Hello and welcome to Ezra. It's not a book I know a huge amount about. Apparently, according to The Bible Project, it was one book with Nehemiah originally! Anyway, Ezra is about some of the people who were taken to Babylon into exile returning to Jerusalem. Once there, they wanted to rebuild the altar and [...]
As with 1 Chronicles, a lot of the stories in this book can be found earlier on in the Bible, in the Samuel and Kings books. Although the bad kings of the north aren't mentioned, which means the narrative feels like there is much more balance, there is still war, threat, violence, and murder to [...]
1 and 2 Chronicles according to The Bible Project are essentially a glossy version of 1 and 2 Kings, which I have already read. The author of the Chronicles was a big fan of King David and some of his more questionable moments are not mentioned, take his encounter with Bathsheba, for example. It reminds [...]
I have mixed feelings about the second book of Samuel. I quite enjoyed reading the first half, although it threw up some interesting questions for me. For example, in chapter 3, there's the sad little love triangle between David, Michal and her husband Paltiel. Paltiel goes along weeping after Michal as she's taken away from [...]
Rev Poppy 