Kings has a lot of stories of private revelation where only a single individual in the entire kingdom will know what God really wants, or a single prophet will deliver a message to just like a closed room with only a handful of people in it, and they alone, out of everybody in the kingdom will know what God really wants. Chronicles disagrees with this vehemently and changes stories to focus much more on public revelation. Everybody in the kingdom knows what God wants. There's lots of big public speeches relaying God's desires. There's big public miracles that are seen by the eyes of all the people in Israel to confirm that everybody knows, everybody's on the same page about what God wants.

A: And number three, Samuel and Kings have a theology of deferred retributive punishment. That is to say, when God punishes people, it often has this pretty brutal eye for an eye kind of sensibility to it. You did this wrong thing, so I'm going to do this bad thing to you. But it's also often deferred, and that is that the people who commit offenses against God are rarely the ones who are punished in Samuel and Kings. Instead, the punishment will fall on their descendants, their sons, their grandsons. Sometimes centuries later, the punishment will fall on people who aren't necessarily the ones who committed the offense that sort of warranted the punishments to begin with. Whereas in Chronicles, there's still divine punishment, but it tends to be immediate and it tends to be rehabilitative. So it's for the express purpose of bringing people to a place where they ask for forgiveness, where they recognize what they've done wrong, and they confess their sins, and they ask for forgiveness. So it has a function of trying to rehabilitate people rather than just punish them. And it's almost always immediate rather than being deferred to some later generation. So those are the three big things that I think we'll find lots of examples of.

C: With that in mind. Benito, let's take a moment to pass the collection plate.

B: Yes, please.

[Music: "Take a Chance On Me" by Stephen Mann of English Martyrs Church]

C: Benito, do you know what I say to the people who have made my yoke heavy?

B: You talk about the relative size of your followers?

C: Nope, sure don't.

B: Okay.

C: I would not do that.

B: Yeah.

C: That seems like a weird thing to do if people are coming to you saying, "hey make our yoke lighter."

B: Yeah.

C: What I would do is say, if you enjoy the show why not go to ko-fi.com slash apocrypals and give us a little bit of a love offering because I still don't have a job.

B: Yeah, that would be a good idea. Not to tip your hand too much, but you even more don't have a job than yesterday.

C: Yeah, I had a prospect that is no longer.

B: Yeah, so I think technically you're in the negative amount of job.

C: Yes, I have. Well, I'm actually still like two up on account of podcasting.

B: Right.

C: But that, look, that's not enough to keep a roof over Biscuit's head.

B: Poor Biscuit. Why don't you think of Biscuit, listeners?

C: Can we put a picture of Biscuit up on the Kofi? Because she's very cute.

B: Yeah. Send me one and I'll put it on there.

C: All right. Kofi contributors will get an exclusive picture of Biscuit, the dog.

B: Yeah, Biscuit the dog, not Biscuit the food. Although, I could probably apply a sticker of a biscuit, the food, the American food....

C: Maybe so.

B: ...on there. But yeah, that's it. Kofi.com slash Apocrypals. K-O-F-I dot com slash Apocrypals. The name of the site slash the name of the show. Where you can leave either one time or recurring donations to help us be alive people who live indoors and can support other living creatures with food and shelter. Um, those being dogs, cats, wives, etc.

C: The three kinds of things we like.

B: But yeah the the three the three kinds of creatures, as in the creation account from Genesis 1: "God populated the earth with all kinds of creatures: dogs, cats, wives, etc." So yes, please help us out that way. We appreciate everyone who has and in fact a big shout out to Chris, but not this Chris, a different Chris, who did the did the Full Beast™, can you believe it?

C: Incredible. Honestly incredible and extremely good for me personally.

B: What a champion, what a hero, so shout out to you. Thank you. But you know don't feel pressure to help us monetarily if you can't do it. It's Hard Times, Daddy™, so if you want to help us nonetheless without opening your wallet that's fine you can leave us a rating and review on your podcast app of choice or you can talk about us with your friends or on Reddit or something. Let people know that the show exists. You know if someone is like, "wow I sure love Dan McClellan and his podcast where can I get more stuff like that?" You can go, "well there's a less good version that has more episodes it's called Apocrypals and you can check it out, and sometimes they steal the same guests that Dan has on his show

C: There's a less good version but if you like the part where he says the name of a superhero at the end for 30 to 50 percent of the show–

B: If your favorite part of Dan's videos is when he shows that he's wearing a Lobo t-shirt, here's a different podcast with that vibe the whole time. And that's us Apocrypals the more you talk about us the more there are google hits for us that aren't just people misspelling the word apocryphal. So, appreciate that. Also remember, Apocrypals with a Y, not with an A in the middle. "Don't call us crap or we will cry."

C: That's a good mnemonic?

B: Good mnemonic. But yeah, but also, hey, you know, we've got a guest here, and I think it is only fair that the guest be allowed to plug any project of his own. Like right now, now you could talk about your online presences. You can talk about your books, talk about your non-Bible books, whatever. The floor is yours.

A: Again, my name is Aaron Higashi, and so you can follow me on TikTok @Aaron Higashi. You can follow me on Instagram at @ABHigashi. You can follow me on Twitter and Bluesky by searching Aaron Higashi on YouTube at Bible of Color, or you can just search Aaron Higashi and I'll show up there too. I post videos as frequently as I can, which isn't as much as I would like these days. But still, I think every one out of three days or something on average. I do have a book out, 1 and 2 Samuel for Normal People, A Guide to Prophets, Kings, and Some Pretty Terrible Men. That came out last summer. We have a hardcover copy of that now. So you can buy either the paperback or the much more fancy version. That's a pretty good book. It's my favorite commentary – it's not even my favorite commentary, but it's a pretty good commentary on 1st and 2nd Samuel that looks at the stories in 1st and 2nd Samuel both through the lens of fatherhood, looking at how these characters help raise and develop the masculinity of characters in successive generations, and also through the lens of political ambivalence of which there is quite a bit in the books of 1st and 2nd Samuel. But it brings the best in biblical scholarship to a lay-level audience, which is the goal of the Bible for Normal People in general. And then I'll have 1st and 2nd Chronicles for Normal People out this coming summer. And you are more than welcome/invited to come pick that up as soon as that is out. And I'm sure I'll post a bunch of announcements and stuff in the run-up to that. And you can learn more about how 1st and 2nd Chronicles are actually the most interesting books in the Bible, if you can just get past some of their surface-level boringness.

C: Cool, so I guess I'm just shallow, that's awesome Aaron, thank you, awesome, I guess I'm just an ill-informed reader, that's fine.

B: Yeah the real reason I brought on a guest is because I was afraid to say that myself, but finally. Finally.

A: It is an off-putting book, like I said at the beginning, and I don't think it's anybody's fault if you pick it up and you read it and you're like, "this is awful" and set it down more power to you that you are not obligated to dig deep into these books. But if you want to get something out of it, I can show you some tips and tricks for getting something out of it.

B: All right. Well, in fact, why don't we do that now?

C: Fortunately/unfortunately, we are obligated to get through it. So let's go ahead and get into the text.

[Music: "Take a Chance On Me" by Stephen Mann of English Martyrs Church]

C: Benito, as you mentioned, this is covering a lot of the same ground that we have covered previously, and for you listener in the future, that might be very recent for us it is a past that has exited our brains, and no longer exists. So, if we make the same jokes, then you know what? They were good the first time. They ain't avocados, they're still good.

B: That's right. Yep. The chances of us making the same joke again not remembering we had made it the first time are extremely high.

C: We have a Repetitiveness Watch that is about to turn into a Repetitiveness Warning.

B: That's correct.

C: With that I would like to give you the first joke that I wrote.

