>> Jen: Good morning, faithful listeners. Welcome to the Bible Explained podcast on this lovely Wednesday morning. Grab your cup of coffee, because today we're going to be talking about some battles that Israel experiences. Right now, it is snowing like cats and dogs. It is completely gray outside with just tons of snow coming down. This year we just have a lot of. A lot of, like, consistent snowfall, and it hasn't really gotten a chance to melt much. So I'm looking at about, um,
probably three. No, probably like two feet of snow on my deck right now. Yeah, I'd say about 2ft of snow now that I'm looking at it. Maybe a little less than two feet. Anyway, faithful listeners, tell me what the weather's like where you all live. I love hearing about that and learning about where you live. But we're going to go ahead and read First Kings, chapter 20 today, verses 1 through 30. And by the way, I am feeling a little
bit better than I was yesterday. Hopefully you can tell in my voice, and that's not as raspy and annoying as it was yesterday for you guys. All right, let's go ahead and read 1st Kings 21:30. And I'll be reading this as I usually do. Add, the web. Ben Hadad, the king of Syria, gathered all of his army together, and there were 32 kings with him with horses and chariots. He went up and besieged
Samaria and fought against it. He sent messengers to Ahab, king of Israel, into the city and said, ben Hadad says, your silver and your gold is mine. Your wives also, and your children, even the best are mine. The king of Israel answered, it is according to your saying, my lord, O king, I am yours and all that I have. The messengers came again and said, ben Hadad says, I sent indeed to you, saying, you shall deliver me your silver
and your gold and your wives and your children. But I will send my servants to you tomorrow about this time, and they will search your house and the houses of your servants. Whatever is pleasant in your eyes, they will put in their hand and take it away. Then the king of Israel called all the elders of the land and said, please notice how this man seeks mischief. For he sent to me for my wives and for my children and for my silver and my gold. And I didn't deny
him. All the elders and the people said to him, don't listen and don't consent. Therefore he said to the messengers of Ben Hadad, tell my lord the king all that you sent for your servant at the first I will do, but this thing I cannot do. The Messengers departed and brought him back the message. Ben Hadad sent to him and said, the gods do so to me, and more also if the dust of Samaria will be enough for handfuls for all the people who
follow me. The king of Israel answered, tell him, don't let him who puts on his armor brag like he who takes it off. When Ben Hadad heard this message, as he was drinking, he and the kings in the pavilions, he said to his servant, prepare to attack. So they prepared to attack the city. Behold, a prophet came near to Ahab, king of Israel, and said, Yahweh says, have you seen all this great multitude? Behold, I will deliver it into your hand today. Then you will know
that I am Yahweh. Ahab said, by whom? He said, Yahweh says, by the young men of the princes of the provinces. Then he said, who shall begin the battle? He answered, you. Then he mustered the young men of the princes of the provinces, and there were 232 after them. He mustered all the people, even all the children of Israel, being 7,000. They went out at noon. But Ben Hadad was drinking himself drunk in the pavilions. He and the kings, the 32 kings who helped
him. The young men of the princes of the provinces went out first, And Ben Hadad sent out and they told him, saying, men are coming out of Samaria. He said, if they have come out for peace, take them alive, or if they have come out for war, take them alive. So these went out of the city. The young men of the princes of the provinces and the army which followed them, they each killed his man. The Syrians fled, and Israel pursued them. Ben Hadad, the king
of Syria, escaped on a horse with horsemen. The king of Israel went out and struck the horses and chariots and killed the Syrians with a great slaughter. The prophet came near to the king of Israel and said to him, go and strengthen yourself and mark and see what you are going to do. For at the return of the year, the king of Syria will come up against you. The servants of the king of Syria said to him, their God is a God of the hills. Therefore they
were stronger than we. But let's fight against them in the plain, and surely we will be stronger than they. Do this thing. Take the kings away, every man out of his place, and put the captains in their place. Muster an army like the army that you have lost, horse for horse and chariot for chariot. We will fight against them in the plain, and surely we will be stronger than they are. He listened to their voice and did so. At the return of the year, Ben Hadad mustered the Syrians and
went up to Aphek to fight against Israel. The children of Israel were mustered and given provisions and went against them. The children of Israel encamped before them like two little flocks of young goats. But the Syrians filled the country. A, uh, man of God came near and spoke to the king of Israel and said, Yahweh says, because the Syrians have said, Yahweh is a God of the hills, but not a God of the valleys. Therefore, I will deliver this great multitude into your hand, and you shall know
