THE KING WHO WOULD NOT DIE
THE
KING WHO WOULD NOT DIE
By
Robert Allen
CHAPTER
FIVE
With a quick gasp Jehoshabeath
pushed Zibiah and the baby back toward the room, placing herself between them
and the guards. The young queen clutched
Joash close, ready to collapse in despair from seeing their only means of
escape cut off.
“Please! Please don’t kill my baby.”
Silently the two guards advanced
into the room straight toward the young mother and her infant son. Zibiah held the baby even closer as
Jehoshabeath backed toward them, protecting them with her own body. If they were going to kill the child their
swords would have to go through her first.
Still the men came, swords drawn and
faces as hard as stone. They advanced
until they were standing right over the women.
“Give us the child,” thundered one
of the guards. But Zibiah’s arms clung
to Joash like vines to a grape arbor.
“No!
Please spare the child. By all
that is holy, do not kill my little one.”
“The child,” he shouted again. Then without waiting for a reply he shoved
Jehoshabeath aside and grabbed the boy from his mother’s arms. As one guard held the boy the other lifted
his sword high above his head and brought it down in one great sweeping blow,
plunging it into the very depths of the infant’s empty cradle.
“Quickly,” whispered the guard,
“before she gets here to check on us. He
handed the little boy to Jehoshabeath.
“You take the baby and go.
Anywhere! Get away from the
palace. Tell no one where you take
him. Let someone else raise him and
never tell him he is a king’s son for it will cost him his life.”
“You,” the other guard said to
Zibiah. “Onto the bed. Weep and howl and cry like a woman possessed
of the devil. Only your crying will convince
Athaliah your son is really dead. If she
looks under those cradle blankets it will cost all of us our lives.”
“But why? Jehoshabeath started out the door only to
stop and ask again. “Why did you spare
him?”
“There are some even among the
king’s guards who still honor Jehovah.
Quickly now! Run! Athaliah comes even now to check every room
in the palace.
Jehoshabeath did not wait to be told
twice. Quick as a coney on the rocks she
disappeared out the door and left the palace with little Joash. Behind she could hear the wailing of Zibiah
as it rose on wings of sorrow to join the cries of the other young mothers
whose sons were already dead.
She disappeared around the corner
just as noises came from down the hall.
Between screams Zibiah opened her eyes to see wicked Queen Athaliah
throw open the door to her room.
“Aha!” she shrieked. “So, the little one weeps for her son! Serves her right! Thinking she can waltz into this palace and
call herself a queen. There’s only one
queen around here. Me! Me!
Me! Jehoram is dead. Ahaziah is dead. The brothers are dead. The cousins are dead. The sons are dead. No one left but me. No one to steal my throne. No one to take my kingdom. I’m the queen. I’m the king!
I’m everything.”
When the queen stepped through the door
the guards immediately dropped to one knee, bowing their heads low. They watched out of the corner of their eyes,
scarcely daring to breathe as the wicked queen stalked toward the cradle. The sword still extended from the top of the
blankets where it had been stuck by the soldier. From a distance the crumpled blankets appears
to cover an infant. But if she came too
close, if she pulled the covers back, they would all be dead.
Slowly the queen advanced across the
room until she stood directly over the infant bed. She stared down at the sword, her eyes
gleaming with hatred. The guards caught
their breath and Zibiah wailed even more loudly trying desperately to distract
her. Suddenly Athaliah threw back her
head and laughed, that same horrible, screaming laughter Zibiah heard the day
of Ahaziah’s death.
“Take him away,” she screamed at the
guards. Throw him into the common grave
with the other sons. No one will live to
take my throne. I am the queen! I am the queen!”
Again Athaliah howled with terrible
laughter and then turned and strode from the room, confident that the last
potential heir to the throne lay dead in his cradle.
When Jehoshabeath left the palace
she took off running up the street toward the temple. And then she stopped. Running would attract far more attention from
the palace guards than a slow walk, especially cradling a child in her
arms. She forced herself to walk
steadily, just like any other mother going up to the temple. All the time she worried that footsteps
behind her would signal the discovery of their secret by Athaliah.
With tremendous relief she stepped
through the large triple doors in the lower wall of the temple and entered the
courtyard. No one would harm the infant
here. This was the place of safety, the house
of the Lord.
Her husband Jehoiada waited
anxiously at the foot of the stairs leading into the holy temple itself. “Jehoshabeath, you have returned safely. Praise be to Jehovah. We have not ceased to offer prayers to Him on
your behalf since you left.”
“Jehovah has heard your prayer, my
husband, and granted your every request.
Joash has been brought to the safety of the temple. Athaliah proclaims herself as Queen and Baal
reigns in the palace in the person of a woman.