B: I would love to hear it, let's... So actually first let me say, like I said, a lot of this material is the the same as First and Second Kings just with the more interesting parts taken out, so we will go over the content of those, but we won't spend as much time on it. So yeah, chapter one and following we get the account of Solomon, there's no succession crisis this time, it's just easy-peasy David to Solomon and also: hey Chris what's the most famous story of Solomon?

C: That baby.

B: Yeah, guess what's not in Chronicles.

C: Not in this. Yeah we get a lot of people talking about how wise he is and then if you're me you go, "oh like can you give me an example?" and they go, "no."

B: Yeah you just got to take our word for it.

C: Yeah many people are saying he's very...

A: Everybody is saying.

C: So here's the first joke I wrote. This is less because of the joke itself, and more just to give you, like to set the bar for the mindset that I was in entering Second Chronicles? Here in chapter one verse four it says that "David had brought the ark of God from Kiriath-jearim to the place he had set up for it, because he had pitched a tent for it in Jerusalem," and I wrote, "whoa, settle down David."

B: Yeah.

A: Ew, David.

C: Little did I know that there would be much more explicit jokes later to come.

B: Yeah that's true. I can't confirm, but I i feel confident we probably made a tent pitching joke in a previous episode. Can't say, and I'm not going to try to account for that anymore. It's just the splash zone, it's the shrapnel, that you the listener are going to have to suffer through as you listen to the episode, is us feeling like we are discovering jokes for the first time that we're not.

C: And if you go there, they are still making that joke to this very day.

B: To this to this very day they are talking about David pitching a tent in a field. Look, David pitched a lot of tents. So did Solomon. But guess what? The Crown Clerk doesn't want to talk about all that. He's not interested in Solomon and David getting up to frisky business.

C: No, he wants to talk about how much horses cost.

B: Yeah.

C: I cannot imagine anything less relevant to anyone than what horses cost Solomon.

B: Yeah. What was the price of horses in Iron Age Canaan? I don't know, man.

C: The time of this writing, it was already out of date.

B: Yeah.

C: Horse prices had fluctuated.

B: So yeah, we've got the story of Solomon, primarily the construction of the temple, bringing the bringing the Ark of the Covenant into the temple, giving us the specs on the Ark and all of that kind of stuff, the temple furnishings... this covers about the first what... six... seven? Seven chapters are about Solomon building and dedicating the temple. Aaron, make this good. Make it good.

A: Well, I mean, there's a first, as you said before, there's no succession crisis, right? The transition from David to Solomon is very smooth in the opening chapter of 2 Chronicles. That was quite a big deal. It takes up two or three chapters in 1 Kings, where Solomon only makes his way to the throne because of sort of backroom political deals and a lot of assassination. But here, Solomon has been prepared to take the throne after David for chapters. David has held him up, again, publicly in front of all Israel. David has explicitly identified him as his heir. So it's very easy for him to just step into those shoes at the opening of 2 Chronicles. 2 Chronicles still opens with a story of God essentially granting Solomon a wish, where he asks for wisdom, and because he didn't ask for wealth or long life, God throws those in too.

A: But as you guys kind of pointed out, Solomon's wisdom is de-emphasized in the version of the story in 2 Chronicles, and this goes with that theme of de-emphasizing human agency in general. We are taking away the possibility or diminishing the possibility that Solomon's achievements are because he's very wise, he as a person, to make more room for Solomon's achievements being the result of God directly. So if you look very closely at 2 Chronicles chapter 1, and you look at verse 10, I think it is there, I should probably pull it up so I have it right here, but if you look at verse 10 where God is giving him these things that he's asked for, I think it's actually verse 11 here. "Because this was in your heart and you have not asked for possessions, wealth, honor, or the life of those who hate you and have not even asked for long life, but have asked for wisdom and knowledge for yourself that you may rule over your people, wisdom and knowledge are granted to you. I will also give you riches and all these things." That short clause there, the beginning of verse 12, "wisdom and knowledge are granted to you," is abbreviated from its version in 1 Kings, where he's told that he'll have wisdom and knowledge unparalleled, incomparable to any king who has come before him. But that incomparability bit is reorganized to go with his wealth, so that I will give you, to the next sentence, "I will give you riches, possessions, and honor, such as no kings have had before you." That's a subtle shift, right? But it moves what's incomparable about Solomon away from his wisdom and towards his wealth.

A: And then combine this with the removal of the story of the two prostitutes that he sort of solves with his incredible wisdom, not that that would take much wisdom to solve, and it's kind of a gross story besides, but combined with the removal of that story, and combined with the removal of any reference to Solomon composing hundreds and hundreds of proverbs, which is something else that you get in the version of the story of 1 Kings, Solomon's wisdom takes a back seat in this story, again, to make room for God's sovereignty. It's not Solomon and his wisdom that are accomplishing all these things. It's God's grace. God is giving him this stuff.

C: I feel like from a religious standpoint, this is one of those examples of a religious idea conflicting with a narrative idea. Because everything you just said, like the removal of the succession crisis and all the assassinations and the de-emphasizing the attributes of the characters, all of that is what makes something interesting. All of that is what makes a story interesting, right? So in... They made it more sacred and less interesting, it sounds like to me.

A: Yeah, well, they made it... It may have resulted in the narrative being less exciting. What it also results in is the theology being more palatable to an audience 300 years or more later than the composition of Samuel and Kings. Samuel and Kings had a very particular theology that was successful for its original audience at the time. That theology wasn't working for this audience anymore, and it had to be updated and changed in some ways. And the de-emphasizing of human agency to make more room for God is part of that. So is it less fun to read? It often is less fun to read. But is it more sustainable? Is it more... Does it engage the imagination better? Does it feel safer? I think that's probably one of the most important things. Does it feel safer theologically for a community probably sitting at the end of the fourth century BCE when the whole world is turned upside down by the conquest of Alexander the Great? These people really want to know who's in charge. And so emphasizing God's sovereignty, it's not human beings and their ambition that's driving history. It's God who's driving history.

B: That makes sense. And I mean, a thing we talk about on the show often is just like how significant and certainly in history, but also specifically to the composition of the various texts of the Bible, is how much of an impact the Babylonian exile had on kind of the consciousness, the spirit of the Jewish people. And how so much of what we think of now, you know, from our modern perspective, looking back on the Bible, how much of that stuff was informed, how much of that theology was informed by that exile, and how these stories were composed to try and make sense of these events of history. Because it's like, "well, we thought this about God, but then this happened. And so that must mean we misunderstood, and here's what really happened."

B: And so one of the ways that, you know, one of the things that not just Dan, but Dan famously, but you also as well, and other most public scholars are talking about when we talk about the multivocality of the Bible, and how there's no one single viewpoint being espoused by the entire text, is because so often, the theology of the individual authors is completely informed by their position in history. Right? Like the, the theology is changed by, well, this foreign nation did this to us. And so we've, you know, you can see, you can follow. And I hope, hopefully the listeners of this show, as we've covered different texts have seen how you, I mean, the idea of God of, you know, of Yahweh, the God of Israel transforming from a, from a local God to the God of, of heaven, you can see that physically happening in Ezekiel, and that's in a response to, "we're being taken away from Jerusalem where our temple is, how does our God go with us?" And so you see these significant theological developments happening, and they're all based on adjusting to historical events.

A: Yes.

B: If that makes sense.

A: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, all theology is contextual theology. All theology arises out of a particular social, historical, cultural context. And one of the consequences of that is that old theology, theology produced in a different time, in a different place, will inevitably, as satisfying as it might have been for its original audience, will almost certainly become less satisfying the further away from that original context you get. And that's what 1 and 2 Chronicles is doing. It is the same story, by and large, but with new theology for a new context.

B: Chris, did you have anything else you would like to look at specifically in the first seven chapters?

