Summary: Bible - Historical Books

The GIST

Historical Books, from the Bible, is the shelf of twelve Old Testament books that Christian Bibles place straight after the five books of Moses: Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther. Read in a row, they carry one people through close to a thousand years, from the day Israel crosses the Jordan into Canaan, through the judges, the first kings, a kingdom torn in two and the captivity in Babylon, to the return to Jerusalem under Persian rule.

They matter because they keep asking one question of every generation: will this people stay loyal to the God who brought them into the land? The answer swings back and forth, and the consequences swing with it. The label needs a caution, though. It was a fourth-century bishop, Athanasius of Alexandria, who first called these books "histories," and the word can mislead. Ancient writers told the past in order to teach, not to produce a neutral record, and scholars believe these accounts took shape well after the times they describe, passing through several rounds of revision.

What It Says

Joshua, Judges and Ruth: taking the land

Joshua opens with Moses dead and God telling his assistant, Joshua the son of Nun, to get up and lead the people over the Jordan. Two spies slip into Jericho and lodge in the house of a woman named Rahab while the king hunts for them. The people cross behind the ark of the covenant, and twelve stones are lifted from the riverbed, one carried by a man from each tribe. Jericho, shut up tight, is circled by the fighting men once a day for six days, and it falls. Then comes a check: a man named Achan keeps what was forbidden, and God's anger turns on the whole camp before the next town, Ai, is taken by ambush. The people of Gibeon make peace, the kings of the land band together against Israel, and a list of defeated kings follows. The second half is quieter. Joshua is old, much land is still untaken, and what has been won is shared out by lot among the tribes, with cities of refuge and towns for the Levites. He ends by gathering all the tribes at Shechem.

Judges begins after his death, and its mood darkens fast. An angel tells Israel that because they have not obeyed, the peoples left in the land "shall be as thorns in your sides." What follows is a loop that repeats again and again: Israel does evil, is handed to an enemy, cries out, and is rescued by a leader God raises up. Under the prophetess Deborah, the enemy is a Canaanite king with nine hundred iron chariots and a general named Sisera. Under Gideon, it is Midian, and God tells him his army is too large, in case Israel should boast that it saved itself. Jephthah, the son of a harlot, has been driven out by his brothers when Ammon makes war on Israel. An angel promises a son to a childless couple, and Samson walks off with the gates of Gaza on his shoulders. The last chapters, with a homemade idol, a tribe still looking for land and all Israel assembled against Benjamin, are introduced with a flat refrain: "In those days there was no king in Israel."

Ruth is set in those same days and could not feel more different. Famine drives a family from Bethlehem to Moab, where the father and both sons die. The widow, Naomi, heads home and tells her Moabite daughters-in-law to go back. One does. The other, Ruth, will not: "whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God." In Bethlehem she gleans barley behind the reapers in the field of Boaz, a wealthy relative of Naomi's husband, who notices her loyalty and protects her. After a night meeting at the threshing floor and a legal exchange at the town gate, where a nearer kinsman steps aside, Boaz marries her. Their son, Obed, becomes the grandfather of David.

Samuel: the first kings

1 Samuel starts with another childless woman, Hannah, and her prayer, and with the boy Samuel, who serves in the sanctuary under the aged Eli. The Philistines capture the ark and set it in the temple of their god Dagon, whose statue is found the next morning face down before it. When Samuel is old and his sons take bribes, the elders come to him and ask for a king.

The first is Saul, a tall, striking Benjamite whom Samuel anoints with oil. He fails, God rejects him, and Samuel is sent to Bethlehem to find the next king among the sons of Jesse. That son is David, who defeats Goliath and wins the devoted friendship of Saul's son Jonathan. Then Saul wants him dead. David runs: to the priest at Nob, to the cave of Adullam, where about four hundred men in debt or distress gather around him, to the wilderness of Engedi, and at last to the Philistines. The book ends on Mount Gilboa, with Israel routed, Saul's sons killed and Saul wounded by archers.

2 Samuel is David's reign. He settles at Hebron, outlasts a long war with Saul's house, and is anointed king over Israel by the elders of all the tribes. He brings the ark up to Jerusalem and remarks to the prophet Nathan that he lives in a house of cedar while the ark sits behind curtains. Then the story turns. One evening, while his army is away at war, David sees a beautiful woman bathing from his roof. Nathan comes to him with a story about a rich man with many flocks and a poor man with one little ewe lamb. Trouble then comes from inside his own family. His son Amnon becomes obsessed with Tamar, the sister of another son, Absalom. Absalom courts the people at the city gate, and soon David is on the run from him. When it is over, the victory feels like a defeat, because the king can only cry, "O my son Absalom, O Absalom, my son, my son!"

