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ဓမၼရာဇဝင္
တတိယေစာင္။
1 Kings
၂၂
၁ရႈရိျပည္ႏွင့္ ဣသေရလျပည္သည္ စစ္မတုိက္ဘဲသံုးႏွစ္ေနၿပီးမွ၊ ၂တတိယႏွစ္တြင္၊၊
ယုဒရွင္ဘုရင္ ေယာရွဖတ္ သည္ ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္ထံသို႔လာ၏။ ၃ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္ကလည္း၊
ဂိလဒ္ျပည္ ရာမုတ္ၿမိဳ႔သည္ ငါတို႔ႏုိင္ငံ အဝင္ျဖစ္သည္ကို သင္တို႔မသိေလာ့။
ငါတို႔သည္ ရႈရိရွင္ဘုရင္လက္မွ မႏႈတ္မယူဘဲ ၿငိမ္သက္စြာေနၾကၿပီတကားဟု
မိမိကြၽန္တုိ႔အား ဆုိ၏။ ၄ေယာရွဖတ္မင္းအားလည္း၊ ဂိလဒ္ျပည္ ရာမုတ္ၿမိဳ႔သုိ႔
ငါႏွင့္ အတူစစ္ခ်ီမည္ေလာဟု ေမးလွ်င္၊ ေယာရွဖတ္က၊ ငါသည္
မင္းႀကီးကဲ့သုိ႔ျဖစ္၏။ ငါ့လူတို႔သည္ မင္းႀကီး၏ လူကဲ့သို႔၄င္း၊
ငါ့ျမင္းတို႔သည္ မင္းႀကီး၏ ျမင္းကဲ့သို႔၄င္းျဖစ္ၾကသည္ဟု ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္အား
ျပန္ေျပာ၏။
၅တဖန္
ေယာရွဖတ္က၊ ထာဝရဘုရား၏ ႏႈတ္ကပတ္ေတာ္ကို ယေန႔ေမးျမန္းပါေလာ့ဟု
ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္ အားဆုိေသာ္၊ ၆ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္သည္ ပေရာဖက္ေလးရာတို႔ကို
စုေဝးေစၿပီးလွ်င္၊ ငါသည္ဂိလဒ္ျပည္ ရာမုတ္ၿမိဳ႔ သို႔ စစ္ခ်ီေကာင္းသေလာ။
မခ်ီဘဲေနေကာင္းသေလာဟု ေမးေသာ္၊ သူတို႔ကခ်ီေတာ္မူပါ။ ထာဝရဘုရားသည္
အရွင္မင္းႀကီး၏ လက္ေတာ္သို႔အပ္ေတာ္မူမည္ဟု ေလွ်ာက္ၾက၏။ ၇ေယာရွဖတ္ကလည္း၊
ငါတုိ႔ေမးျမန္းစရာ ထာဝရဘုရား၏ ပေရာဖက္တစံုတပါးမွ် မရွိသေလာဟုေမးေသာ္၊
၈ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္က၊ ထာဝရဘုရားကိုေမးျမန္း ရေသာသူတေယာက္ ဣမလသားမိကၡာရွိေသး၏။
သို႔ရာတြင္ ထုိသူကိုငါမုန္း၏။ ငါ၌မဂၤလာစကားကုိမေဟာ။ အဂၤလာစကားကိုသာ
ေဟာတတ္သည္ဟု ေယာရွဖတ္အားဆုိလွ်င္၊ ေယာရွဖတ္ကထုိသို႔မင္းႀကီးမေျပာပါႏွင့္ဟု
ျပန္ဆုိ၏။ ၉ထုိအခါ၊ ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္သည္ အရာရွိတေယာက္ကုိ ေခၚ၍၊
ဣမလသားမိကၡာကုိ အလွ်င္အျမန္းေခၚ ခဲ့ဟု မိန္႔ေတာ္မူ၏။ ၁ဝဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္ႏွင့္
ယုဒရွင္ဘုရင္ ေယာရွဖတ္တို႔သည္ မင္းေျမာက္တန္ဆာကုိ ဝတ္ဆင္လ်က္၊
ရွမာရိၿမိဳ႔တံခါးဝေရွ႔၊ ဟင္းလင္းေသာအရပ္၌ ရာဇပလႅင္တို႔အေပၚမွာထုိင္၍၊
ပေရာဖက္အေပါင္း တို႔သည္ေရွ႔ေတာ္၌ ေဟာေျပာၾက၏။ ၁၁ေခနာနာသား ေဇဒကိသည္