C: No, a lot of what I wrote was just the word "cool" and "great" in the margins.

A: There are a couple other small things. I mean, I could do like rapid fire. I mean, the size of the temple is different in 2 Chronicles. It's 200 feet tall instead of being 30 feet tall. So it's imagined to be much grander than it was. This is probably just nostalgia, right? They have a different temple now. 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings may have traditions as old as the first temple. So they are composed when either the temple was like a recent memory or composed at a time when the first temple was actually standing. The second temple is a much more modest building. So imagining it to be massive is something they are freely able to do because that original temple is no more standing. But it serves to sort of bolster the morale of the community. We used to build monumental architecture.

B: And silver used to be as common as pebbles on the ground.

A: Right. We used to be, you know, now we are, you know, a province of Persia. Now, you know, even the Greeks are coming in and conquering Persia. Who knows what's going to happen to us? We are downtrodden and we are poor and we are marginalized, but we used to have, you know, wealth all over the place.

A: One of the most theologically significant things that happens in this temple construction part happens in 2 Chronicles chapter 7. This doesn't happen in the version of the story in 1 Kings. In 2 Chronicles chapter 7, verse 1 through 3, you have this fire coming down from heaven to consume burnt sacrifices on an altar, and only then does the glory of the Lord fill the temple. And if you read down a little bit further, you'll see that everybody, all Israel, witnesses this fire come down. So this is an example of that public revelation, that public theology. Who gets to see the glory of the Lord enter the temple? Who gets to see the divine confirmation of the legitimacy of this worship site? Everybody. Every single person in the entire country gets to witness this event. And so there's no excuse later on, right? So when later people are like, no, I'm going to go worship wherever I please. There's no excuse. Whereas previously in first Kings, yeah, the glory of the Lord enters the temple, but it enters almost secretly with the Ark of the Covenant. And only the people who are in the room at the time get to see that. And so you could reasonably dispute, well, I have no idea what's going on down there at the temple. Second Chronicles seven removes that excuse with this big public, like literally fireworks display.

C: The only other thing that I had of note was in chapter 7, verse 19. This is where the Lord is talking to Solomon. And he says, "hey, everything's going to be chill. Everything's going to be good." And then he says, "however, if you turn away and abandon my statutes and my commands that I have set before you, and if you go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will uproot Israel from the soil that I gave them in this temple that I have sanctified for my name, I will banish from my presence." And as someone who has read at this point a significant chunk of Bible, the note that I wrote for that is, "yeah, but what are the odds of that happening?"

A: Yeah. Everybody gets to make prophetic statements in retrospect, right? If this happens, who would think this? Of course it's going to happen, right? And the chronicler knows this is going to happen.

C: Listen, I'm sure they've learned their lesson by now.

B: Yeah, surely. These are not a hard-hearted people.

C: Not hard-hearted, not stiff-necked.

B: Yeah.

C: The book likes to call them a lot.

B: Yeah, nothing like that. So chapter eight and nine, we have the various activities of Solomon. I noticed the change from Kings, where in Kings, Solomon had to give up cities to King Hiram. Here, King Hiram gives those cities to Solomon. Again, kind of sanitized, idealized version of the Davidic dynasty, which has been a recurring theme throughout the Chronicles.

B: Then in chapter nine, we get the Queen of Sheba. And she comes and she thinks Solomon pretty great. And importantly, King Solomon gets apes, ships full of apes.

C: Two things here. One, when the Queen of Sheba shows up, it says that "she came to Solomon and spoke with him about everything that was on her mind. So Solomon answered all her questions. Nothing was too difficult for Solomon to explain to her." So it's nice that we have the invention of Solomon-splaining.

A: Very solid.

C: I bet he was like, "no, no, it's on the blockchain. And so when you find out that Tyler Durden was actually Edward Norton the whole time..." We also get these shields that he makes that are recurring in the book but not in a way that is interesting or narratively significant they just come back at one point. They are "200 large shields of hammered gold 15 pounds of hammered gold went into each shield," or 1.5 National Wrestling Alliance Championship belts.

B: Yeah, gold famously the best metal to use for protective armor.

A: Famously.

B: Famously hard metal gold.

A: Always a step up from silver in role-playing games though, so.

B: And Minecraft? I don't know.

A: There's another subtle change here tucked in in verse seven of chapter nine. In verse seven of chapter nine the Queen of Sheba says, "happy are your people and happy are your servants who continually attend to you and hear your wisdom." That's changed from the version in 1 Kings, which says happy are your wives. So as you guys mentioned before, any reference to Solomon's 700 wives and 300 concubines is removed in the version of the story in 1 Chronicles. Solomon is not guilty of worshiping foreign gods, the foreign gods of his wives in 1 Chronicles. And so even the small reference here to as many wives is expunged and replaced with "happy are your people" instead.

C: How could they take out his wives? Their teeth were like sheeps?

B: Yeah, necks like towers?

C: As you mentioned Benito, it does say, speaking of gold, I think we have here the hierarchy of weapon quality, right? Gold: best. Silver: second best. Ivory, apes, peacocks all the common currencies

B: Right and what this tells me is we need to rethink the way that we have been categorizing comics history. We're like, "what comes after the bronze age?" and we're like, "iron age? I don't know, the dark age?" I think this clearly sets it: gold age, silver age, ivory age, ape age, peacock age.

C: Here's the problem with that is that the Silver Age was the Ape Age.

B: That's true. The Silver Age was the Ape Age. How come there are no additional texts about the apes of Solomon? How do we get through the entire medieval period with nary a text about King Solomon's apes?

A: You can write some fan fiction.

C: It's called Pseudepigrapha.

B: That's right.

A: There's a thriving romance fan fiction community online.

B: That's right.

A: Who would love to hear about...

B: My AO3 story about King Solomon's ape and peacock having erotic friend adventures.

C: Speaking of erotic friend adventures.

B: Yes?

C: Solomon dies.

B: Right.

C: Aaron, maybe you can speak to that if he died on an erotic friend adventure.

A: He dies. Not as a result of that. Solomon has very few erotic adventures in the version of the story in 2 Chronicles. But he does die. He dies peacefully, contrasting very sharply again with First Kings, where before his death, the text reminds us of all his enemies that are still alive, that are the result of David's violences. We get none of that in First Chronicles. Solomon dies in First Kings, knowing that his kingdom is going to be torn apart. That doesn't happen in First Chronicles. No, he gets a good death here. He goes to the grave full of years, lots of wealth. He sleeps with his ancestors. His son, Rehoboam, succeeds him. Very nice.

C: Let's talk about Rehoboam.

B: Yeah, so yeah, chapter 10, you know, now that we have gotten past the reign of Solomon, we're going to look at the individual kings of Judah. The kings of the, like, there's a very only very quick mention of the idea that, "oh, yeah, the kingdom is divided now. And now there's, now there's two opposing kings." Whereas in the book of Kings, we kind of alternate back and forth between the Northern and Southern kingdom, Chronicles only focuses on Judah with only the briefest mentions of the kings of Israel when necessary, which is primarily when they're interacting with the king of Judah. And there's kind of a running theme the idea that the southern kingdom is the real israel because because the northern kings are noted for their evil ways and so when he wants to talk about wicked kings of Judah he says he acted like a king of Israel. So obviously this is some form of anti-Northern propaganda. But is this simply jingoism or is this a retroactive thing to try to account for the conquest of the Northern Kingdom? We can justify that by showing how evil they were or is it a combination?