Kings: glory, division and exile

1 Kings opens with David old and cold, charging his son Solomon to keep God's ways. Solomon builds the house of the LORD in Jerusalem and a palace for himself, brings the ark into the Temple, and receives the queen of Sheba, who arrives with camels, spices and gold to test him with hard questions. But he also loves many foreign women, seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, and they turn his heart away.

After him the kingdom breaks. The people ask his son Rehoboam to lighten the heavy yoke Solomon laid on them, and the outcome is two kingdoms: Israel in the north, under Jeroboam, and Judah in the south. From here each king is weighed in a sentence: he did right in God's sight, or he did evil. Prophets step forward to confront them. Elijah tells King Ahab there will be neither dew nor rain, hides by a brook where ravens feed him, and flees for his life from Jezebel. Ahab covets the vineyard of a man named Naboth, who will not part with his family's inheritance.

2 Kings sees Elijah taken up to heaven in a whirlwind and his companion Elisha helping a widow with nothing but a pot of oil, restoring a woman's son to life, and it introduces Naaman, a Syrian commander with leprosy. Coups and reforms follow one another. A child king, Joash, is hidden for six years in the Temple from Athaliah, who has destroyed the rest of the royal family. Then Assyria comes against the north, and the kingdom of Israel falls. In Judah, Hezekiah does right and turns to the prophet Isaiah when Assyria threatens him too. Josiah, crowned at eight, reads the rediscovered book of the covenant aloud to the whole people. It is not enough. Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon besieges Jerusalem until there is no bread left in the city, and Judah goes into exile.

Chronicles: the story told again

1 and 2 Chronicles go back to the beginning, literally to Adam, and retell the story through nine chapters of family lists before reaching Saul's last battle. The retelling has its own interests: David as the organiser of worship, with his Levites, gatekeepers and musicians with harps and cymbals; Solomon's Temple, filled with the glory of God at its dedication; and the kings of Judah, measured by the principle one man, moved by the Spirit of God, states to King Asa: "The LORD is with you, while ye be with him." Where Kings explains a disaster, Chronicles, with its eye on worship and on David's line, reads like a book meant to put heart into those who came back.

Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther: after the exile

Ezra begins with Cyrus, king of Persia, proclaiming that the house of God in Jerusalem should be rebuilt. The first returnees, led by Zerubbabel and the priest Jeshua, set up the altar. Neighbours offer to help, are refused, and then obstruct the work until a later king, Darius, finds Cyrus's decree in the archives. Later the scribe Ezra arrives from Babylon to teach the law of Moses, and is horrified to find the people intermarried with their neighbours.

Nehemiah is told in the first person. Serving wine to King Artaxerxes, he cannot hide his grief that Jerusalem's wall is broken and its gates burned, and he asks to be sent to rebuild. The wall goes up section by section while enemies mock, "for the people had a mind to work." Invited to a meeting that is really a trap, he replies, "I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down." With the wall finished, Ezra stands on a wooden pulpit and reads the law to the people from morning until midday.

Esther stays behind in Persia. King Ahasuerus rules a hundred and twenty-seven provinces, and Esther, a Jewish orphan raised by her cousin Mordecai, becomes his queen. When Mordecai refuses to bow to the king's favourite, Haman, Haman plots to destroy every Jew in the empire. Esther risks her life by going to the king, invites him and Haman to dinner, and at the second banquet names her enemy: "The adversary and enemy is this wicked Haman." On the day chosen for the massacre, it is the Jews who prevail over their enemies.

Why It Matters

These books turn faith into a story with consequences. Loyalty to God brings rest in the land; idolatry and injustice bring defeat and finally exile; and yet the covenant is never cancelled, and a remnant always comes home. They also insist that leaders matter, and that outsiders and ordinary people, a Moabite widow, a man who pours the king's wine, an orphan queen, can carry the story forward. Esther never names God at all, and readers have long seen his hand in it anyway.

The grouping is a Christian one. Its order follows the ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint, and not the Hebrew Bible, where part of this material belongs to the Former Prophets and Ruth and Esther sit among the Five Megillot. Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Bibles differ on exactly which books belong. Christians also prize Ruth's place in the family line that leads to David and, in their reading, to Jesus.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who wants the backbone of the Old Testament's story, from the Jordan crossing to the return from Babylon. Lovers of story will find Ruth, David and Esther hard to put down, and readers interested in leadership will find a long gallery of rulers, some admirable and many not.