Here’s part two of our three-part series, The Bible According to Jackson Ferrell, inspired by Hope Church‘s new year-long study of the whole Bible titled This is the Story.
Thanks to my supporters on Patreon, who have made this series possible. Pledge to my Patreon, and you’ll be able to read the final part right now, along with the rest of my patrons.
Picking up where we last left off:
Jacob’s descendants were called the Israelites, because God had given Jacob the name “Israel.” In Egypt, the Israelites had babies. And after Joseph and the former Pharaoh were long dead, there were so many Israelites that the new Pharaoh enslaved them and tried to kill all their male babies. One of the male babies was named Moses, and his family saved him from death by sending him down the Nile River in a basket, where Pharaoh’s daughter found him and had him raised in the Egyptian palace.
As an adult, Moses killed an Egyptian for beating an Israelite slave, but when word got out about the incident, Moses had to run away. He ran away to Midian, where he was living his life when God started talking to him out of a burning bush and sent him back to Egypt to free his people. Through Moses, God told Pharaoh to let his people go, but initially Pharaoh wasn’t having it, so God hit Egypt with twelve plagues until Pharaoh relented. But after he let them go, Pharaoh got his army and chased after the Israelites, so God parted the Red Sea and Moses led the people across. Then God let the sea fall back on the Egyptian army and drowned them.
Through Moses, God gave Israel the Law to set them apart as his people. But when he led them back to their homeland, they were too chicken to take back their land from the people who’d settled there, so God said he was going to wait ‘til the next generation to take the people into their homeland. And he did. A leader named Joshua led them in, and for many more generations, God used other leaders to get the people out of the crap they kept getting themselves in.
Then Israel wanted a king. God thought the idea was stupid, because he was their king and human kings were evil and selfish and fallible, but he decided to give them their king. Their first king, Saul, was not a great king, but the king after him, David, was pretty great. Even so, his children had conflicts between them, and his son Absolom tried to usurp the throne. David’s son, Solomon, received the gift of wisdom from God, but later in life he married a ton of foreign wives and let them bring the worship of other gods into the kingdom, which was bad.
The monarchy went downhill over several years, with idolatry and wars and all kinds of crap. The kingdom split in two, with Israel to the north and Judah to the south. God gave messages to a bunch of prophets about how things were going downhill–Isaiah looked forward to a day that God would set the mess right, Ezekiel had bizarre visions and did prophetic performance art, Amos spoke out against injustice toward the poor–but those in power in Israel weren’t having it. So then God let Assyria and then Babylon come in and wreck shop. The Jewish people were taken into exile.
Ezra, and then Nehemiah, orchestrated the restoration of Jerusalem, bringing back a Jewish population and seeing to the restoration of the city walls. Israel was a shadow of its former glory during David’s reign, but at least the people were back in their homeland.
Then a bunch of other stuff happened. It happened for several hundred years. But that stuff didn’t make it into the Bible. If you want to read about that stuff, you’ll have to read other books.
Chocolate Book 