A: I think it's primarily theological. It's: "what makes a kingdom that worships Yahweh legitimate" is the question. Is it the king? Is it that they worship Yahweh? Is it that they have power or wealth or make foreign alliances, that they're relatively successful, that they have a lot of people, that they descend from the tribes of Israel? Is it any of those things? No. The author of Chronicles is consistent that the legitimacy of a Yahwistic kingdom depends exclusively on the proper functioning of the temple. And so the kingdom of northern Israel is nothing because it does not have the temple. It does not have the temple in Jerusalem.

A: So it can also be many of these other things that you touched on. It can be a polemic against them. It could be a justification for, you know, by the time of the composition of 1st and 2nd Chronicles, the Northern Kingdom is obviously long gone. It's been gone for 400 or 500 years. There are like Samaritans who live up there now that have a very tense relationship with the people in Judah. So it can also be like this ethnic polemic. But I think what it primarily is, the author of 1st and 2nd Chronicles is primarily thinking theologically. It's about what makes Judah's only legitimate because of the proper functioning of the temple. Nobody else, there is no other legitimacy. There is no kingdom up there. And so you only mention them if they come into contact with the real kingdom in the South that has the temple.

B: All right. Chris.

C: Yes.

B: Let's, let's hear it. What do you got?

A: The joke. Say the joke.

[Clip: "Say the line, Bart."]

C: We find out about Rehoboam, and Solomon's kid, not as wise, but gifted in other areas, it seems.

A: Perhaps.

C: He has people who come to him after he ascends to the throne. And they say, "hey, it's been pretty hard for us lately. Can you lighten your father's harsh service? And then we'll be happy to serve you and be very chill." And he asks the elders and they say, "be nice to them." And he's like, "nah, I'm going to ask my boys."

A: The boys.

C: And that's when he goes to his terrible friends, the terrible adult sons of the court of King Solomon. And he says, "hey, what do you guys think I should do?" And they say, "you should talk about your hog."

B: Yeah.

C: And that's what he does. That is what he decides. I read the bit at the top of the show. He talks bad about King Solomon's own hog?

A: Yes.

C: Which is a bold choice.

A: It is a bold choice. Not very many genital-related jokes in the Old Testament, but more than you might think, and this is one of them.

C: Yeah. So he says, they come to him and they say, "hey, your father's service on us was really taxing." He's like, "well, I'm going to be a million times worse. So get used to it." And it doesn't... it says that his friends tell him that he should say the thing about King Solomon's ding-dang being thinner than his little finger. But it says that he spoke to them according to the young man's advice saying, "My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to it. My father disciplined you with whips, but I with barbed whips." It does not specify if he did say the thing about his hog.

B: That's true.

C: I think we can assume he did.

B: I think we have to assume that.

A: Yeah. I mean, it's funny. So we do need to recognize how funny it is. It's a funny thing to say that to compare your finger to your father's private parts and make a joke.

C: Truly a bizarre move.

A: It's weird how kind of relatable, how bro-y and relatable this is. Like, toxic masculinity and penis jokes have not evolved in 3,000 years. They are the same, and they've remained the same for a long time. They are biblical, in fact. What's kind of weird about this story is that in 2 Chronicles, this yoke that northern Israel is burdened with, that occasions them coming to Rehoboam and asking for relief, is nowhere previously mentioned, because 2 Chronicles cleans up all the possible references to Solomon enslaving his own people to help build the temple. The version of the story of 1 Kings is much more ambiguous. There are passages that seem to be very clear that Solomon did in fact enslave his own people in order to build the temple, despite his great wealth and despite all his international trade relations and stuff like that. But all those elements are removed. So it's kind of abrupt and it's out of the middle of nowhere that Jeroboam from northern Israel comes down and is like, "hey, the burden that your father placed on us was great." What burden? There is no burden in 2 Chronicles, but it's kind of a holdover from the version of the story in 1 Kings. But Rehoboam's response is also a holdover from that earlier version of the story. And it's still funny, the second time around.

C: So that doesn't go well for him.

A: Surprise, surprise.

C: Gosh, imagine living in some weird past time so distant from our own when you would go to the government and say, "hey please ease our suffering and just someone would talk about his hog.

A: Yeah.

B: Cannot imagine living in such world,

C: It causes problems. Isreal is in revolt until this very day. So Rehoboam starts fortifying cities and it says that "he strengthened their fortifications and put leaders in them with supplies of food, oil, and wine." Three food groups, obviously. "He also put large shields and spears in each and every city to make them very strong." The wording of that does make it sound like he gives... like it's a transformer and the city has like a large sword and shield. Like one.

B: Yeah.

C: One city-sized sword and shield like the movie mortal engines.

A: I don't mind that.

B: I mean Aijalon kind of sounds like a Gundam.

C: If there were Gundams in this–

B: We would be having a very different discussion?

A: I think the discussion would be the same it'd just be more awesome, but yeah.

B: We'd be talking about how the Gundams in Kings were more interesting.

A: Yeah. Somebody needs to do a sci-fi space opera retelling of the biblical story and give us some Gundams.

C: Yeah, Rob Liefeld did a little bit of that. King David did have a hoverboard.

B: Yeah. Rob Liefeld does a little bit of a lot of things, Chris.

A: Immediately after that, so we're in 2 Chronicles chapter 11 now. That's where you get the large shields and spears put in the city. The next passage, verses 13 through 17 in chapter 11, are unique to the version of the story in Second Chronicles, where all the priests and Levites who had been up north abandoned the kingdom of northern Israel and come down to join Rehoboam in the south. That's not verses that we get in the version of the story in 1 Kings. But again, it sort of suits the author, suits the chronicler's agenda. What makes their kingdom legitimate? The proper functioning of the temple. And you need priests and Levites to have proper functioning of the temple. So they all come down. And it also is a de facto delegitimization of the northern kingdom of Israel. They don't even have the proper priesthood necessary to run a cultic site, even if they wanted to.

B: Yeah. And all of their high places have been abandoned to the goat demons.

A: The goat demons, yeah.

B: Again, another element that could have been amplified on and is just given the briefest of mentions.

C: I did, in fact, highlight that and note a complaint that maybe this should have been expanded upon.

B: Yeah.

A: You'd like to hear more about the goat demons. What do they look like? What are they doing?

B: Exactly.

A: Are they pretty?

B: Maybe? So "goat demon" – what is it? Is it serim? Is that right? I don't know what it is. Something similar?

A: Yes from if it's from the root seir. It means to be hairy.

B: Hairy, right, so it's related or at least folk etymologically related to Mount Seir, right, which is in Edom and Esau who's the hairy one, so that so hair is the common element there.

A: Yeah.

B: I wish, yeah, I wish there was more. More of that stuff. Give me more goat demons. I have to assume is it tied to Azazel the goat of the wilderness? Maybe.

A: Yeah, I mean it's it is a different word, so you would expect if they wanted to make like a strong connection. So perhaps for those who don't know in Leviticus 16 it has the day of atonement – the Yom Kippur instructions for the day of atonement that priests are supposed to perform. And that involves the ritual sacrifice of one goat and then the, like I'm not sure what's a good word, but like the metaphorical transference of all the sins of the community onto another goat that's then led out into the wilderness and sent to Azazel, this, basically, an other, a different goat demon or a goat demon kind of thing that's supposed to reside out there in the wilderness. And it kind of just represents like all the chaotic supernatural forces that are out there beyond the scope of civilized life. And so what you would expect is that if, you know, if the author of the Chronicles wanted to make a strong parallel, the most obvious parallel would be an explicit one. You would say the same thing. But it's worded slightly differently. So scholars have speculated, is this part of that same– in continuity with that same tradition? Or is this something new, more applicable to the author of Chronicles' day? Difficult to say.

C: And we do want to clarify, just so everybody knows, that Azazel is not Nightcrawler's dad.

B: Chapter 12, The Sin of Rehoboam. As happens with almost all of these kings, he breaks bad.