သံဦးခ်ဳိတို႔ကိုလုပ္၍၊ ထာဝရဘုရားမိန္႔ေတာ္ မူသည္ကား၊ ကိုယ္ေတာ္သည္
ရႈရိလူတို႔ကုိ မဖ်က္ဆီးမီွတိုင္ေအာင္ ဤဦးခ်ဳိတို႔ႏွင့္
တိုးရမည္ဟုမိန္႔ေတာ္မူေၾကာင္း ကိုဆင့္ဆုိ၏။ ၁၂ပေရာဖက္အေပါင္းတို႔ကလည္း၊
ဂိလဒ္ျပည္ ရာမုတ္ၿမိဳ႔သို႔ စစ္ခ်ီ၍ ေအာင္ေတာ္မူပါ။ ထာဝရဘုရား သည္
အရွင္မင္းႀကီး၏ လက္ေတာ္သုိ႔အပ္ေတာ္မူမည္ဟု ပေရာဖက္ျပဳ၍ ေဟာၾက၏။
၁၃မိကၡာကိုေခၚေသာ တမန္က၊ ပေရာဖက္အေပါင္းတို႔သည္ မဂၤလာစကားကုိသာ
ရွင္ဘုရင္အားတညီတညြတ္တည္း ေဟာၾက၏။ ကိုယ္ေတာ္လည္း သူတို႔ေဟာၾကသည္နည္းတူ
မဂၤလာစကားကုိသာ ေဟာေတာ္မူပါဟု ဆုိလွ်င္၊ ၁၄မိကၡာက၊ ထာဝရဘုရားအသက္
ရွင္ေတာ္မူသည္အတုိင္း၊ ထာဝရဘုရားမိန္႔ေတာ္မူေသာ စကားကုိသာ
ငါျပန္ေျပာရမည္ဟုဆုိ၏။
၁၅ရွင္ဘုရင္ထံသို႔ေရာက္ေသာအခါ၊ ရွင္ဘုရင္က အခ်င္းမိကၡာ၊ ငါတို႔သည္
ဂိလဒ္ျပည္ရာမုတ္ၿမိဳ႔သို႔ စစ္ခ်ီေကာင္းသေလာ။ မခ်ီဘဲေနေကာင္းသေလာဟု
ေမးလွ်င္၊ မိကၡာက၊ စစ္ခ်ီ၍ေအာင္ေတာ္မူပါ။ ထာဝရဘုရားသည္ အရွင္မင္းႀကီး၏
လက္ေတာ္သုိ႔အပ္ေတာ္မူမည္ဟု ျပန္ေလွ်ာက္၏။ ၁၆ရွင္ဘုရင္ကလည္း၊
မွန္ေသာစကားမွတပါး၊ အျခားေသာစကားကုိ ထာဝရဘုရားအခြင့္ႏွင့္
သင္သည္ငါ့အားမေဟာမွီအေၾကာင္း၊ ငါသည္ ဘယ္ႏွစ္ႀကိမ္ တိုင္ေအာင္
သင့္အားအက်ိန္ေပးရမည္နည္းဟုေမးေသာ္၊ ၁၇မိကၡာက၊
ဣသေရလအမ်ဳိးသားအေပါင္းတို႔သည္ သိုးထိန္းမရွိ ေသာသိုးကဲ့သုိ႔
ေတာင္မ်ားအေပၚမွာ အရပ္ရပ္ကဲြျပား လ်က္ ရွိၾကသည္ကို ငါျမင္ၿပီ။
ထာဝရဘုရားကလည္း၊ ဤသူအေပါင္းတို႔သည္ အရွင္မရွိေသာေၾကာင့္၊
အသီးအသီးကိုယ္ေနရာသို႔ ျပန္ၾကပါေလေစဟု မိန္႔ေတာ္မူေၾကာင္း ကုိေလွ်ာက္ဆို၏။
၁၈ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္ ကလည္း၊ သူသည္ငါ၌မဂၤလာစကားကို မေဟာ၊ အမဂၤလာစကားကိုသာ
ေဟာတတ္သည္ဟု မင္းႀကီးအားငါမေျပာသေလာဟု ေရွာရွဖတ္အားဆုိ၏။ ၁၉မိကၡာကလည္း၊
သို႔ျဖစ္၍ ထာဝရဘုရား၏ အမိန္႔ေတာ္ကုိ နားေထာင္ပါ။ ထာဝရဘုရားသည္
ပလႅင္ေတာ္ေပၚမွာ ထုိင္ေတာ္မူသည္ကုိ၄င္း၊ ေကာင္းကင္ဗိုလ္ေျခအေပါင္းတုိ႔သည္
လက္်ာေတာ္ဘက္ လက္ဝဲေတာ္ဘက္၌ ရပ္ေနၾကသည္ကုိ၄င္း၊ ငါျမင္ၿပီ။
၂ဝထာဝရဘုရားကလည္း၊ အာဟပ္သည္ ဂိလဒ္ျပည္ ရာမုတ္ၿမိဳ႔သုိ႔ စစ္ခ်ီ၍
ဆံုးေစျခင္းငွါ၊ အဘယ္သူေသြးေဆာင္မည္ နည္းဟု ေမးေတာ္မူလွ်င္၊
အျခံအရံေတာ္တို႔သည္ တေယာက္တနည္းစီ ျပန္ေလွ်ာက္ၾက၏။ ၂၁တဖန္ဝိညာဥ္တပါး
သည္လာ၍၊ ထာဝရဘုရားေရွ႔ေတာ္၌ ရပ္လ်က္၊ အကြၽႏု္ပ္ေသြးေဆာင္ပါမည္ဟု
ေလွ်ာက္လွ်င္၊ ၂၂ထာဝရဘုရားက အဘယ္သို႔ေသြးေဆာင္မည္နည္းဟု ေမးေတာ္မူေသာ္၊
