If you have read my curriculum book The Ten Commandments and the Covenants of Promise, then some of this will be a review for you. Otherwise, this week you will be learning about why these kings were fighting and how understanding their relationship with King Chedorlaomer also helps us to understand God’s relationship with the children of Israel and with us too!
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible modified a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context).
Okay, we are starting chapter fourteen of Genesis, and this is sure one oddball chapter because it starts with nine kings whom we have never heard of before and eight of them we will never hear from ever again. And the action of the first half of Gen 14 revolves totally around them and this war they are having—but who are they, where are they from, and why are they even fighting?? If you have gone through my covenants curriculum, this will be totally review for you but if you haven’t, you are about to get an important lesson on something that will be very important throughout the entire Bible, and especially beginning in Exodus 19 and 20. Understanding what is going on with these nine violent kings is going to give us an idea of how we relate to God in His Kingdom, and how much better God is than all these kings who are creating a huge mess in the land of Canaan, where Abram and Sarai and their friends all live. So, this week we will be talking about ancient Near Eastern politics, covenants, and warfare. But first, let’s read this week’s verses so that you can have any idea of what I am blabbing about!
In those days (when Abram was living near Hebron, and Lot had moved to Sodom), King Amraphel of Shinar, King Arioch of Ellasar, King Chedorlaomer of Elam, and King Tidal of Goiimwent to war against King Bera of Sodom, King Birsha of Gomorrah, King Shinab of Admah, and King Shemeber of Zeboiim, as well as the king of Bela (which is now known as Zoar). These five kings all came as allies to the Siddim Valley (which is now known as the Dead Sea). They were subject to Chedorlaomer for twelve years, but in the thirteenth year they rebelled against him. In the fourteenth year, Chedorlaomer and the kings who were with him came and defeated the Rephaim in Ashteroth-karnaim, the Zuzim in Ham, the Emim in Shaveh-kiriathaim, and the Horites in the mountains of Seir, as far as El-paran by the wilderness. Then they came back to invade En-mishpat (which is now known as Kadesh), and they defeated the whole territory of the Amalekites, as well as the Amorites who lived in Hazazon-tamar. Then the king of Sodom, the king of Gomorrah, the king of Admah, the king of Zeboiim, and the king of Bela (aka Zoar) went out and lined up for battle in the Siddim Valley against King Chedorlaomer of Elam, King Tidal of Goiim, King Amraphel of Shinar, and King Arioch of Ellasar—four kings fought against five kings. Now the Siddim Valley contained many asphalt pits, and as the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah ran away, some fell into the pits, but the rest ran to the mountains. The four kings took everything from the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and even all their food and kept on going. They also took Abram’s nephew Lot and everything Lot had, because he was living in Sodom, and they kept on going.
Oh boy, Lot is in huge trouble because he looked with his eyes and took what he thought looked best and ended up living outside a very wicked city, a worse city than we can possibly imagine. But it evidently didn’t take him very long to decide to move into the city instead. But we aren’t going to talk about Lot this week because to understand what is going on here, we have to look at archaeology and something called a Suzerain-Vassal covenant. And that is a huge and fancy name that simply means that a whole bunch of little kings are all being controlled by one bigger king. Kinda. That’s a good place to start thinking about this. In the ancient world, most of the people whom we call kings were actually more like city leaders or chiefs of tribes of people and not like modern kings and queens at all. They weren’t living in huge palaces, but they were the leaders of a large enough group of people that they would have a lot of money and probably more than one wife because that’s one of the ways that men showed off how powerful they were back then and also how they made friends with other cities by marrying the daughter of their king. And because they were in charge, they got to boss everyone around and could even kill anyone they wanted to kill if they had enough people backing them up and protecting them. But then you would have leaders of even bigger cities, who had more money and more wives and more soldiers than the smaller kings. And what do you think the bigger kings did with their soldiers? There were no laws telling them to stay in their own city, and they certainly didn’t see anything wrong with having more stuff, as well as more people to make into slaves.