A: Yeah, he commits, he does some idolatry as people are wont to do, especially when they're comfortable.

C: Who could have seen this coming?

A: It's a very different story, though. Again, now we get some big differences in the narrative from First Kings.

B: Yeah. So, I mean, here the major expansion is that the invasion from Egypt is a direct result of Rehoboam's apostasy, right?

A: Yeah. I mean, there's several. Yeah, the entire narrative is constructed. The basic outline of the story is the same. Rehoboam commits idolatry. And as a result of this, Pharaoh Shishak from Egypt comes up and attacks Judah, both outlying cities and the city of Jerusalem itself, and then carries off some of the riches in the temple. That's the same between both versions of the story.

A: The version in 2 Chronicles is expanded to add an explicit warning by a prophet, by the prophet Shemaiah, explaining to Rehoboam why Shishak is attacking. And this then prompts Rehoboam and his officials to repent in 2 Chronicles 12:6. And as a result of this repentance, God partially relents, sparing Jerusalem and only allowing Shishak to steal gold from the temple.

A: So those additional components, the warning from the prophet, the repentance of Rehoboam and his officials, and then the moderating of Shishak's success are unique to the version of the story at 2 Chronicles in this pattern of, again, it's public revelation, right? Rehoboam has no excuse. He's committed idolatry, but a prophet has warned him, has explained to him why he's suffering this consequence. And he's not suffering this consequence retributively, just as a matter of course, but he's experiencing this consequence for the explicit purpose of getting him to repent. And that when he does, there is some relief from that consequence. So that's part of the author of Chronicles' unique theology and a difference between the way it plays out in 2 Kings versus the way it plays out here.

A: This actually might be a historical event, too. We do have Egyptian records of Shishak's conquest, or at least his military exploits in Canaan.

B: Right. So, I mean, we're definitely entering the period of the biblical narrative where we start to have material evidence for the figures, specifically the kings of the northern and southern kingdom. However, they may have been referred to in the actual historical record. But, yeah, we're starting with Omri in the north, right? He's like the earliest one apart from a reference to the line of David on a stele somewhere. So, yeah, we're hitting the point where the non-supernatural elements of the story are most likely, at least mostly historical.

B: And, yeah, I don't know how closely we want to look at some of these other kings. Again, we've talked about these as we went through the Book of Kings, and they do tend to follow a pattern, almost a formula, where they either bring reforms to Judah and institute the worship of Yahweh and destroy some but never all of the places of worship of the old gods and so in that way they either gain or lose the the favor of Yahweh which then affects their militaristic endeavors their enemies specifically the kingdom in the north but also the Edomites, the Arameans and and other neighbors.

B: Yeah, I don't know there's a couple of kings who are singled out as particularly righteous asa in chapter 15 he is a he's a reformer. Let's see, Jehoshaphat is mostly good until he is not.

A: Yep. That's a great description.

B: Which is true for some of his successors as well.

C: A thing that I want to talk about in here is in the the chapter with Asa where Zera the Cushite shows up and it says that he shows up with an army of one million men and 300 chariots. And we may have covered this before, I don't recall if it's in Kings or not, and look, despite what my mother believes, this is not a show about debunking, it's not a show about tearing down the bible. No he absolutely did not show up with an army of one million men. Do you know how many people are in the United States Army including national guard and reserves? 954,000. Zera the Cushite did not show up with a larger army than the United States Army. That did not happen. I'm sorry.

A: Well there probably aren't a million people in Cush at the time for there to be in an army.

B: Probably true, oh my gosh.

A: There's probably only, I mean, a million and a half, maybe two million in Egypt as like the most populous nation on the planet at the time, or at least in this in in ancient southwest asia. So I mean, no armies of this size are impossible to field. They don't even have the resources. They don't have the metal working. They would be armed with sand if they had a million. You know, rocks and stuff like that.

B: Pocket sand is a more powerful weapon than you might imagine.

A: No, it's, most of the numbers, a lot of the numbers in most of the history books are either just fantastically ridiculous or at the very least hyperbolic.

C: Oh, word?

B: Word indeed.

C: Like be serious, please.

A: It's also weird that there's a million men but then only 300 chariots, like a very modest number of chariots.

B: Like yeah I was I was noting that as well. Also counterpoint Chris, how many chariots does the U.S. Army have, so checkmate.

C: I mean, probably 300.

A: He's got you there yeah.

C: I would say probably around 300 at least.

B: Could be. What are their oxen stores looking like?

C: They do a lot of stuff. One of them fights. Asa again fights a guy named King Baasha, which is a real Mad Max name. And then he dies of foot disease, which I'm sorry, is very funny.

C: Jehoshaphat, like you said, is good until he's bad. It says here chapter 17, verse–

A: I have to add the other penis joke here because we should always keep in mind that foot is often a euphemism for the genitals. So perhaps it's not a foot disease.

C: I didn't realize that he might have died of a hog disease.

B: He died of nasty hog

A: Possible, likely even.

B: Yeah. Alright.

C: Jehoshaphat, like you said, was good until he was bad. It says here in chapter 17 verse 3 that he did not seek the Baals.

B: He did not, yeah. He did not seek the Baals, yeah, did not seek the Baals of his father.

C: Highlighted it every time it came up by the way.

B: Yeah, there is of course much talking about the Baals of one's fathers.

C: That's with two As.

B: Yes, of course Ba-al. The Baals. Which of these kings do I even want to talk about? We finally get a little bit of intrigue when we get Athaliah, the queen mother, who conspires to have all of the heirs of the king Ahaziah killed, except one is stolen away and hidden, and is only crowned king later, at which point the queen mother is driven out into the courtyard and killed or something, I recall. So that's interesting, but you can also find it in 2 Kings chapter 11.

B: So what has been added? Singers and musical instruments leading the celebration. So there you go. He copied the homework, but changed it a little bit.

C: Can we talk about Jehoram's last days?

B: All right, Chris, tell me about Jehoram's last days.

C: Well, buddy, the Lord did afflict his intestines with an incurable disease, And this continued day after day until two full years passed.

B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

C: His intestines came out because of his disease, and he died from severe illness because he pooped out his own intestines.

B: Yeah, yeah. So we got nasty junk disease. We got nasty butt disease.

A: Yeah, that's the story of Jehoram's death is actually also the only mention of Elijah in all of Chronicles. So Elijah and Elisha are two of the most interesting and enigmatic–they're both prophets. They both perform a variety of miracles. They have entire chapters, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 chapters dedicated to them and their activity in the end of 1 Kings and the beginning of 2 Kings. And 99% of that is removed. And it's entirely replaced by this one letter from Elijah that warns Jehoram before his death. At a time when Elijah, in the parallel narrative, should be dead already. So it's like a letter from heaven that gets delivered to this king. He's like emailing him this letter to let him know that he should change his ways. But that follows the chronicler's– the chronicler likes to have people warned before they suffer consequences. And prophets primarily serve that purpose of warning people, "look, if you keep going down this path, the bad things are going to result." We saw that with Rehoboam and the campaign of Shishak, but it happens here too in kind of a more fantastical way. But Jehoram is warned. He disregards the warning, and so his butt explodes.

C: Bible.

B: Bible, baby. So yes, following the intrigue of the Queen Mother Athaliah, the one rescued son of Ahaziah, Joash, is crowned king at the age of seven.

C: Good move always.

A: Getting that bag early.

B: Yep, that's right. And he is positively influenced by the high priest Jehoiada. And so his ways are righteous as long as Jehoiada is alive. However, once the priest dies, Joash goes astray, returns to the Baals of his fathers.