အကြၽႏု္ပ္သြား၍ ထုိမင္းႀကီး၏ ပေရာဖက္အေပါင္းတို႔အထဲမွာ မုသာစကားကို
ေျပာတတ္ေသာ စိတ္ဝိညာဥ္ျဖစ္ပါမည္ဟု ျပန္ေလွ်ာက္ေသာ္၊ သင္သည္ ေသြးေဆာင္၍
ႏုိင္လိမ့္မည္။ ထိုသို႔သြား၍ ျပဳေလာ့ဟု မိန္႔ေတာ္မူ၏။ ၂၃သို႔ျဖစ္၍
ထာဝရဘုရားသည္ မုသာစကားကုိေျပာတတ္ေသာ စိတ္ဝိညာဥ္ ကိုမင္းႀကီး၏
ပေရာဖက္အေပါင္းတို႔၌ သြင္းေတာ္မူၿပီ။ မင္းႀကီး၏ အမႈမွာ အမဂၤလာစကားကုိ
ေျပာေတာ္မူၿပီဟု ေဟာေလ၏။ ၂၄ထုိအခါ ေခနာနာ၏သား ေဇဒကိသည္ ခ်ည္းလာ၍၊
မိကၡာ၏ပါးကုိပုတ္လွ်က္၊ ထာဝရဘုရား၏ ဝိညာဥ္ေတာ္သည္သင္ႏွင့္ ႏႈတ္ဆက္ျခင္းငွါ၊
အဘယ္လမ္းျဖင့္ ငါမွထြက္ေတာ္မူသနည္းဟု ေမးလွ်င္၊ ၂၅မိကၡာက၊
သင္သည္ပုန္းေရွာင္၍ ေနျခင္းငွါ အတြင္းခန္းထဲသို႔ ဝင္ေသာေန႔၌
သင္ျမင္လိမ့္မည္ဟု ဆုိ၏။ ၂၆ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္ က၊ မိကၡာကို
ၿမိဳ႔ဝန္မင္းအာမုန္ထံ၊ သားေတာ္ေယာရွထံသုိ႔ ယူသြား၍၊ ၂၇ဤသူကုိေထာင္ထဲမွာ
ေလွာင္ထားၾက။ ငါသည္ ၿငိမ္ဝပ္စြာျပန္၍ မလာမွီတိုင္ေအာင္
ဆင္းရဲစြာစားေသာက္ေစဟု အမိန္႔ေတာ္ရွိေၾကာင္းကုိ ဆင့္ဆုိေလာ့ဟု စီရင္၏။
၂၈မိကၡာကလည္း၊ မင္းႀကီးသည္ ၿငိမ္ဝပ္စြာျပန္လာရလွ်င္၊ ထာဝရဘုရားသည္
ငါ့အားျဖင့္ မိန္႔ေတာ္မမူ၊ အုိလူမ်ားအေပါင္းတို႔ နားေထာင္ၾကေလာ့ဟုဆို၏။
၂၉ထုိသုိ႔ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္ႏွင့္ ယုဒရွင္ဘုရင္ ေယာရွဖတ္တို႔သည္
ဂိလဒ္ျပည္ရာမုတ္ၿမိဳ႔သုိ႔ စစ္ခ်ီၾက၏။ ၃ဝဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္က၊
ငါသည္ျခားနားေသာအေယာင္ကုိေဆာင္၍ စစ္ပဲြထဲသုိ႔ဝင္မည္။ မင္းႀကီးမူကား၊
မင္းေျမာက္တန္ဆာကုိ ဝတ္ဆင္ပါေလာ့ဟု ေယာရွဖတ္အားဆုိၿပီးမွ၊ ဣသေရလ
ရွင္ဘုရင္သည္ ျခားနားေသာ အေယာင္ကုိေဆာင္လ်က္၊ စစ္ပဲြထဲသုိ႔ဝင္၏။
၃၁ရႈရိရွင္ဘုရင္က၊ ဣသေရလ ရွင္ဘုရင္မွတပါး၊ အျခားေသာလူႀကီး
လူငယ္ကိုမတိုက္ႏွင့္ဟု ရထားစီးသူရဲမ်ားကုိ အုပ္ေသာ
ဗုိလ္သံုးက်ိပ္ႏွစ္ေယာက္တို႔ကုိ မွာထားႏွင့္ေသာေၾကာင့္၊
၃၂ရထားစီးသူရဲအုပ္ဗုိလ္မင္းတို႔သည္ ေယာရွဖတ္ကို ျမင္ေသာအခါ၊
အကယ္စင္စစ္ထုိသူသည္ ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္ ျဖစ္လိမ့္မည္ဟု ဆုိလ်က္
သူ႔ကုိတိုက္အံ့ေသာငွါ လမ္းလႊဲၾက၍၊ ေယာရွဖတ္လည္းေၾကြးေၾကာ္ေလ၏။
၃၃ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္ မဟုတ္ေၾကာင္းကုိ ရထားစီးသူရဲအုပ္ဗုိလ္မင္းတို႔သည္
ရိပ္မိေသာအခါ၊ မလုိက္ဘဲအျခားသုိ႔ ေရွာင္သြားၾက၏။ ၃၄လူတေယာက္သည္