Well, they would take their soldiers and they would go to a smaller city and bully them and fight with them until the smaller king surrendered and agreed to serve the bigger king and to give him money and stuff every year. We call that “protection money” nowadays. When you are paying someone not to beat you up. Back in the days of Abram, when smaller kings agreed to pay and obey bigger kings, they would make a covenant between them to seal the deal. And we’ve talked a little bit about covenants in the past because God made one with the whole world after the flood. But this one is very different. I guess I should begin the story by talking about the kings here in chapter 14. The big king whose name was Chedorlaomer, came from a place called Elam, and Elam is where Queen Esther would live over a thousand years later, very far from the land of Canaan in modern day Iran. And he must have been a very powerful king because there were eight other small kings who were all paying him not to beat them up. And if you look at where those kings all lived, it was in the big cities that led from Chedorlaomer’s home in Elam all the way to what would become the Dead Sea on the border of the land of Canaan. He ruled over the kings of what would later become Babylon and Assyria, which were close by him, and other places that would take him months of traveling to get to. Remember, they had no cars or airplanes, and they couldn’t walk in a straight line from here to there or they would die. They had to follow the Tigris and Euphrates rivers from the Persian Gulf, northwest, until they could travel south into what would someday be the Land of Israel. This was no easy trip.
And I am betting that those five kings who lived around the Valley of Siddim knew exactly how far away they were and so they figured they could get away with not doing what Chedorlaomer said anymore—but that’s a big long name and since the beginning sounds like Cheddar, let’s just call him “the Big Cheese.” But at one point, the Big Cheese or his father must have rolled through there with all his soldiers and busted them up real bad because they had agreed to serve his kingdom. But what does that mean? What did serving the Big Cheese mean? Well, they would have written a treaty on clay tablets, where the Big Cheese promised not to attack them anymore and would even protect them if someone else came after them. In return, if the Big Cheese needed help in a war, those smaller kings had to come with all of their men to help him out, plus, they had to pay him every single year. What a city would pay to the Big Cheese all depended on what they had to give. Sometimes it was food, or gold or silver or other metals, or sheep, goats and cows, fabric, paper, dyes, jewels, or even people. But what the five kings of the Siddim Valley had to pay with was very valuable and rare—their cities were involved in asphalt mining. Asphalt is probably what the roads in your town are made out of and even the Babylonians would someday make their roads out of it but at this point in history, it was mostly valuable for making buildings.
You see, in Elam, where the Big Cheese lived, and in Shinar as well, they didn’t have rocks for building like they had in the land of Canaan. They had to make bricks and if you look very close at a brick building or wall, you will see that the bricks need to be glued together or they will just fall over once they are stacked up high enough. That’s what they used the sticky gooey asphalt for and that’s why so many buildings from three and four thousand years ago haven’t fallen down yet. Asphalt was very valuable stuff and it was why the cities of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim and Bela were very rich. And it’s probably why the Big Cheese went after their cities in the first place even though they were so far away. He wanted them to send him free asphalt every year for the things he wanted to build. And so, at some point, they had agreed to give him a certain amount of it every year. And they did that for twelve years but then they figured out that this wasn’t a good deal for them. The Big Cheese was way too far away to help them out if someone decided to attack them and so they were getting nothing out of this deal and had to give away what they had worked very hard to get. They could be selling it and getting richer, but instead they were giving it away and probably had nothing to show for it. So, after twelve years of paying him not to beat them up, they stopped paying. All five of them. But that still left four kings that they had to deal with. Would they really travel all that way just to get them to keep paying? That was the question the five kings were asking and that was the big risk they were taking.