that I am Yahweh. They encamped opposite each other for seven days. So it was that in the seventh day, the battle was joined. And the children of Israel killed 100,000 footmen of the Syrians in one day. But the rest fled to Aphek into the city, and the Wall fell on 27,000 men who were left. Ben Hadad fled and came into the city, into an inner room. So we take a break from Elijah and Elisha's story in this chapter. They're not mentioned at all. And we
see this. This problem that happens in Samaria while Elijah and Elisha are off, you know, doing the things that God told them to do. In the previous chapter, it says that Ben Hadad, the king of Syria, gathered all of his army together. Now, this could be the same Ben Hadad of Syria that we saw several chapters ago, where King Asa actually partnered with this particular king to attack Israel before Ahab was actually king. This could be the same Ben Hadad, but he'd be probably very old, but by
this point in time. So more likely, this is probably Ben Hadad II or third or something like that, either the grandchild or child of the original Ben Hadad. But anyway, it says that Ben Hadad, the king of Syria, gathered all of his army together. There were 32 kings with him with horses and chariots, and they went up and besieged
Samaria and fought against it. So Ben Hadad of Syria, as well as these other 32 kings of surrounding nations, decided to all band together to attack Israel, because Israel had just gone through a really bad drought, don't forget, and a very bad famine because of that drought. So this was prime time for these kings to come up against Israel when they were super weak and when many people had died from the famine. So these 32 Kings
and Ben Hadad go up. It says they besieged Samaria and fought against it. In other words, they put a siege on Samaria, which, uh, sometimes sieges would last years. They would surround the city and not allow anybody to come and go. And the people inside that city would die of thirst and starvation and just terrible things. So Samaria is under a siege now by the king of Syria. And King Ahab of Israel, who resides in Samaria, is probably very scared.
And when he receives a message from Ben Hadad, who has his city under siege, he listens to the message. The message says, you, silver and your gold are mine. Your wives also, and your children, even the best are mine. And this, of course, was a way to humiliate King Ahab. But Ahab, as we've seen in previous chapters, was kind of. I called him Wimpy on Wednesday. And he kind of was like. He just didn't really stand up for anything. And he was very concerned with his own lifestyle.
So when he hears that Ben Hadad wants his wives and his children, the best of the best, as well as his silver and his gold, he's like, you know what? You can have it. You can have my wives, you can have my children. I'll give them away like they're nothing. And then you can have my gold and silver, too. As long as my lifestyle can still be pretty comfortable here in my palace, I will give you these things. So he says, according to your saying, my lord, O king, I am yours and all that I have.
So Ben Hadad sees that King Ahab is completely defeated by this response, so he pushes for more. It says, another messenger came again to Ahab with this message from, I sent indeed to you, saying, you shall deliver me your silver and your gold and your wives and your children. But now I will send my servants to you tomorrow about this time m and they will search your house and the houses of your servants. Whatever is pleasant in my eyes,
they will put in their hand. Whatever is pleasant in their eyes, they will put in their hand and take it away. And now this affects Ahab a little bit more. Because, yes, sending his children and his wives and his gold and silver would affect him a little bit. But now Ben Hadad is going to go into his palace and take away all the luxuries that Ahab has. And he doesn't
like this very much. So it says, now, finally, Ahab calls the elders of the land and asks them, verse seven, please notice how this man seeks mischief. For he sent to me for my wives and for my children, my silver and gold, and I didn't deny him. And all the elders and the people said to him, don't Listen and don't consent. It probably would have been wise for Ahab to call the elders together the first time instead of just being like, yeah, Ben Hadad, you can have my family members. That's cool.
It probably would have been really good, because now Ben Hadad sees that Ahab is just a complete and total pushover and is demanding more and probably got Samaria into a lot more trouble than he really needed to. But Ahab actually listens this time because Ahab is personally affected by the actions of Ben Hadad. So he stands up for himself. Not really for Israel or Samaria, but he stands up for himself. And he sends a messenger to Ben Hadad with
this. All that you sent for for your servant at the first I will do, but this thing I cannot do. So Ahab's like, okay, look, you can come and have my wives and children and my gold and silver, but you can't have anything out of my houses. You can't have my luxuries. Now, of course, this makes Ben Hadad very angry, and he's like, how dare you stand up for yourself. I am in complete and total control here. My men have your city under siege. I'm going to
come in and I'm going to kill you. He says, the gods do so to me. And more also, if the dust of Samaria will be enough for handfuls for all the people who follow me. Now, what's really ironic about this response is, is it's very similar to the response that Jezebel had given Elijah in the previous chapter, where she said, the gods do so to me. And more also, if I don't kill you, Elijah, about this time tomorrow. It's pretty funny that it's coming back around to Ahab now.