မရြယ္ဘဲေလးႏွစ္ျပည့္၍၊ ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္ကို သံခ်ပ္အက်ႌအဆစ္ၾကား မွာ
မွန္ေလေသာ္၊ ငါ့ကုိစစ္ပဲြထဲက လွည့္၍ ထုတ္ေဆာင္ေလာ့။ ငါနာသည္ဟု
မိမိရထားေတာ္ထိန္းကုိ ဆုိ၏။ ၃၅ထိုေန႔၌တုိး၍တိုက္ၾက၏။ ရွင္ဘုရင္သည္
ရႈရိလူတဘက္တခ်က္၌ ရထားေတာ္ထဲမွာ လူကိုမွီ၍ ထုိင္ေန၏။ ညဦးယံ၌အသက္ေတာ္ကုန္၏။
ထိခိုက္ရာအနာမွအေသြးသည္ ရထားထဲသုိ႔ယို၏။ ၃၆လူအေပါင္းတို႔၊ ကုိယ္ေနေသာ
ၿမိဳ႔ျပည္သို႔ျပန္သြားၾကဟု ေနဝင္ေသာအခါ တတပ္လံုးကုိ ေၾကြးေၾကာ္ေလ၏။
၃၇ထုိသို႔ရွင္ဘုရင္ေသ၍၊ ရွမာရိၿမိဳ႔သုိ႔ေရာက္သျဖင့္ သၿဂႋဳဟ္ျခင္းကိုခံရ၏။
၃၈ရထားေတာ္ႏွင့္ လက္နက္ေတာ္ကို ရွမာရိၿမိဳ႔ေရကန္၌ ေဆးသျဖင့္၊
ထာဝရဘုရားမိန္႔ေတာ္မူေသာစကားႏွင့္ အညီ၊ ေခြးတို႔သည္ အေသြးကိုလ်က္ၾက၏။
၃၉အာဟပ္ျပဳမူေသာ အမႈအရာၾကြင္းေလသမွ်တို႔ႏွင့္ တည္ေဆာက္ ေသာ ဆင္စြယ္နန္း၊
ျပဳစုေသာၿမိဳ႔တို႔သည္ ဣသေရလရာဇဝင္၌ ေရးထားလ်က္ရွိ၏။ ၄ဝအာဟပ္သည္
ဘိုးေဘးတို႔ႏွင့္ အိပ္ေပ်ာ္၍ သားေတာ္အာခဇိသည္ ခမည္းေတာ္အရာ၌ နန္းထုိင္၏။
၄၁ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္အာဟပ္နန္းစံေလးႏွစ္တြင္ အာသသား ေယာရွဖတ္သည္ အသက္သံုးဆယ္
ငါးႏွစ္ရွိေသာ ယုဒႏုိင္ငံကုိ အစိုးရ၍၊ ၄၂ေယရုရွလင္ၿမိဳ႔၌ ႏွစ္ဆယ္ငါးႏွစ္
စိုးစံေလ၏။ မယ္ေတာ္ကား ရွိလဟိသမီး အဇုဘ အမည္ရွိ၏။ ၄၃ထုိမင္းသည္
ခမည္းေတာ္အာသလုိက္ေသာ လမ္းကုိမလႊဲ၊ အကုန္အစင္လုိက္၍ ထာဝရဘုရား ေရွ႔ေတာ္၌
ေျဖာင့္မတ္ေသာအက်င့္ကုိသာ က်င့္၏။ သို႔ရာတြင္ ျမင့္ေသာအရပ္တို႔ကို
မပယ္ရွားေသာေၾကာင့္၊ လူတို႔သည္ ထုိအရပ္တို႔၌ ယဇ္ပူေဇာ္၍ နံ႔သာေပါင္းကုိ
မီးရႈိ႔ၾက၏။ ၄၄ေယာရွဖတ္မင္းသည္ ဣသေရလရွင္ဘုရင္ႏွင့္ စစ္မတိုက္
မိႆဟာယဖဲြ႔ေလ၏။ ၄၅ေယာရွဖတ္ျပဳမူေသာ အမႈအရာၾကြင္းေလသမွ်တို႔ႏွင့္
တန္ခိုးႀကီးျခင္း၊ စစ္တိုက္ျခင္းအရာတို႔သည္ ယုဒရာဇဝင္၌ ေရးထားလ်က္ရွိ၏။
၄၆ခမည္းေတာ္အာသလက္ထက္၌ က်န္ၾကြင္းေသးေသာ ေယာက္်ားအလုိသို႔လုိက္တတ္ေသာ
မိန္းမလ်ာတို႔ကုိ ျပည္ေတာ္မွ သုတ္သင္ပယ္ရွင္းေလ၏။ ၄၇ထုိကာလ၊
ဧဒုန္ျပည္၌ရွင္ဘုရွင္မရွိ။ ယုဒရွင္ဘုရင္ခန္႔ထားေသာ ၿမိဳ႔ဝန္မင္းစီရင္ရ၏။
၄၈ေယာရွဖတ္သည္ ၾသဖိရ ျပည္သုိ႔ေစလႊတ္၍၊ ေရႊကိုယူေစျခင္းငွါ တာရႈသေဘၤာတို႔ကုိ
ဧဇယုန္ဂါဗာၿမိဳ႔မွာ တည္၏။ ၄၉အာဟပ္သား အာခဇိက၊ င့ါကြၽန္တို႔သည္
မင္းႀကီးကြၽန္တို႔ႏွင့္ သေဘၤာစီးပါေစဟု ေယာရွဖတ္၌ အခြင့္ေတာင္း၍
ေယာရွဖတ္သည္ အခြင့္ေပး၏။ သို႔ေသာ္လည္း သေဘၤာတို႔သည္ ဧဇယုန္ဂါဗာၿမိဳ႔မွာ