Well, the Big Cheese wasn’t going to put up with those five small kings disrespecting him in front of the other kings and so he told those loyal kings to get their stuff together and that they were all going to go to war against the five kings who had broken the covenant agreement they had made. If the Big Cheese just let them get away with it, then guess what? The other three kings that were still loyal to him would figure that they could just refuse to pay him anything too. So, off they went to the Land of Canaan to go to war with the five small kings. The question is whether or not the four kings had enough men and weapons to defeat the five kings, and the answer is yes. Yes, they did. People had been living in Elam and Shinar for a whole lot longer than people had been living in Canaan. The cities were bigger, there was more food, and they had better technology—meaning they had better weapons and buildings and farming equipment and ways to travel and all that. In fact, the armies of the four kings were so strong that not only would they end up winning and taking everything from the five cities and including all the people, they also fought against everyone along the way there and won against them as well. Even the people described as giants in other books of the Bible. These were tough dudes and they wanted everyone to know not to mess with the Big Cheese and his buddies. After all, a covenant is a covenant and when you agree to serve and obey and help someone forever, you are supposed to do that. Except, with kings and countries and cities it never works that way forever. At some point, someone is going to decide that they are sick and tired of doing it and they will break the covenant—sometimes it works out okay and sometimes it doesn’t. This time it doesn’t. They are gonna get the snot beaten out of them.
But what would this covenant have looked like fourteen years earlier? Well, the Big Cheese would have brought his armies over to where he knew that valuable asphalt was and they would have attacked the five cities, probably one at a time, and when they surrendered, they would have been given a choice—either agree to pay and to serve the Great King forever or be wiped off the face of the earth and we will take your asphalt anyway. Now, the king of that city would also be given a choice—if you pay and serve the Big Cheese forever, you can keep being the king and you can even become the king’s friend and he will help you if you are ever in trouble, or, the Big Cheese will find someone else to be king instead and kill you. And that would have happened to all five of the cities in the Siddim Valley who were mining asphalt—although some of them probably surrendered right away while others tried to fight. But when they agreed to be little kings serving the great king, there would have been a ceremony that would have involved killing a bull or a sheep or a goat, and they would have shared a meal together, and they would have made two special clay tablets with the agreement on it. The Big Cheese would keep one, and the little kings would keep the other one—and they would store each tablet in the Temple of their city god, who was supposed to punish them if they went back on their agreement.
So, when the five kings got together and said, “Look, we are totally sick of paying the Big Cheese all this money every single year. If we stopped paying then we could have bigger armies and if we all join together, he won’t be able to beat us this time.” And they probably went into their city Temples and got the tablets and broke them and then probably had a big party to celebrate. Probably paid for by Big Asphalt! And they got away with it for a whole year—because it probably took the Big Cheese a long time to figure out that they weren’t paying and that trip couldn’t be made just any time of the year. It was dangerous to make such a long trip in the winter when there was heavy rain and flooding. So, they would have set out in the spring when it was dry and it took them months to get there. But they didn’t attack all those cities right away. Nope. They made trouble in a lot of other places first. But why did they do that if they were only angry at the five kings? Well, one, armies needed food and it wasn’t like they could bring a ton of it with them so they would attack people on the way there and on the way back to feed their armies and also just to take any good stuff they found as well. Soldiers didn’t get paid very much but, in most armies, they were allowed to keep a lot of what they took during a fight—including people to make them slaves! It was a terrible time to be alive, for sure. It is hard for us to understand how so much of the world has changed because of what Jesus did for us. Why, before God spoke to Moses at Mt Sinai, there were really no or almost no rules about war at all. God told the Israelites that there were many things that they just weren’t allowed to do if they went to war, even though the people around them all did those things. God’s people have to be different than the world. We always have to be better and kinder and more generous than the world around us. People should always be looking at us and see that we are different in good ways.
Unlike the Big Cheese, our King isn’t a bully and so no one who follows Him should be a bully either. In fact, one of the things God says He hates all through the Bible is when the big and powerful, like the Big Cheese and the kings who are with Him, pick on the weak and vulnerable—like the people they attacked on their way to fight the five little kings. And we know from Genesis 13 that the five kings were wicked too and so were their cities. That’s why it was bad for Lot to live there. In fact, the Bible gave the five kings funny, made-up names to tell us how awful they were. And that might surprise you—but all through the Bible there are funny, made-up names for some people while most others have real names. For example, the names of the four kings are all real and we can find names just like them in cuneiform tablets. But the other names—how can I describe this…have you ever seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarves where the dwarves all have funny names that suit their personality? Sneezy is always sneezing, Grumpy is always grumpy, and Bashful is very shy. Now, those aren’t names their mothers would have given them and especially Dopey because that’s just rude. Those are more like nicknames. Like, my cat Buttercup is called Squeak because that’s what she does instead of meowing. In fact, she doesn’t even know that her real name is Buttercup because we never call her by that name.
