EVERY KING OF ISRAEL AND JUDAH EXPLAINED: WHAT THEIR REIGNS ACTUALLY MEAN

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]After Solomon died, the kingdom of Israel split in two.

[00:00:03]The northern kingdom kept the name Israel, 10 tribes, capital at Samaria.

[00:00:09]It lasted 209 years before Assyria destroyed it.

[00:00:13]The southern kingdom was called Judah, two tribes, capital at Jerusalem. It survived another 136 years before Babylon burned it to the ground.

[00:00:25]Between the two kingdoms, there were 39 kings. 19 ruled the north, 20 ruled the south.

[00:00:32]And most Christians, if you ask them honestly, could not name more than five or six of them. The kings of Israel and Judah are the part of the Old Testament that most people skip.

[00:00:43]The long section of 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles that feels like a list of names and dates that goes nowhere.

[00:00:51]And most of them have missed what the list is actually doing.

[00:00:55]Here's what changes everything.

[00:00:58]The biblical writers do not evaluate these 39 kings by their military victories or their economic policies or their building projects.

[00:01:07]They evaluate every single one of them by one measuring stick. The same one applied to every king in the same language without exception. And that measuring stick is a theological verdict, not a historical summary.

[00:01:23]Did this king do what was right in the sight of the Lord?

[00:01:28]Or did he do what was evil? That question is asked and answered for every king in the list.

[00:01:34]And when you see the answers laid out in order, when you see the pattern that emerges across 400 years of Israelite monarchy, the list of names and dates becomes one of the most theologically loaded arguments in the entire Old Testament.

[00:01:51]39 kings, one verdict system.

[00:01:54]And a conclusion that points far beyond any of them. Let's go in order. Before we go king by king, I want to tell you two things that most people never notice about the way the biblical historians write about the kings.

[00:02:10]First, the formula.

[00:02:13]Every king in 1 and 2 Kings gets the same evaluative sentence.

[00:02:18]For the good ones, he did what was right in the sight of the Lord. For the bad ones, he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.

[00:02:26]Sometimes the sentence adds a comparison. He walked in the ways of David his father, or he walked in the ways of Jeroboam the son of Nebat.

[00:02:37]This is not accidental.

[00:02:39]The biblical historians are deliberately applying a consistent theological rating to every reign.

[00:02:45]Not political success, not military accomplishment. Covenant faithfulness.

[00:02:51]Did this king honor the covenant God made with Israel at Sinai and confirmed with David?

[00:02:56]Did he lead the people toward God or away from him?

[00:03:00]That is the only question the biblical historians care about, and they ask it 39 times. Second, the measuring stick itself.

[00:03:10]The phrase in the sight of the Lord is doing enormous theological work.

[00:03:15]It does not say in the sight of the people, not in the sight of the neighboring nations, not by the standards of international politics. In the sight of the Lord, the only perspective the biblical historians consider relevant when assessing a human leader.

[00:03:31]Here's what most people miss about the kings. The books of Kings and Chronicles are not primarily history books.

[00:03:39]They are covenant assessment documents.

[00:03:42]They are asking for every reign the same pastoral question.

[00:03:46]Is Israel walking with God or away from him? Is the covenant being kept or broken?

[00:03:52]The northern kingdom, 19 kings, zero, not one, did what was right in the sight of the Lord.

[00:04:00]The southern kingdom, 20 kings, eight did what was right, 12 did what was evil.

[00:04:07]And of the eight who did right, only two are described as having done so with their whole heart.

[00:04:13]That is the framework for everything that follows. 39 kings, one measuring stick, let's go in order.

[00:04:20]When the kingdom split, Jeroboam the first became the first king of the northern tribes.

[00:04:27]And almost immediately, he did something that would poison the northern kingdom for its entire 209-year existence.

[00:04:36]He made two golden calves.

[00:04:38]Not because he was an idolater in the crude sense, he actually said, "Here are your gods who brought you out of Egypt."

[00:04:46]He was trying to keep people from going to Jerusalem to worship.

[00:04:49]Afraid that if his people went south to the temple, they would shift their loyalties back to the house of David.