က်ဳိးပဲ့ေသာေၾကာင့္၊ ၾသဖိရၿမိဳ႔သို႔မသြားရ။ ၅ဝေယာရွဖတ္သည္ ဘိုးေဘးတို႔ႏွင့္
အိပ္ေပ်ာ္၍ သူတို႔ႏွင့္ အတူ အဘဒါဝိဒ္ၿမိဳ႔၌ သၿဂႋဳဟ္ျခင္းကုိခံေလ၏။ သားေတာ္
ယေဟာရံသည္ ခမည္းေတာ္အရာ၌နန္းထုိင္၏။
၅၁ယုဒရွင္ဘုရင္ ေယာရွဖတ္နန္းစံ ဆယ္ခုနစ္ႏွစ္တြင္၊ အာဟပ္သားအာခဇိသည္
ရွမာရိၿမိဳ႔၌မင္းျပဳ၍၊ ဣသေရလႏုိင္ငံကို ႏွစ္ႏွစ္စိုးစံ၏။ ၅၂ထုိမင္းသည္
ထာဝရဘုရားေရွ႔ေတာ္၌ ဒုစရုိက္ကိုျပဳ၍၊ မိဘလုိက္ေသာလမ္း၊
ဣသေရလအမ်ဳိးကုိျပစ္မွားေစေသာ၊ ေနဗတ္၏သား ေယေရာေဗာင္လုိက္ေသာ
လမ္းသို႔လုိက္ေလ၏။ ၅၃ဗာလဘုရားကုိ ဝတ္ျပဳကိုးကြယ္၍၊ အဘက်င့္ေလသမွ်အတိုင္း
ဣသေရလအမ်ဳိး၏ ဘုရားသခင္ ထာဝရဘုရား၏ အမ်က္ေတာ္ကုိ ႏႈိးေဆာ္သတည္း။
ဓမၼရာဇဝင္တတိယေစာင္ၿပီး၏။
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1 Kings 22
Micaiah Prophesies Against Ahab
22:1-28 pp—2Ch 18:1-27
1 For three years there was no war between Aram and Israel.
2 But in the third year Jehoshaphat king of Judah went down to see the
king of Israel.
3 The king of Israel had said to his officials, “Don’t you know that
Ramoth Gilead d belongs to us and yet we are doing nothing to retake it
from the king of Aram?”
4 So he asked Jehoshaphat, “Will you go with me to fight e against
Ramoth Gilead?” Jehoshaphat replied to the king of Israel, “I am as you
are, my people as your people, my horses as your horses.”
5 But Jehoshaphat also said to the king of Israel, “First seek the
counsel f of the LORD.”
6 So the king of Israel brought together the prophets—about four hundred
men—and asked them, “Shall I go to war against Ramoth Gilead, or shall I
refrain?” “Go,” g they answered, “for the Lord will give it into the
king’s hand.” h
7 But Jehoshaphat asked, “Is there not a prophet i of the LORD here whom
we can inquire j of?”
8 The king of Israel answered Jehoshaphat, “There is still one man
through whom we can inquire of the LORD, but I hate k him because he
never prophesies anything good l about me, but always bad. He is Micaiah
son of Imlah.” “The king should not say that,” Jehoshaphat replied.
9 So the king of Israel called one of his officials and said, “Bring