Well, the five kings have names like that too. King Bera’s name means “evil”, and King Birsha’s name means “wicked”. Shinab can mean “father of lies” and Shemeber means something like “name of the strong.” The last king isn’t even given a name. And all of this would have sounded like a big joke to the original audience when Moses told the story to the children of Israel in the wilderness. They are like the five dwarves—Evil, Wicked, Liar, Powerful, and Nobody. When the people heard this, because they knew the story of what would happen to these five cities later, they would have laughed. These cities were so terrible and so dangerous that God would destroy them to keep them from hurting the people around them. They did cruel and shameful things to the strangers who would visit that I don’t even want to talk about! Sometimes in the Bible, when someone is bad enough that God doesn’t even want them to be remembered, we will never know their real name. We will just get a fake name that describes them. Right now, God is telling us that these kings can’t be trusted and that although they may be powerful compared to the rest of the Land of Canaan and all the people that they hurt, there is always a bigger bully. So, we will never know their names but their names aren’t important. When Moses told them the story, what he did instead was tell us everything we needed to know about them. During their lives, people were scared and terrorized by them but as Qui-Gon Jinn said, there’s always a bigger fish.
And that’s an important thing to know because it is still true now and always will be. In this world, there will always be bullies and criminals and liars and all those kinds of things, but they aren’t the biggest people on the block. God is always bigger, and He isn’t blind. He sees everything and although He allows people to do what they choose, no one is ever really getting away with anything even when it seems like they are winning. And people ask, all the time and even in the Bible, why God allows people to be so evil and it is a hard thing to deal with. If He is so good, then why is there so much bad in the world? Grown ups have been arguing and debating and complaining about that for years. They call that question of how the world can be full of bad things if God is so good, theodicy. Why does God allow people like Hitler, or members of the Klu Klux Klan, or con artists, and bullies to hurt people? Why does He allow them to even be born? Why doesn’t He kill them as soon as they get to the point where they will start hurting people? I mean, that seems like what I would do if I was God but then if I was God, I might just start killing anyone who doesn’t use their turn signals or who tells a particularly appalling dad joke. You know what I am talking about with those terrible dad jokes. They should be illegal!
And the thing is that God does love us. He doesn’t want us to hurt each other, and He cares very deeply and especially for the people who are being hurt. He sees it and He doesn’t like it one bit. Sometimes He steps in and puts a stop to it in ways that seem like a coincidence, but He doesn’t control people. He isn’t causing people to behave badly or to hurt us, but without being able to choose to do right versus doing wrong, none of us would really be alive. Choosing good means nothing if we can’t choose to do bad. I don’t want to be a robot just watching my life from inside my brain and unable to choose what I do, and neither would you. That would be just a terrible way to live. And because God doesn’t control the people who act in evil ways, we can trust Him not to trick us, use us and control us. If you choose to do something wonderful, it is because you made the right choice, and you chose to be like Jesus. When we choose to do bad things when we can do something good instead, we are being more like Satan. That’s why Jesus told His disciples to follow Him—so that they could show the world what He is like once He was gone. And we all have that choice, because God loves us too much to force us to do anything. We can choose to be like Jesus and even when it is hard, or we can choose to be like Satan. Who we act more like shows the world what we really believe and who our King is.
The people in the cities of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Bela were very evil. And the people in those cities acted just like their kings—which is why God told His people to make sure that their leaders were good people. When visitors came, the citizens of those five cities ganged up and did horrible things to hurt them and shame them. So, it’s no surprise that they went back on their agreement with the Big Cheese. They were evil, violent, liars and very dangerous. And it is very shocking, with what we know about them now and will find out in chapters 18 and 19, that Lot felt that it was okay to live there and raise his family in a place like that. He was probably able to do good business selling animals and milk and cheese to them and so maybe they treated him well because they needed him. But Lot wasn’t blind. He knew what was going on and he stayed there anyway.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to think about what happens when we hang around people who may be nice to us but are terrible to others. How do you think God feels about that?