A: Yeah. This is another innovation of the Chronicler. The idea that one of the most important jobs of a priest, this has never been the case before, one of the most important jobs of a priest is to teach. They're teachers. They're supposed to educate kings in particular, but the population in general, about how to be faithful to Yahweh. Previous texts don't ever make priests out to be teachers, but in 1 and 2 Chronicles, they are. So this is going to be a recurring theme closer towards the end of 2 Chronicles: a priest's ability to teach kings and their people weighs heavily on the fate of several generations of Israelite kings.

B: Yeah, that's true. I noticed that myself. There's definitely a point later where specifically the priests are sent out to instruct the people in the teaching of the law. I guess after they find the book of the law, that happens later.

A: Yeah.

B: All right. Then we've got King Amaziah. He's wicked. Got King Uzziah. Starts good, breaks bad. Jotham. Jaahth? Jotham City? He's good and so the country becomes prosperous. Then Ahaz.

C: He made cast images of the Baals.

B: Yeah, yeah. So let's see. Hold on, does Chronicles not even mention the destruction of Israel and Samaria, that it doesn't even like–

A: Correct.

B: It doesn't rate a mention that one of the two kingdoms was completely destroyed and filled with foreigners so is that for is that about where we are here around chapter 28? Ahaz?

A: Yes that is the parallel that would be the parallel, if we were historically, that's the historical parallel, yeah. The destruction of northern Israel at the hands of the Neo-Assyrian Empire takes up an entire chapter in 2 Kings, a long, mournful theological reflection on the fate of northern Israel. Not a single word in 2 Chronicles. You can't even find it. I mean, as you're trying to do right now, you can search the pages, you won't see a single reference to it.

B: Yeah.

A: It just skips right by and, oh, Hezekiah. But then you're like, wait, isn't Hezekiah under siege by the Neo-Assyrian Empire that just wiped out Northern Israel? Yeah, but not a reference.

B: Yeah. Yeah, really, really interesting. I mean, it's almost a laser focus on Judah, which I understand. Yeah, theologically, if the point is the temple is the center of everything, Jerusalem is where the temple is. Judah is the true israel. The people of northern Israel, you know especially since in more recent times we have, you know post-Assyria, there's conflict with them as Samarians. Yeah I guess like it just seems it's very strange. I guess it assumes a familiarity because otherwise the narrative doesn't really make sense.

A: Yeah, that weighs pretty heavily in scholars' debates about whether or not 1 and 2 Chronicles was designed to replace Samuel and Kings or to be read alongside it. And people will offer in support of the hypothesis they were designed to be read beside each other by pointing out things like this. Does a narrative even hold together anymore without some of these omissions? Like, if you didn't know that happened, could you make sense of this? And so people will point to exactly that observation you just made.

B: King Uzziah broke into the temple to try to make... Oh, he wanted to make an offering of his own. He tried to make an incense offering in the temple and the priests are like, you can't do that. And so he's afflicted with a wasting disease of some kind, leprosy as it is put probably in most translations. And he's leprous until the day of his death. That was Uzziah, but then his son Jotham was good. Then Ahaz was entirely bad and following Ahaz we have Hezekiah who in the book of kings we see Hezekiah and Josiah as the two great reformers, the great institutors, or reinstitutors at least as it is phrased in the in the narrative, of the worship of Yahweh. Hezekiah gets the most real estate in the book of anyone other than David and Solomon which to me is interesting because it feels like maybe the more historically important to the institution of what we would think of as something more approaching Judaism as we know it would be under Josiah, but Hezekiah gets all the space here. Is there a reason for that, or am I just misunderstanding what's going on?

A: Your observation is absolutely correct. Hezekiah gets a huge amount of real estate in 2 Chronicles. If you read 2 Kings, you'll walk away with the impression that Josiah is the best king and worth the most attention. That's not the case in 2 Chronicles. That's definitely Hezekiah. Why we have to speculate a little bit, it doesn't say explicitly, but one thing that he does do, and this is an addition, is his numbering of the Levites and the rather lengthy account of the cleansing and sacrifices by Levites that happen afterwards.

A: So in most of biblical history, only the descendants of Aaron in particular are meant to serve in the temple. And they are almost always considered, as far as priests are concerned, to be superior to the rest of the Levites, Levites from other non-Aaronid families. But that kind of blurs in 1 and 2 Chronicles. The Levites take up many of the duties, the broader Levites take up many of the duties of the descendants of Aaron. Their stature is raised and that's attributed to Hezekiah's reforms. And so many biblical scholars believe that the author, the chronicler, comes from a Levite background and has worked either in or around the temple and so is essentially rewarding Hezekiah for uplifting these extra Levite families to a higher station. So that's why people will say Hezekiah gets more real estate than he does in other books.

B: Interesting. That's a really interesting thought because this was strictly a vibes-based assessment, but reading this reminded me of the priestly material from the Torah. And so it feels like this also being possibly being from a priestly source and trying to present that kind of like, yeah, like a more sanitized version of things, right? Where you have P versus the non-P material, which is a very anthropomorphic, get his hands dirty kind of God versus the more kind of cosmic God of P. It had a similar vibe because, again, you have two different versions of things to compare, and one's a little messier and one's a lot cleaner. And so I was having a similar feeling. So the idea that this might also be coming from the Levites is interesting.

A: Yeah, that's a great analogy between the priestly source and the Pentateuch and the non-priestly material is very similar. That relationship is very similar to Chronicle's version of history versus Samuel and King's version of history.

B: Yeah. All right, so, I mean we can talk about Hezekiah restoring worship in the temple, restoring the celebration of the passover. Okay, so here's my question, because we see this with Hezekiah and Josiah both, it talks about the reinstitution of these great old forgotten celebrations and acts of worship. To what extent were these things actually reinstitutions? And to what extent do we think they were actually being instituted for the first time? Like, we talk about Josiah's reforms. Is he going back to an old worship of Yahweh? Or is he creating a new worship of Yahweh and eliminating other local cults and things like that?

A: It's a very complicated question. So in the version of the story in 2 Kings, Hezekiah doesn't celebrate the Passover. So that's an addition of the author of– that's the chronicler's edition to the story. In fact, it creates a contradiction in the story because when the chronicler goes on to narrate Josiah's reforms, it keeps, copies and pastes all the Josiah's celebration of the Passover and says the same things like nobody has celebrated the Passover before, which in the narrative in 2 Kings is true. Nobody had prior to Josiah celebrated the Passover, but because the chronicler adds a Passover celebration to Hezekiah's story, that statement is then contradicted by his preservation of old material. So he sort of gets twisted up there.

A: So how it plays out in the narrative is a little bit different than how it plays out in history. Historically speaking, we don't have any good evidence of the celebration of the Passover in a recognizable form until all the way down into like the second century BCE as something that the Jewish people are actually doing with like regularity. There may be a reference to the Passover celebration at a small Jewish colony in Egypt during the Persian period. There's some correspondence between that Jewish colony and the Second Temple that may refer to the Passover. Scholars are a bit split about that. But otherwise, no, we don't get good evidence that people are actually celebrating Passover until very late in history.

A: So is Hezekiah or any king doing this for the first time? There's a good chance that's the case. Regardless, it doesn't seem to be something that they're doing annually as the legal texts the legal texts imagine that this ought to be done every year but we don't have any evidence that that was actually done in that way.

B: It's just something that I was thinking about, where, for example, I mean, again jumping ahead a little bit to Josiah, where they discover they discover the Book of Law, which you know some people interpret as, you know, some version of the deuteronomic code or something like that, and the idea is that it was something that was hidden away and forgotten and rediscovered versus something that was composed at that time, right? And so I'm you know thinking along the same way, like did Josiah reintroduce the proper worship of Yahweh in into Judah or did he invent it? You know what I mean, and then the story is is made as if it has always been this way except for when we have strayed from the true path right, and it was Josiah who brought us back to the true path rather than creating that path. I don't know if that– I guess that makes sense, I hope.

