Day 34 - 2 Chronicles and Ezra

I am typing this while sitting on the plane flying to Israel, where I shall be staying in Jerusalem. The European Friends of Israel have organised a policy conference with more than 80 MEPs and over 300 assorted hangers-on (staff such as myself) also being flown out. So numerous are we, that we are being split into 5 separate flights, and a tremendous amount of organisation and preparation has been carried out. In this light, the careful listing and counting and enumerating of people and objects that we read in Ezra seems an early variant of this trip that I am on.

One thing that strikes me in reading Ezra was that the very people one would expect to be most committed to carrying out God's plan to its fulfilment - the 'professionals', the priests and the Levites - were the least committed on the event. Ezra has to beg for some Levites to come along with them.

This was also the case when Josiah wants to go about the restoration of the temple. He gives the instruction, but the professionals drag their feet.

One small detail that I found intriguing. 2 Chr 35:3 talks about Josiah telling the Levites to put the ark of the covenant back in the sanctuary and not to keep moving it around. Why were they moving it around? The ark was placed in the Holy of Holies in the temple by Solomon, and was not moved. So what has happened? Nick Page has written a book which deals with the question of what happened to the ark, but this focuses more on the exile to Babylon. Intriguingly, Lynn Austin's novel Among the Gods posits a theory that the ark was smuggled out of Jerusalem during the reign of the evil king Manasseh and moved to a community of Jews on Elephantine Island in the Nile. Remarkably, there is archaeological evidence that such a proposition cannot be dismissed out of hand.

That is really nothing more than an interesting digression. The main point is that God fulfilled his side of the covenant, His people did not, even though His mercy has been shown time and time again. With the impinging of the rise of world empires on the land of Israel, we can see how God is the mover in the great tides of history, something we should remember when considering what is happening in the Arab world at the moment.