
The original podcast file was somehow corrupted and would not play. It has now been replaced. I apologize for any inconvenience. Being on the road, the Monday following the podcast I was finally able to edit the notes, and there I was also able to add a few short clarifications and make a few minor corrections.
Bible Blunders, Part 1
Here I am going to present something that I will call Bible Blunders. Ultimately this may turn into something of a series, so I will even add “Part 1”. When I made several Forum posts addressing certain things in Scripture which are commonly misunderstood, a friend suggested that I compile them into a program called Bible Mysteries, but these really are not mysteries. Rather, they are blunders because the solution to understanding them is in the Scripture, and for that reason we really have no excuse not to understand them. But some of these traps I have fallen into myself, not necessarily because I made the mistakes, but because we often trust others to be correct, especially our teachers, and we repeat things that they say without investigating them for ourselves. So here we are going to discuss queen Athaliah of Judah, a trap which I managed to avoid, and also the identity of the Rechabites of the Book of Jeremiah, and the “Kenites” of 2 Chronicles chapter 2, a trap which I was caught in until recently, because I followed older teachers without giving the subject a sufficiently full consideration.
Proof that Athaliah queen of Judah was not the daughter of Jezebel:
A version of this was originally posted at the Christogenea Forum on 17th July 2022.
Years ago, in June, 2009, I made a presentation called Women in the Genealogy of Christ. Only rather recently did I realize that it needs an update. That is because I never had a “church” background, and therefore I never knew that the churches teach that Jezebel is an ancestor of Christ. That is what at least most of them teach, and it is absolutely wrong. So in that early podcast, I discussed Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba, three of which women are specifically mentioned in the genealogy of Christ as it is presented in the Gospel of Matthew, but I never knew there was a need to discuss Jezebel. (Bathsheba is also referred to in Matthew, but not by name.)
Here I shall prove that Jezebel could not have been the mother of Athaliah, the queen of Judah, in spite of the fact that Ahab was her father. But this entire story of Ahab's descendants is sometimes confusing not only in the way in which years are reckoned but also because there are two men named Jehoram, sometimes also spelled Joram (in the King James Version): a son of Ahab and a son of Jehoshaphat king of Judah. There are also two men named Ahaziah: a son of Ahab and a grandson of Jehoshaphat, the son of Jehoram king of Judah. So when we mention Jehoram or Ahaziah, we always need to check to make certain we have the correct one.