And Ben Hadad is literally saying the exact same thing to Ahab. He's saying, yeah, tomorrow Samaria is going to be dust, and it's going to be such fine dust that all of my men probably won't even get a handful of it. That is how destroyed Samaria is going to be. Now, kind of uncharacteristically, Ahab gets pretty upset and stands up for himself with a pretty good
proverb here. It says, the king of Israel answered Ben Hadad, tell him, don't let him who puts on his armor brag like he who takes it off. That's a really good saying. In other words, Ben Hadad was acting and boasting as if he had just totally destroyed Samaria. And King Ahab's like, you haven't won the battle yet, so don't brag like you have. So Ben Hadad heard this message, and he was drinking, he and these 27 kings. And he was infuriated. So he says to his servants,
prepare to attack. So they prepared to attack the city. So they still had the city under siege, it seemed like, but now they were about to attack the city. So a prophet who apparently lived in the city came to King Ahab. And this is. It's really interesting because a few prophets are going to be mentioned in the next coming chapters who are not Elijah or Elisha, proving here that there were in fact prophets of Yahweh and followers of Yahweh in Samaria and in Israel.
And one of these prophets is this unnamed man who comes to Ahab with a message from Yahweh, verse 13. Yahweh says, have you seen this great multitude? Behold, I will deliver it into your hand today. Then you will know that I am Yahweh. And this is really amazing because Yahweh is very kind here to Samaria and to Israel and to King Ahab, even after all of the evil things that they did to God and to God's prophets. God says, I'm going to show my power to you so much that you will know that
I am Yahweh. You will know that I am God. So Ahab says in verse 14, by whom? In other words, who's going to win this battle? Is it going to be me or my men who's going to do this? Yahweh says, by the young men of the princes of the provinces. Then Ahab said, who shall begin the battle? And he answered, you. So Ahab mustered the young men of the princes of the provinces, and there were 232. That is nothing. That is a very
small number of men. And then after them, he also mustered all the people, even all the children of Israel, being 7,000, and they went out at noon. And Ben Hadad, it says, was drinking himself drunk in the pavilions. He and all the kings, 32 kings who helped him. And this kind of shows that Ben Hadad was really unconcerned about this battle because Ben Hadad was holding all the cards. He had three dozen kings helping
him. He had thousands of Syrian soldiers and fighting soldiers, as well as all the military assets that you could possibly have back in these days, the chariots and the horses. So he had all the weapons. Israel had Nothing. Israel had 7,000 men, well, 7,232 men total, fighting this battle. So Ben Hadad is not worried at all. He's just drinking himself drunk and buddying it up with all of his
king friends. It says the young men of the Prince of the provinces went out first, and Ben Hadad sent out and they told him, saying, men are coming out of Samaria. And Ben Hadad says, and this is very funny, if they have come out for peace, take them alive. If they have come out for war, take them alive. And the reason that is funny is because typically the response is, if you've come out for war, kill them,
don't take them alive. It could be that Ben Hadad was drunk out of his mind and didn't know what he was saying when he gave this very bad order because he literally told all of his men not to kill a single Israelite. No matter what the situation, Whether they're killing you or not killing you, take them alive. That was a bad order. So these went out of the city. The young men of the Prince of the provinces and the army which followed them, they each killed his man.
That means that the 7,232 men that came out of Israel each killed a Syrian. This was a massive slaughter. And not a single man died because of that terrible order that Ben Hadad made. The Syrians fled and Israel pursued them. Ben Hadad, uh, the king of Syria, escaped on a horse with horsemen. The king of Israel went out, Ahab, and struck the horses and the chariots and killed the
Syrians with a great slaughter. So now that the Syrians are in retreat, King Ahab actually goes and fights and does a very good job of it. He killed the Syrians with a huge massive slaughter, is what it says. So after this battle is over and Ahab is back home, verse 22 says, the Prophet came near to the king of Israel and said to him, go and strengthen yourself and mark and see what you're going to do. For at the return of the year, the king of Syria will come up against you.