[00:04:56]So, he made the calves for political reasons.

[00:04:59]He set them up in Bethel and Dan. He appointed priests who were not Levites.

[00:05:05]He moved the feast calendar.

[00:05:07]And he told the people, "It is too far for you to go to Jerusalem." Here is what most people miss about Jeroboam's sin. The phrase, "the sin of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat" appears 17 times in the books of Kings.

[00:05:23]17 times.

[00:05:25]It becomes the standard by which every subsequent northern king is evaluated.

[00:05:30]Every wicked king after Jeroboam is said to have walked in his sin.

[00:05:35]Jeroboam the first set the template for 200 years of northern apostasy.

[00:05:40]One political decision, keeping people from the temple for economic and political reasons, became the theological DNA of an entire kingdom.

[00:05:50]He did what was evil.

[00:05:51]And every king who came after him did the same.

[00:05:55]If Jeroboam the first set the template for northern wickedness, Ahab pushed it to its furthest extreme.

[00:06:02]Ahab married Jezebel, a Phoenician princess, daughter of a Baal priest.

[00:06:07]And Jezebel did not simply bring her religion with her. She actively promoted it. She killed the prophets of God.

[00:06:15]She installed 450 prophets of Baal and 400 prophets of Asherah.

[00:06:21]She turned the northern kingdom into a state-sponsored Baal cult. The text of 1 Kings says, "Ahab did more to provoke the anger of the Lord, the God of Israel, than all the kings of Israel who were before him." Elijah appears in the Ahab narrative because when wickedness reaches its maximum expression, God's prophetic response reaches its maximum intensity.

[00:06:46]The fire on Carmel, the still small voice at Horeb, the drought that lasted 3 years, all of it happens in response to Ahab.

[00:06:56]And yet, here is something worth noticing about Ahab that most readers miss.

[00:07:02]When Elijah pronounced judgment on him, Ahab tore his clothes and fasted and put on sackcloth.

[00:07:08]And God said to Elijah, "Have you seen how Ahab has humbled himself before me?

[00:07:14]Because of this, I will not bring the disaster in his days." Even Ahab, the worst king of the north, showed a moment of genuine humility. And God noticed.

[00:07:24]The northern kings are not cartoon villains. They are complicated, broken, occasionally repentant human beings making catastrophic leadership choices with generational consequences.

[00:07:36]Here is what sealed the northern kingdom's fate.

[00:07:39]Not one of the 19 kings did what was right.

[00:07:43]Not one reformed the worship. Not one removed the golden calves of Jeroboam.

[00:07:49]Not one led the people back to the covenant. Some were better than others.

[00:07:55]Jehu killed Ahab's entire house and eliminated the ball worship Jezebel had established. But even Jehu, the reformer king, did not remove the golden calves of Jeroboam. He took the revolution halfway and stopped.

[00:08:09]And that halfway reform is the story of the northern kingdom in miniature.

[00:08:15]Reform that doesn't go all the way.

[00:08:17]Repentance that doesn't reach the root.

[00:08:19]Better, but not whole.

[00:08:21]Improved, but not healed.

[00:08:25]In 722 BC, the Assyrian king Shalmaneser the fifth besieged Samaria.

[00:08:32]Three years later, it fell.

[00:08:34]The northern kingdom ended. The 10 tribes were scattered across the ancient world. The 10 lost tribes of Israel.

[00:08:42]The theological verdict of the biblical historians, "Because they walked in the sins of Jeroboam, this happened to them."

[00:08:51]The northern kingdom was not defeated by Assyria.

[00:08:54]It was abandoned by the covenant partner it had rejected. The southern kingdom's record is more complicated than the north's and more revealing.

[00:09:03]20 kings.

[00:09:04]Eight did what was right in the sight of the Lord.

[00:09:08]12 did what was evil.

[00:09:10]But here is the detail most people miss about the eight good a qualifying phrase attached.

[00:09:18]Asa did what was right, but the high places were not removed. Jehoshaphat did what was right until the high places were not removed.

[00:09:27]Joash did what was right, but only while the priest Jehoiada was alive.

