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ToES Diary August 2017
By Admin | ToESWriting
Once again, I was not happy with Chapter 1 of Volume 3, because it just didn’t read well. I have been back working on it for the last few days. There are two main difficulties:
1. Presenting Jeremiah as being in a dangerous situation during the life of a good king. When growing up, I always thought that having a good king meant that everyone would do good. Over the years, I have seen more clearly that a king – just as is true with governments all over the world now – has a very limited effect and even more limited control over the nation. Laws can control the people’s action, but nothing can control their thoughts and often, over time, the thoughts will find their way into action or rebellion.
2. Life is full of action. This chapter wasn’t. By the 20th year of Josiah, Jehoiakim was about 14 years old, which is quite old enough to be a troublemaker given the sort of king he turned out to be. Add an example of his selfish trouble-making.
Also reordered some other parts of the chapter and simplified it a little. Seems to be getting a bit better. Maybe I can finish the rewriting tomorrow if the Lord is willing…
Finished another draft of Chapter 1. Now moving on to updating of Chapter 2 also.
Various changes in Chapter 2 flow from the changes in Chapter 1. A lot of work, but I think the story works better now while still being just as reasonable in fitting with the facts we know from Jeremiah, Kings and Chronicles.
God thought Jehoiakim worthy of the burial of a donkey (Jeremiah 22:19), so it seems likely that it would have been showing through when he was 14. In Chapters 1 and 2 it now will. Still more work to do on Chapter 2.
One last review/edit of Chapter 1 before sending it to Cathy for her to review. Much more happy with it now than I was.
Worked on Chapter 2 to improve it also. Re-ordered, re-wrote, re-worked. Still not as good as I want.
Reviewed important dates for Volume 3 since advertising of the eBook serial needs to start soon. Cathy Morgan has agreed to do all the proof reading and detailed review. Chris Morgan has agreed to read the book for the audio serial. What a blessing to have family members who can and will help so much!
Relevant dates are:
11 Aug 2017: Advertise eBook serial (with half chapter sample and full chapter provided for those who sign up)
4 September: eBook serial starts with Chs 1&2
28 September: Advertise audio serial (with half chapter sample)
23 October: audio serial begins with Ch 1
11 December eBook serial ends
5 February 2018 audio serial ends
My aim is to complete Volume 3 by 31 October since I will be very busy after that – if the Lord is willing and I am alive and Jesus has not already returned. To be honest, it would be much better if he had returned! Sometimes, a rest from our labour sounds rather attractive.
Some work on “An afternoon at the well” and setting up of “Fiction Favours the Facts” also. Cover still needs finalising before it can be printed and some typesetting that is not worth doing until all the text to be included is properly finalised.
Who were Josiah’s sons? There are a few complications in answering this question.
1 Chronicles 3:15 gives us a list: “The sons of Josiah: Johanan the firstborn, the second Jehoiakim, the third Zedekiah, the fourth Shallum.”
How does this fit in with the sons we know from elsewhere?
Eliakim/Jehoiakim is the oldest we know of. 25 years old when he became king (2 Kings 23:31; 2 Chronicles 36:2) after Pharaoh Neco took Jehoahaz away, 3 months after Josiah died. Pharaoh changed Eliakim’s name to Jehoiakim. His mother’s name was Zebidah the daughter of Pedaiah of Rumah (2 Kings 23:36). When Josiah died, the people made Shallum/Jehoahaz king rather than Eliakim/Jehoiakim. We are not told why, but Shallum/Jehoahaz was the popular choice.
Mattaniah/Zedekiah was the last king of Judah and he was 21 years old (2 Chronicles 36:11) when he became king after Jehoiachin/Jeconiah/Coniah was taken away by Nebuchadnezzar. He is described as the uncle of Jehoiachin in 2 Kings 24:17 and the brother of Jehoiachin in 2 Chronicles 36:10. Jeremiah 1:3, 27:1 (Hebrew) and 37:1 state that Zedekiah was the son of Josiah. Nebuchadnezzar changed his name from Mattaniah to Zedekiah. His mother’s name was Hamutal the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah (2 Kings 24:18).
Overall, there is little overlap, so how should we understand these details?
Let’s think about David’s sons which are listed in the same chapter and various other places in Samuel and Chronicles. First we compare the lists of the sons born in Hebron:
These two lists include all of the same names with the exception of Chileab/Daniel.
Now we consider the list of sons born in Jerusalem:
The highlighting in the two lists highlights the similarities (green and blue) and differences (orange). Shammua/Shimea and Elishua/Elishama are probably just two people with the sort of name variation that is common in the Old Testament. Eliphelet and Nogah, however, are two names that only occur in one of the lists.