So Ben Hadad did survive this battle. He went back home to Syria. And the prophet says to Ahab, he's going to come back, and he's going to come back with a huge fighting force and come up against you. So you better strengthen yourself and get ready for that. So meanwhile in Syria, Ben Hadad's servants give him some advice. They say to Benhadad, the God of the Israelites is the God of the hills.
Therefore they were stronger than we. But let's fight against them in the plain, and surely we will be stronger than they. So they thought that, uh, they thought that Yahweh was only the God of the hills. Or they could have been. Honestly, they could have been talking specifically about baal because baal was the official religion of Israel at the time. So they could have been referencing baal and had no clue that the
Israelites even worshiped Yahweh. But regardless, they got this notion in their head that the reason they lost was because whatever God the Israelites worshiped was a God of the hills, but he wasn't a God of the plains. They didn't have a God for the plains. So if the Syrians fought in the plains or in the valleys, then they would certainly win. They just couldn't go up into the
hills. They continue the advice in verse 24, do this thing, take the kings away, every man out of his place, and put the captains in their place. In other words, get rid of all the kings that have been supporting you and instead put captains in their place. Muster an army, like an army that you've lost, horse for horse and chariot for chariot. We will fight against them in the plain, and surely we will be stronger than they are. And of course, Yahweh
can hear everything. He knows what's going on here, and He also knows the future. So Yahweh sends another prophet to Ahab, and it could have been the same prophet, or it could have been a different prophet, because it mentions here a man of God. So we don't know who this man of God was, but it says a man of God in verse 28 came near and spoke to the king of Israel or Ahab and said, Yahweh says, because the Syrians have said Yahweh
is God of the hills. Oh, so they were referring to Yahweh here, the Syrians, not to baal. They did know of Yahweh and assumed that He was a God of the hills. Because the Syrians have said, Yahweh is a God of the hills, but he's not a God of the valleys. Therefore, Yahweh will deliver this great multitude into your hand, and you shall know that I am Yahweh. And this
wasn't just for the Israelites. You know, I think a lot of times people have the misconception that in the Old Testament, God really only cared about the Israelites and didn't really care about the Gentiles at all. But that is extremely untrue. If you read through the majority of the Old Testament, actually, a lot of it was God trying to get the Gentiles to believe in Him He would show them acts of just miraculous power all the time so that they could see His power and actually start worshiping
Him. And this could be that God wasn't just showing His power to the Israelites here, but He was also showing His power to the Syrians because they had a misunderstanding of who Yahweh was. They thought that He only was a God of the hills, and God was going to show them, no, I'm also the God of the plains and the God of everything else. And so it'd do well for you to actually worship Me instead of worshiping whatever gods you worship. So Ben Hadad indeed comes against
Israel. It says at the return of the year, Ben Hadad mustered the Syrians and went up to Aphek to fight against Israel. And the children of Israel were mustered and given provisions and went against them. The children of Israel encamped before them like two little flocks of young goats. But the Syrians filled the country, so the Israelites were massively outnumbered. Massively outnumbered. But God promised to allow the Israelites to win in this battle.
They encamped opposite each other for seven days. So it was that in the seventh day, the battle was joined, and the children of Israel killed 100,000 footmen of the Syrians in one day. So somehow God miraculously gave the children of Israel power to completely just massacre the Syrians in one day. 100,000 footmen. The rest fled to Aphek into the city, and a wall fell on them. So that might seem like bad luck, but that was just providence. God was fully attacking the Syrians for
the Israelites. So a Wall fell on 27,000 men who were left. You might be like, man, that's a really big wall. Well, yes, cities did have big walls around them. And since this battle was in and around Aphek, it could be that that wall was damaged pretty badly. And so when those Syrians went into the city to flee from the Israelites, the wall was so damaged already that it collapsed right on top of them.
Now, while all this is happening, it says Ben Hadad fled, came into the city, into an inner room, and that's where we leave off today. And we're going to talk about what happens to Ben Hadad next week. And if you've never read the story, it is not what you expect to happen to him. Anyway, faithful listeners, I hope you enjoyed today's
episode. If you did, make sure to tell people that the Bible Explained podcast exists, and also go over to Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast platform you listen on and rate the Bible Explained podcast five stars or whatever you think of it. Guys, I'll see you all tomorrow for an episode from second Corinthians. Happy listening and God bless.