[00:09:34]Amaziah did what was right, but not with a whole heart. Good kings, with qualifications. The high places, the unauthorized worship sites on the hills where Israel mixed Yahweh worship with Canaanite religious practices, kept surviving every reform.

[00:09:51]Every good king made progress, and almost every good king stopped short of completion.

[00:09:57]Which makes the two kings described as doing right with their whole heart stand out all the more. Hezekiah becomes king of Judah while the northern kingdom is being destroyed by Assyria.

[00:10:09]He watches his northern neighbors fall.

[00:10:11]And instead of accommodating to the new Assyrian reality, he does something extraordinary. He smashes the high places.

[00:10:19]He cuts down the Asherah poles. He breaks the bronze serpent Moses had made in the wilderness because Israel had been burning incense to it.

[00:10:27]And he called it a worthless piece of bronze. He reopens the temple. He reinstates the Passover. He reforms the priesthood.

[00:10:36]The text of 2 Kings 18 says he held fast to the Lord. He did not depart from following him, but kept the commandments.

[00:10:43]And the Lord was with him.

[00:10:45]And then Sennacherib of Assyria sends his army.

[00:10:49]The Assyrian field commander stands outside Jerusalem's walls and delivers a speech designed to break the people's morale.

[00:10:57]Your God cannot save you. Every other nation's gods failed against us.

[00:11:03]What makes you think yours is different?

[00:11:06]And Hezekiah takes the threatening letter he receives and spreads it out before God in the temple and prays.

[00:11:14]Here is what I want you to notice about Hezekiah's prayer.

[00:11:17]He does not ask God to save him because he deserves it. He asked God to save Jerusalem so that the nations will know that the God of Israel is the only God.

[00:11:27]His prayer is not about his survival. It is about God's reputation among the nations.

[00:11:34]And that night the angel of the Lord went through the Assyrian camp and 185,000 soldiers died.

[00:11:42]Sennacherib returned to Nineveh and was murdered by his own sons. A prayer stopped an empire. And then Hezekiah's son Manasseh became king 55 years, the longest reign in either kingdom's history and almost every year was catastrophic.

[00:12:00]Manasseh rebuilt everything Hezekiah had destroyed. The high places, the Asherah poles, he built altars to all the host of heaven in the temple courts.

[00:12:11]He sacrificed his son to fire. He practiced divination and sorcery. He consulted mediums and necromancers.

[00:12:19]And the text says he led Judah to do more evil than the nations God had driven out before Israel.

[00:12:27]More evil than the Canaanites whose wickedness had justified their removal.

[00:12:32]The biblical historian state that it was Manasseh's sins that ultimately sealed Judah's fate. That even the righteous King Josiah who came after him and led the greatest reform in Judah's history could not reverse the sentence that Manasseh's 55 years of evil had set in motion.

[00:12:50]One generation of wickedness at the leadership level can do more damage than multiple generations of reform can undo.

[00:12:57]Josiah becomes king at 8 years old. When he is 26, the high priest Hilkiah finds something in the temple during a renovation project. A scroll.

[00:13:07]The book of the law. Read that slowly.

[00:13:10]The book of the law had been lost, not misplaced, lost. So thoroughly absent from public life that when the king heard it read, he tore his clothes, the sign of profound grief, because he understood immediately how far the nation had drifted from what the covenant required.

[00:13:29]Josiah leads the most comprehensive reform in Judah's history.

[00:13:33]He destroys every high place, every idol, every unauthorized worship site, not just in Judah, but in the territories of the former northern kingdom.

[00:13:43]He reinstates the Passover in a way that the text says had not been kept since the days of the judges. The text says, "Before him, there was no king like him who turned to the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might according to all the law of Moses, nor did any like him arise after him."

[00:14:05]The highest evaluation any king of Judah ever receives.

[00:14:10]And then, he dies at the Battle of Megiddo.

[00:14:13]Caught between the Egyptian and Babylonian empires, killed at 39 years old.

[00:14:19]And after Josiah, Judah's last four kings are all evil.

[00:14:24]The momentum of his reform dies with him.

[00:14:28]Within 23 years of Josiah's death, Babylon destroys Jerusalem. Here is the pattern most people never see.