Micaiah son of Imlah at once.”
10 Dressed in their royal robes, the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat king
of Judah were sitting on their thrones at the threshing floor m by the
entrance of the gate of Samaria, with all the prophets prophesying
before them.
11 Now Zedekiah n son of Kenaanah had made iron horns o and he declared,
“This is what the LORD says: ‘With these you will gore the Arameans
until they are destroyed.’ ”
12 All the other prophets were prophesying the same thing. “Attack
Ramoth Gilead and be victorious,” they said, “for the LORD will give it
into the king’s hand.”
13 The messenger who had gone to summon Micaiah said to him, “Look, as
one man the other prophets are predicting success for the king. Let your
word agree with theirs, and speak favorably.” p
14 But Micaiah said, “As surely as the LORD lives, I can tell him only
what the LORD tells me.” q
15 When he arrived, the king asked him, “Micaiah, shall we go to war
against Ramoth Gilead, or shall I refrain?” “Attack and be victorious,”
he answered, “for the LORD will give it into the king’s hand.”
16 The king said to him, “How many times must I make you swear to tell
me nothing but the truth in the name of the LORD?”
17 Then Micaiah answered, “I saw all Israel scattered r on the hills
like sheep without a shepherd, s and the LORD said, ‘These people have
no master. Let each one go home in peace.’ ”
18 The king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, “Didn’t I tell you that he
never prophesies anything good about me, but only bad?”
19 Micaiah continued, “Therefore hear the word of the LORD: I saw the
LORD sitting on his throne t with all the host u of heaven standing
around him on his right and on his left.
20 And the LORD said, ‘Who will entice Ahab into attacking Ramoth Gilead
and going to his death there?’ “One suggested this, and another that.