A: Yeah, no it does. For those who don't know, biblical scholars for the better part of 200 years now have dated the composition of Deuteronomy to the end of the 7th century BCE, to the time of the reign of Josiah, precisely because of this story where Josiah discovers this scroll, the book of the Torah of Moses in the temple when they're doing some, they're like refurbishing the temple. He discovers a scroll, has it authenticated by a prophet. And while we don't get a specific description in narrative of what's on the scroll, it immediately leads him to a campaign, a reform that sounds exactly like Deuteronomy 12, which is the first chapter in the law code in Deuteronomy. He just immediately sets out doing that stuff.

A: So it seems like he discovers, or says he discovers a copy of the book of Deuteronomy. And so biblical scholars are like, you know, that seems very coincidental. This is the ideal time for a text like that to be composed. Deuteronomy– the story of Josiah makes several direct comparisons between Josiah and Moses that are given in the book of Deuteronomy. So it seems like something is happening in the 7th century where this text is being produced rather than just being discovered for the first time.

A: And yeah, I mean, Josiah gets to like, a lot of Deuteronomy's theology is focused on the centralization of worship. You should only worship in the temple in Jerusalem. And Josiah kind of gets that for free because shortly before, you know, he's at the middle/end of the 7th century BCE, right before that, Assyria came in and destroyed everything else. So there aren't really worships– there aren't really places for them to worship otherwise. He gets a de facto centralization of worship for free.

A: Now, the narrative in 2 Kings says that Josiah campaigns militarily. He goes up north and destroys all these high places and forcibly centralizes worship around Jerusalem. But that would largely be unnecessary. It was already all torn down and destroyed by the Assyrians when they came in and wiped out northern Israel. So whether he did it or the Assyrians did it, Josiah ends up in a situation where it's very easy for him to say, hey, the only place you can worship is in Jerusalem. That lines up with the theology in the book of Deuteronomy. Hey, look, I just found the book of Deuteronomy. I'm the best king in the world. The book of Deuteronomy says so because I did exactly what it said. And all those coincidences sort of come together to persuade, I think, the majority of biblical scholars that the text was composed at that time.

B: Awesome. Nice. Hey Chris, you've been quiet. What do you what do you got for us buddy?

C: Bud, literally the only things I have written down for like the second half of this book: one of them is I drew a little picture of a cat with a crown next to when they were talking about the Neko King?

B: Yeah, yeah.

A: It's good.

B: Yeah.

C: And the other was in the section on Judah's king Amaziah?

A: Yeah, Amaziah.

C: That he had the powers of the entire Justice League. That's it. That's all I've got.

B: Yeah.

C: That's everything, bud.

A: Those are valuable contributions.

B: Absolutely they are. And we're near the end here. So now that I know that I'm not steamrolling over anything you wanted to talk about, Chris, let's try and cover these last couple chapters here because, again, we get these extremely abbreviated and kind of oblique references to things we've discussed more in previous episodes on other books. The Syro-Ephramite War which we talked about at great length in our episode on Isaiah. The siege on Jerusalem where Hezekiah stops up the water and builds the water tunnels. We get we get references to that without the context really being explained in this version. We have the invasion of Sennacherib, where the angel comes and kills all of them. And so, yeah, we get all that. Hezekiah, who, like I said, gets so much space in this book relative to any other king after the division of the kingdom. We get Manasseh who we have encountered before he is the one who traditionally killed Isaiah by sawing him in half hot dog style, but then repents later in the extracanonical – well depends on your canon – Prayer of Manasseh. It's in Orthodox bibles.

A: Yeah, well, that repentance is in here too.

B: Yeah, and I think this bit which, if I recall correctly, his repentance in this is unique to Chronicles versus Kings right?

A: Yes.

B: And so people assume that the Prayer of Manasseh that exists – and there's a separate there's a separate text also called the Prayer of Manasseh I think among the Dead Sea Scrolls that's textually different from the one that exists in the Orthodox canon. But yeah, that is believed to be a late in life repentance and conversion for Manasseh.

B: And let's see, he is followed by Josiah, who's the other really good one. And Kings, he is certainly presented as the greatest of all kings, the last good king of Judah, certainly. Repairing the temple, finding the law book, celebrating Passover. However, let's see.

A: Killed by the anime cat pharaoh.

B: Yes, that's right. But we learned– so he does something bad and so he dies. But because of his general great virtue, His death is also a blessing because he dies before the fall of Judah and he doesn't have to witness one of the greatest tragedies in the history of the Jewish people. What does he do that he dies for? I cannot remember.

A: This is an interesting case because in 2 Kings, Josiah's death is very abrupt and has no theological explanation to it. He's lived a remarkable life. He's done everything right. There's no intimation that he's committing idolatry, which would be really the only thing that he would get offed for. But what happens is that Pharaoh Neco heads up northeast in a military campaign to go assist the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which at this point is on the out and is being attacked by Babylon. The Pharaoh goes up to assist the remains of that empire. Josiah intercepts him in an attempt to cut him off, and then falls in battle and dies.

A: And in 2 Kings, it's very abrupt. He just dies without comment. And that's weird because the only people who should be dying without comment are people who are idolaters, people who have done something wrong to deserve such an ignomious death. And so there's a missing theological explanation there.

A: So 2 Chronicles 35, when it covers the death of Josiah, invents a theological explanation. So Pharaoh Neco comes up to support the Assyrians at Carchemish. Josiah goes out to cut him off. But then Pharaoh Neco sends him a message and says, "Look, God has told me to go up there and support the Assyrians. Back off. Don't come fight me." And again, this is representative of the chronicler's theology. Josiah has been warned by God not to do this, but he ignores the warning, and as a result, he gets shot by an archer and dies. So the author of Chronicles invents this warning and this explanation to account for Josiah's otherwise abrupt death.

B: Yeah, yeah, I see that. That's in chapter 35, verses 20 through 25-ish, 26, toward the end of the chapter, really.

A: The end of the chapter.

B: So it is interesting that here that the Egyptian pharaoh, Neco, is speaking on behalf of the Lord. And then in 36, when we see Josiah's, well, his son Jehoahaz is placed on the throne, but he has a brother named Eliakim. And Pharaoh changes his name to Jehoiakim, which is basically just replacing the theophoric element of his name, the part of his name that has the name of God in it. He changes it from El, the kind of, well, not quite generic, but the name of the Semitic deity, high deity, to specifically Jeho being Yahweh, right? Which obviously we're seeing that the conflation of those two has happened, I guess, by this point. But it seems like something, I don't know, A, significant about the changing of the name, and B, why is it the Egyptian pharaoh that is renaming a prince after the god of Israel?

A: I don't know if the pharaoh himself is renaming. I think I'd have to check the Hebrew. It might just be that second, the "he" might be different. It might be Eliakim who renames himself Yehoiakim. I don't know. If it were in fact the king, if it was the Pharaoh who was renaming him, I would have absolutely no explanation for that whatsoever. I have no idea why he would do that.

B: Right. Okay. Okay. I thought that was strange.

A: It is strange. When I look at it, it is in fact strange. But no, I don't have some cool witty explanation, biblical scholar explanation for why that is off the top of my head.

B: Okay. All right. I thought it was worth asking because it did occur to me while I was reading. So, yeah. I mean –

A: I'll look it up and have Elijah send you a letter and he'll –

B: Yes, please. Right. So, yeah, we've got Jehoiakim followed by Jehoiakim or Jeconiah as he's named elsewhere who is an eight-year-old. Here's the funny thing to me. Jehoiakim was eight years old when he began to reign. He reigned three months and ten days in Jerusalem. He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. He was eight years old.

