These chapters contain many intriguing details. We see immediately how wayward things get, especially in the northern kingdom of Israel where Jeroboam goes off the rails, away from the true religion. The devastating prophecies leveled at Israel are apocalyptic. It is said in 1 Kings 14:10, "Behold I will bring evils upon the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up, and the last in Israel: and I will sweep away the remnant of the house of Jeroboam, as dung is swept away till all be clean." Soon enough (in a few generations), the entire northern kingdom, ten of the tribes of Israel, will be essentially wiped off the face of the earth. I found this revelation shocking -- that ten of the original twelve tribes were obliterated, swept away like "dung," removed from the Promised Land by the Assyrians never to return, dissolved into other peoples and cultures until no discernable trace of them remained. And to this day, no one knows what came of them; they simply ceased to exist. Again, reading this was a shock to me. This only reinforces the notion that even today, the inhabitants of the modern nation of Israel are not the Biblical Israelites. The ancient tribes, save Judah and Benjamin, are no more. The southern kingdom, the House of David, lived on longer, and its history is better preserved, though the story of its downfall is no less devastating. But I was ignorant of the northern kingdom's fate. God's people deserted Him, chose to worship strange gods, and so He cleared the way to prepare the coming of His Son and the founding of His Church, the new Israel.
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