21 Finally, a spirit came forward, stood before the LORD and said, ‘I
will entice him.’
22 “ ‘By what means?’ the LORD asked. “ ‘I will go out and be a lying v
spirit in the mouths of all his prophets,’ he said. “ ‘You will succeed
in enticing him,’ said the LORD. ‘Go and do it.’
23 “So now the LORD has put a lying w spirit in the mouths of all these
prophets x of yours. The LORD has decreed disaster y for you.”
24 Then Zedekiah z son of Kenaanah went up and slapped a Micaiah in the
face. “Which way did the spirit from 99 the LORD go when he went from me
to speak b to you?” he asked.
25 Micaiah replied, “You will find out on the day you go to hide c in an
inner room.”
26 The king of Israel then ordered, “Take Micaiah and send him back to
Amon the ruler of the city and to Joash the king’s son
27 and say, ‘This is what the king says: Put this fellow in prison d and
give him nothing but bread and water until I return safely.’ ”
28 Micaiah declared, “If you ever return safely, the LORD has not spoken
e through me.” Then he added, “Mark my words, all you people!”
Ahab Killed at Ramoth Gilead
22:29-36 pp—2Ch 18:28-34
29 So the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat king of Judah went up to Ramoth
Gilead.
30 The king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, “I will enter the battle in
disguise, f but you wear your royal robes.” So the king of Israel
disguised himself and went into battle.
31 Now the king of Aram g had ordered his thirty-two chariot commanders,
“Do not fight with anyone, small or great, except the king h of Israel.”
32 When the chariot commanders saw Jehoshaphat, they thought, “Surely
this is the king of Israel.” So they turned to attack him, but when
Jehoshaphat cried out,
33 the chariot commanders saw that he was not the king of Israel and
stopped pursuing him.
34 But someone drew his bow i at random and hit the king of Israel
between the sections of his armor. The king told his chariot driver,
“Wheel around and get me out of the fighting. I’ve been wounded.”
35 All day long the battle raged, and the king was propped up in his
chariot facing the Arameans. The blood from his wound ran onto the floor
of the chariot, and that evening he died.
36 As the sun was setting, a cry spread through the army: “Every man to
his town; everyone to his land!” j
37 So the king died and was brought to Samaria, and they buried him
there.
38 They washed the chariot at a pool in Samaria (where the prostitutes
bathed), 100 and the dogs k licked up his blood, as the word of the LORD
had declared.
39 As for the other events of Ahab’s reign, including all he did, the
palace he built and inlaid with ivory, l and the cities he fortified,
are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Israel?
40 Ahab rested with his fathers. And Ahaziah his son succeeded him as
king.
Jehoshaphat King of Judah
22:41-50 pp—2Ch 20:31-21:1
41 Jehoshaphat son of Asa became king of Judah in the fourth year of
Ahab king of Israel.
42 Jehoshaphat was thirty-five years old when he became king, and he
reigned in Jerusalem twenty-five years. His mother’s name was Azubah
daughter of Shilhi.
43 In everything he walked in the ways of his father Asa m and did not
stray from them; he did what was right in the eyes of the LORD. The high
places, n however, were not removed, and the people continued to offer
sacrifices and burn incense there.
44 Jehoshaphat was also at peace with the king of Israel.
45 As for the other events of Jehoshaphat’s reign, the things he
achieved and his military exploits, are they not written in the book of
the annals of the kings of Judah?
46 He rid the land of the rest of the male shrine prostitutes o who
remained there even after the reign of his father Asa.
47 There was then no king p in Edom; a deputy ruled.
48 Now Jehoshaphat built a fleet of trading ships 101 q to go to Ophir
for gold, but they never set sail—they were wrecked at Ezion Geber. r
49 At that time Ahaziah son of Ahab said to Jehoshaphat, “Let my men
sail with your men,” but Jehoshaphat refused.
50 Then Jehoshaphat rested with his fathers and was buried with them in
the city of David his father. And Jehoram his son succeeded him.
Ahaziah King of Israel
51 Ahaziah son of Ahab became king of Israel in Samaria in the
seventeenth year of Jehoshaphat king of Judah, and he reigned over
Israel two years.
52 He did evil s in the eyes of the LORD, because he walked in the ways
of his father and mother and in the ways of Jeroboam son of Nebat, who
caused Israel to sin.
53 He served and worshiped Baal t and provoked the LORD, the God of
Israel, to anger, just as his father u had done.
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