A: You can't trust these kids, man.

B: Eight years old. I think that one is on God, really. That is a child.

A: Gen Z. He's running around talking about the gyat and the skibidi.

B: Yeah, that's right. He's just sitting on the throne with an iPad watching skibidi toilet videos.

A: God said, "no, absolutely not. This evil needs to be dealt with right now."

B: Yeah. So anyway, this is when we get the Babylonians coming in. They siege and conquer Judah. Jerusalem is destroyed, the temple is destroyed, Jehoiakim the king is taken hostage as is so much of the nobility of Judah and his uncle Zedekiah is placed on the throne as a puppet king, who if I recall correctly nevertheless rebels at some point and is then destroyed by the Babylonians as a result of that. And that's, I mean, that's it. That's the end. That's the end of Judah, for now, until Cyrus.

B: And so, here's the very last section of, of Chronicles here, starting in chapter 36, verse 22. And so keep in mind, as you're hearing this listeners, that, if you were reading, the Hebrew scriptures front to back, these, this would be the last thing you would read. So:

B: "In the first year of King Cyrus of Persia, in fulfillment of the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord stirred up the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia so that he sent a herald throughout all his kingdom and also declared in a written edict: ‘Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him! Let him go up.’"

B: And so we end with this call to action. Obviously, the narrative has continued in Ezra, but with the idea of rebuilding the temple and ultimately the walls of Jerusalem and that kind of stuff. But we end with this kind of almost optimistic call to action, seeing the Lord place his anointed one, in this case Cyrus, to the restoration of the people of Judah following their decades in exile.

B: All right. Chris, final thoughts?

C: Aaron, you have convinced me that this is structurally interesting.

A: Structurally interesting.

C: It is not, unfortunately, narratively interesting.

A: It's not at all. It's rhetorically interesting. It's not what it's saying, it's what it's doing.

C: Also, thank you for acknowledging that the Pharaoh was an anime cat.

A: Yes, sure. I'm always happy to affirm the weeb audience.

A: On this show, they are significant, I will say.

C: That's about all that I've got, Benito. Was there anything that you did not get a satisfactory answer for?

B: No, I feel like we covered things pretty thoroughly.

C: Here's my favorite part of 2 Chronicles: we never have to read it again.

B: That's true. We do still have to read Ezra and Nehemiah. And also, there are two more Ezras after that that we are also going to cover.

A: You guys could have me back for Ezra and Nehemiah. I did my dissertation on that.

B: Hey, if you want, absolutely we will. What do you know about 2 Ezras, though?

A: Well, second Ezra is not that different from the Ezra and Nehemiah that we have.

B: Well.

A: Now, it's when you get to the third and fourth Ezra, the things start getting great.

B: Right. Yep. I was going to say, that's a nomenclature problem. When we get to that episode, we're going to have to discuss all the different ways that those four or three books are named.

A: Yeah, four. It's ridiculous.

B: So it depends on whether you consider Ezra and Nehemiah one or two books. But then there's two other Ezras, Greek Ezras, one of which is a wild apocalypse, and the other one is basically just a rewording of regular Ezra. But we'll get there when we get there. And, of course, Aaron, you are more than welcome to come back. But do you have any final thoughts on Chronicles you'd like to share with us, or do you feel like you've said what you had to say?

A: Well, I mean, you mentioned that it ends on an optimistic note. I think that's really important just to reaffirm that because these are the last words in the Hebrew Bible, this is the note that the Hebrew Bible ends on, it chooses to end on, go to the temple in Jerusalem. That is the heart of the Hebrew Bible. The high note, the climax of the story is the call to go worship at the temple in Jerusalem. That's kind of an interesting point. It's also something that you miss if you're reading the Old Testament in a Christian Bible. The Christian Bible ends with the book of Malachi, which can make a nice segue to the gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. But the structure is very different. It's very different for a reason because they are choosing to end on different notes.

A: But I would just add one more quick thing also in 2 Chronicles chapter 36 that we skipped over, and that's chapter 36 verse 14. We've read this long history about all these kings who are unfaithful, and through all this unfaithfulness of kings, that was always a recoverable situation. You could always bounce back from an unfaithful king. What you can't bounce back from without some consequence is what's described in verse 14 there. "All the leading priests and the people were also exceedingly unfaithful." That's what does it in, the leading priests.

A: So again, this sort of ties into that idea that this is coming from a Levitical author, somebody who takes very seriously this new responsibility of priests to safeguard the religious fidelity of their people by teaching. He, in a way, identifies himself and kind of takes some responsibility for the fall of Judah by blaming this not just on unfaithful kings, but on unfaithful priests who have failed in their task as teachers.

A: And I think that's also, that's something that'll preach today, right? If you wanted to, how important it is for religious leaders to be, not just to be faithful in a generic sense, but to be faithful in a way that's going to be beneficial and life-giving for their community.

B: Well said indeed. And a great note, I believe, to end on. So, Chris, before you ask me, the answer is, I don't know what we're reading next, because I forgot to think about that.

C: Are there any good prophets left? Because I do remember we had a lot of, we took a lot of comfort in the words of some prophets.

B: Yeah. There are there are some short prophets left, so that's one thing. Yeah we got some minor prophets left and so we can look at one or two of those next time. I'll have to look again at the ones we've already covered, but that is something we can do for sure. All right let's do the outro. I'll do it.

B: If you the listener like this show and want to find us elsewhere on internet, please do so by finding us on Blue Sky. We're @apocrypals.bsky.social. Or you can also find us on Tumblr, on Discord. If you want to find links to all of these things, the best thing to do is go to apocrypals.wiki, the fan-run official/unofficial repository of all known knowledge concerning this podcast that has links to all of our social media accounts, as well as an invitation code for our discord, which is a good time full of a bunch of weirdos, a lot of weebs. And I had to make a whole separate channel called the weeb hole for them to talk about all of their animes and gunplas, et cetera. But yeah, please do that. Thank you again to Jemal and all the other people who help keep that site going with transcripts of episodes and that kind of stuff. It's a really great resource. And thank you to everyone who works on it.

B: If you're looking for me in specific, please find me at benitocereno.bsky.social. You can use my profile there to my link tree to find all my other stuff. The most important one is my Patreon, patreon.com slash benitocereno, where I have all sorts of stuff. And I will be very soon making a big announcement. I've got a big project coming out this year that should be announced in the next couple of weeks, I think. So keep an eye on my Patreon. You can even subscribe for free. There's a free level and you can get news and stuff direct into your email inbox without costing you even a single penny. But I do appreciate each and every one who subscribes with money.

B: Chris, tell the people about your internet.

C: Everybody can find my stuff by going to the-isb.com. That is my website. It has a couple of things that you can read, a lengthy essay on the concept of having a favorite in media and a lengthy essay on Star Trek. Both you can find there as well as links to other things that I do. And a button that you can hit to give money directly to me. And I promise 0% of it goes to Benito.

B: That is true. That is true. And thank you once again, one more time to our excellent guest, Dr. Aaron Higashi. Aaron, can you one more time repeat for the people where they can find you online so they can follow your excellent content on YouTube and TikTok, et cetera?

A: Well, thank you so much. I had a great time being here. You can find me on TikTok @AaronHigashi. You can also find me on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Blue Sky by searching the same name, Aaron Higashi. It'll come up.

B: All right I think that's going to do it Chris.

C: That's right everybody we will be back in our next episode until then please do not forget that Black lives matter.

B: And trans rights are human rights.

C: As are abortion rights.

B: Drag: not a crime.

C: Diversity is not the problem and cops aren't your friends.

B: Free Palestine.

C: Benito, Aaron peace be with you.

B: And also with you.

A: And also with you.

C: and also with you

B: and also with me

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