HAVE – Yehosheba

Heroes and Villains Explored – Yehosheba

We continue our HAVE series and today we are investigating Yehosheba. Some translations will have her name as Yehoshabeath.

2 Chronicles 22v11-12 But Yehosheba, the daughter of the king, took Joash the son of Ahaziah, and stole him away from among the king’s sons who were slain, and put him and his nurse in the bedroom. So Yehosheba, the daughter of king Jehoram, the wife of Jehoiada the priest (for she was the sister of Ahaziah), hid him from Athaliah, so that she didn’t kill him. He was with them hidden in God’s house six years: and Athaliah reigned over the land.

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Yehosheba was a princess, the daughter of King Joram and her name means “Yahweh is an oath”. She had married Jehoida, who was the high priest. Yehosheba, although she was a king’s daughter and a king’s sister, married a descendant of Levi, the head of the priest class in Judah. In the Old Testament, the promised coming of God in human form had been seriously threatened repeatedly. It was threatened by the fact that Sarah and Abraham remained childless for a long time; by Jacob’s flight; by the attempts on David’s life by Saul; and also by Athaliah attempted massacre of the royal baby Joash. However, as evil as Athaliah was, it cannot be said that she planned that massacre with a deliberate intention of preventing the coming of the promised Messiah from the line of King David.

HAVE – Athaliah

Heroes and Villains Explored – Athaliah

The person we are going to look at in this study, is Athaliah. You can read about her in 2 Kings 11 and 2 Chronicles 22-23. The judges have long gone, and the nation of Israel had become a monarchy under Saul, David and Solomon. Yet soon after Solomon died, the nation splits into north and south – Israel and Judah.

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An Evil Scheming Woman

As we have just read, Athaliah was, by all accounts, a terrible woman. The tribes in the kingdom of Israel, tried to lure the kingdom of Judah’s tribes into a trap, and prepared it for the Babylonian exile. Athaliah was to cause Judah’s moral life to decay. Athaliah was the daughter of that horrible couple Ahab and Jezebel. She somehow inherited all the evil of her wicked parents. Jezebel had brought poison from Sidon and injected it into the life of Israel. Now Athaliah was to give some of that same poison into the life of Jerusalem.

HAVE – Yael

Heroes and Villains Explored – Yael (Judges 4-5)

 

It is perhaps a sad fact of church life (and of church history), that very rarely do we hear the stories about the minor women characters of the Bible. So in this series, we will discover together something about the lesser known characters of the Bible as well as the more famous ones. These people from the Bible are like you and I, and we have lessons to learn from them, in order that God is glorified and honoured through our lives. They have a lot to teach us, so the first three in this series will be minor women characters, of whom you probably have never heard spoken about.

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Yael (Judges 4&5)

Judges 5v24 – “Yael shall be blessed above women, the wife of Heber the Kenite; blessed shall she be above women in the tent. The first person we are going to look at is Yael. Yael is mentioned in one place and 5 times in all the Bible. Yet as was just read in Judges 5:31, she was accorded great honour and blessing? Why?

Yael’s name, like other Bible names, means more than just a name. It means goat, a graceful goat and the term implies that she was an attractive woman.. In the west, comparing your wife to a goat would be an insult, so most translations apparently use the word hind or deer. So we could quite properly, call Yael the name ‘Yael Doe’.