But a better day is coming.
Praise be to Jehovah.”
From that day on Jehoshabeath and
Jehoida treated Joash as one of their own children. Greatly fearing Athaliah and knowing she had
no way to protect her son from the queen, Zibiah left the palace and returned
to her parent’s home in Beer-sheba. She
longed to see her little boy again but realized that would not be safe for
either of them. She had to be content
with the fact that he had been hidden safely away and she would never see him
again.
As Joash grew he seemed to have no
memory at all of ever living in any other place except the temple. As far as he knew Jehoshabeath and Jehoida
were his parents and Zechariah their son was his brother.
The temple provided a wonderful,
exciting place for two little boys to live.
While three and four years of age they spent hours playing hide and seek
among the sheep and lambs waiting to be sacrificed. They would climb over and under them, between
their legs and in and out of the stalls.
They tried to ride them and when they were tired they would curl up and
bury their heads in warm, furry wool for naptime.
When the boys turned five play time
grew less since they were expected to attend school. A boy of five began reading the Scritpures so
they needed to learn how to read. Their
first teacher was Jehoshabeath and she made it fun to learn. They never even realized they had started
school until many days had passed.
Jehoshabeath simply came outside with a scroll one day, a scroll like
the priests always carried, and said, “Let’s play a game.”
“Yippee!” shouted Joash and
Zechariah. “Let’s play a game.”
“Here’s how it goes,” said
Jehoshabeath, pulling out a quill pen.
“I’ll draw a picture on this piece of parchment.” She quickly dipped the pen into an inkhorn
carried on her shoulder and showed it to the boys.
“What is it?” asked Zechariah.
“That is an aleph. Can you say that?”
“A—lep,” said Zechariah.
“Very good. How about you, Joash. Can you say Aleph?”
Joash nodded. “Alef,”
he said and then because of the smile on the face of his mother he said
it again and again, “Aleph. Aleph. Aleph.
Aleph. Aleph.”
Soon Zechariah joined in the new
game as well. “Alep! Alef!
Aleph! Aleph! Aleph!”
“Wonderful,” beamed
Jehoshabeath. “Very good! And now to the game. I want you to see how many alephs you can
find on this scroll.” Unrolling a scroll
of the first part of Genesis she spread it out in front of the boys.
The boys raced to see who could get
done first. “Seventeen,” Zechariah
shouted. “Seventeen alephs.”
“You missed one,” shouted Joash. “I
counted eighteen.”
“Eighteen it is,” laughed their
mother. “How quickly you boys did
that. But do you know what an aleph is?”
“One of those good looking fruits we
pick off the trees across the valley?” Zechariah asked after thinking hard.
“No,” said his mother. “Those are olives.”
“Is it a bird,” asked Joash, “or
maybe a fish like we catch in the brook Kidron?”
‘No, an aleph is a letter. There are many letters and each one has a
sound. When you learn all of them you will
be able to read this scroll which is a message from Jehovah God Himself. Won’t that be fun? That’s why we learn to read, you know. So we can read the things God has told us,
the things He wants us to know.”
“Can we read the scroll today,
Mother?” the boys pleaded.
Jehoshabeath just laughed and jumped
to her feet. She knew it would take many
days before the boys could read, but she also knew they would learn quickly if
they had a real desire to read the Word of God.
“Let’s go all over the temple mount
and find things that begin with aleph,” she called to the boys. So they did.
They raced from the Gate Beautiful to the Eastern Gate, up to the Sheep
Gate and all the way around the holy place to the Court of the Gentiles. All the time they called out words that began
with the letter aleph.
“There’s an ‘adam’,” yelled
Zechariah pointing at one of the priests carrying a golden censer full of
perfume. He yelled so loudly and so
quickly that the priest almost dropped the clay pottery even though he was used
to the boys always being underfoot.
“That’s right,” Jehoshabeath smiled,
coming up behind them. “That is an
‘adam.’ The word ‘man’ begins with a
aleph in our Hebrew language. Good job,
Zechariah.”
“There’s an ‘aor’,” said Joash, not
about to be outdone. He pointed to the
burning lamp the priest carried in his other hand.
“Yes, a ‘light,’ an ‘aor.’ That too begins with an aleph.”
Soon they had spotted an ‘ayil’ or
‘ram,’ and ‘ayiah’ or ‘husband,’ and looking over the wall Joash pretended to
see an ‘ari’ or ‘lion’”.
For the next several weeks the boys
played the game of letters. They learned
“beth” which sounded like a “b” and then “gimel” and “daleth.” Before long they could run through the entire
Hebrew alphabet without even taking a breath.
And then, one day, she told them that on the morrow they would go in to
read for Jehoida, the priest.
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