July 26

I did read yesterday's scripture but after my market I was so tired, I just had nothing in me to write a post. Plus, I was coming down with a cold (is there anything worse than having a cold in the summer???) and just wanted to take benadryl and go to bed. Which I did.

OT -- 2 Chronicles 17:1-18:34
I'll admit it. I have read ahead. The story of Jehoshaphat covers the next 3 days and I just had to know the end of the story. It is fascinating.
What is also fascinating to me is that colloquialism "Jumping Jehoshaphat". I could find no reference to Jehoshaphat jumping anywhere.
Here is what Wikipedia had to say:
"The king's name in the oath jumping Jehosaphat was likely popularized by the name's utility as a euphemism for Jesus and Jehovah. The phrase is first recorded in the 1866 novel The Headless Horseman by Thomas Mayne Reid.[5] The longer version "By the shaking, jumping ghost of Jehosaphat" is seen in the 1865 novel Paul Peabody by Percy Bolingbroke St. John.[6]

Another theory is that the reference is to Joel 3:11-12, where the prophet Joel says, speaking of the judgment of the dead:

Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves together round about: thither cause thy mighty ones to come down, O LORD. Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about.

Jehosaphat is one of the "mighty ones" who has come down to judge the wakened heathens (or he is one of the wakened himself, thus, a "ghost".)

Jehosaphat is used repeatedly as an expletive by Elijah Baley in Isaac Asimov's Robot series."

Yahoo answers has a Midrash story. Click here to read that one.

None of these satisfies. I will have to keep digging on this one.

But in our scripture today, Jehoshaphat becomes king, probably while his dad Asa was still alive but suffering greatly from the foot disease that would eventually take his life. By the way, it has been postulated that Asa had extreme psoriasis that caused cracking and breaking of the skin and gnarling of the feet and hands to the point of immobility. When you have open, running sores in society that has open sewage, it is a recipe for disaster.
But back to Jehoshaphat. He follows the way of the Lord and builds a great army. He fortifies the remaining cities in Judah, puts garrisions in them and appoints judges and priests to help maintain the citizenry. Along the way, he becomes fabulously wealthy and somehow ends up marrying Ahab's daughter. You remember Ahab. Jezebel, the wife and Elijah, the condemning prophet. Ahab. Not a good king in the eyes of the Lord. But somehow, Jehoshaphat stays clean even by association and wins his battles and returns home. Ahab does not.
Elijah certainly must have known the proverb for today:
"A king's wrath is like the roar of a lion; he who angers him forfeits his life."
Elijah spent many years running from Ahab who was felled by a casual arrow.