[00:14:36]39 kings.

[00:14:38]And the pattern that emerges from their reigns is not primarily about politics.

[00:14:43]It is a theological argument, one that the biblical writers are building across 400 years of history about what kind of king Israel actually needs.

[00:14:53]Every reform is reversed by the next generation.

[00:14:56]Asa reforms.

[00:14:58]His son Jehoshaphat mostly holds the line, but makes bad alliances. Joash does right while the priest lives.

[00:15:06]The moment the priest dies, Joash orders the priest's son killed.

[00:15:11]Hezekiah removes the high places, smashes the bronze serpent, stops an empire with a prayer.

[00:15:18]His son Manasseh spends 55 years dismantling everything his father built.

[00:15:24]Josiah leads the greatest reform in Judah's history.

[00:15:28]His sons are the last four kings before Babylon burns the city.

[00:15:33]The pattern is not eight good kings versus 12 bad kings.

[00:15:37]The pattern is this.

[00:15:39]No human king, however faithful, can sustain covenant faithfulness from generation to generation.

[00:15:46]The reform always lasts one generation.

[00:15:50]The reversal always follows. And here is the theological claim that emerges from the pattern.

[00:15:57]The problem is not that Israel kept choosing bad kings. The problem is that a human king, any human king, is insufficient for what the covenant requires. The covenant requires a king whose heart does not waver.

[00:16:12]A king whose faithfulness does not depend on what his son decides.

[00:16:17]A king whose reign does not end with his death. A king who is not competing with Assyria and Babylon for geopolitical survival.

[00:16:26]Not one of the 39 could be that king.

[00:16:28]Not Hezekiah, not Josiah, not even David, the standard by which all the others were measured.

[00:16:35]The books of Kings end in disaster.

[00:16:38]Jerusalem burned. The temple destroyed.

[00:16:41]The people in exile.

[00:16:43]By any external measure, political, military, cultural, the monarchy of Israel had failed completely.

[00:16:50]But the prophets who spoke during and after the monarchy did not conclude that God's plan had failed.

[00:16:59]They concluded that the monarchy was preparing the ground for something the monarchy itself could never provide.

[00:17:06]Isaiah wrote during the reign of the Assyrian crisis, surrounded by failing kings, that a child would be born.

[00:17:14]A son would be given.

[00:17:16]And the government would be on his shoulders.

[00:17:19]Wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, prince of peace.

[00:17:26]Of the increase of his government and peace, there would be no end. No human king could say that. Not one of the 39.

[00:17:34]But the prophets kept saying it was coming.

[00:17:37]The 39 kings are not a list of political failures. They are a 400-year demonstration of what every human king, however great, cannot do. And therefore, a 400-year argument for the kind of king who can. Every time a human leader, in government, in the church, in any institution, proves insufficient for the weight of the covenant they carry, they are adding their name to a long list that stretches back to Jeroboam and reaches forward to Josiah.

[00:18:11]Not because leadership is worthless, but because human leadership, however faithful, is always provisional, always temporary, always subject to the next generation's choices. The 39 kings were not the point. They were the evidence.

[00:18:28]And the evidence pointed, as all the biblical evidence eventually points, to one throne that will not be overturned, one reform that will not be reversed, one reign of which the increase will have no end. If this video changed how you read 1 and 2 Kings, if you'll never again see the list of kings as a dry history section, but as a theological argument about the insufficiency of human leadership and the necessity of a different kind of king, share this with someone in your church or Bible study.

[00:19:02]Because I think most Christians have been taught the kings as a history lesson when they are actually a prophecy.

[00:19:09]The failure of 39 kings is the argument that made Isaiah's announcement of one coming King the most urgent declaration in the Old Testament.

[00:19:20]We have already gone deep on every covenant God made, every feast of Israel, every I am statement of Jesus, the promises of God in the Hebrew text, and the hidden pattern behind every 40.

[00:19:33]Every video connects. Every thread runs somewhere.

[00:19:37]39 Kings, one measuring stick, and a kingdom without end that none of them could provide, but all of them pointed toward. Subscribe, and we'll keep going deeper.