If we allow the same sorts of variations in the lists of Josiah’s sons, we can think about what the differences may be.
If we compare the list in 1 Chronicles 3:15 with the original names as they are listed in Kings there are no names matching.
If we use the names under which the kings reigned we can match Jehoiakim and Zedekiah and the order is correct.
If we use Jeremiah’s names, we can match Jehoiakim, Zedekiah and Shallum, but the order is not correct.
Conclusions?
1 Chronicles 3:15 may be the list of children born to Josiah’s first wife only. Some sons may have died and their names were reused for later sons. Names may have been duplicated and then “nicknames” used to distinguish between them.
We can’t tell for sure, but I feel there is enough variation and doubt in David’s lists that we can reasonably suggest the same sorts of uncertainties in the lists of Josiah’s sons.
In the Terror on Every Side! series, I plan to work on the indications of order found in the narrative text and the names used in Jeremiah.
Jeremiah meets Zephaniah and they discuss their experiences with the word of God. He also says “declares the Lord” 5 times (1:2, 3, 10; 2:9 and 3:8) and “says the Lord” once (3:20).
Zephaniah mentions only that it was “the word of the Lord that came to him” (Zephaniah 1:1).
Jeremiah mentions God’s words being a fire in his bones if he tries to hold the word of God in (Jeremiah 20:9), but Zephaniah says nothing about himself or his experiences. He is an almost completely uninvolved reporter.
How did God communicate with Zephaniah? We don’t know at all. There are a few different ways mentioned in the Bible as methods of communication from God: angels; cherubim; a disembodied voice (loud or soft); visions and dreams; meeting (with Moses).
What method did God use with Zephaniah?
Work on publishing “Fiction Favours the Facts”. Both of the previous books published by Bible Tales have been privately published through Ingram Spark, and this one will be too – if the Lord is willing. I’m sorry, but some of the following detail is quite technical, so skip it if you want.
The blurb for the back cover has been written and re-written several times and then adjusted to physically fit better on the cover.
In the last week, I have been working on the cover with some help from my sons Chris and Philip. Philip’s hand-drawn picture of a heron was scanned, but needed some cleaning up in the Gimp to print well. That work is fairly close to finished.
Three distinct versions of the front cover are needed – all produced using Inkscape:
1. An Amazon-standard size which I use on the website and other marketing/advertising.
2. A wider version (in JPG format) for the eBook when publishing through Ingram-Spark.
3. A full book cover version including the spine and back cover with allowances for 6mm of bleed around the outside also.
Added and/or updated the details of the book as recorded with Thorpe-Bowker against the ISBN for the paperback (target audience, subject, format/size, biography, short summary, etc.). Cloned the record and assigned an ISBN for the eBook and updated the details for it.
Adjusted and/or added the acknowledgements of the pictures included in the text. Had to change some of the pictures because of copyright restrictions once the book is being sold.
Still need to finish final checking of text and layout in two stages: first in the editor I use (Scrivener) and then by exporting it to Microsoft Word. From then on, all changes will be made in Word (probably 2011 or newer) to produce the final document used for publishing. Normally I will find some problems that require changes to be made in both places. After making various adjustments, font changes, formatting, pagination, resizing, table of contents and anything else that is needed, the book interior is exported to PDF using Adobe Distiller (as a print driver), reduced to greyscale (with no other colours) and all fonts embedded using Adobe Acrobat. This is the version that is submitted to the publisher.
The final size of the paperback cover depends on the number of pages, so it is easiest to finalise the PDF of the internals of the book before finalising the cover. Once we know the final number of pages, the thickness of the spine can be calculated and a PDF template created on the Ingram Spark website and downloaded.
After that, a PNG picture of the front/spine/back can be generated from Inkscape and added to the template using Adobe InDesign. This has to be converted to the CMYK colour space for printing and saved as a PDF file.
The paperback requires two files to be uploaded to the Ingram Spark website:
1. The internals in a PDF file with embedded fonts and no colour.
2. The cover in a PDF file with colours in the CMYK colour space.
Creating the eBook requires conversion from Word format to EPUB using Calibre. Metadata for the book must be entered also. Various tweaks are normally required and I go through a few versions before getting things how I want them.
Publishing the eBook through Ingram Spark requires uploading of two files:
1. Contents in EPUB format
2. A “cover” picture (in JPG format) with a slightly different aspect ratio from the paperback cover.
After all of that, I can place an order for a copy of the book to make sure that there is nothing terribly wrong. Printing one copy seems to take a couple of days longer than printing more, which is amusing. Once the proof copy arrives, I can find and fix any problems, uploading new versions of the files as necessary, and then place an order for more printed books.
For distributing the eBook from the BibleTales website, I need to also produce two more eBook formats:
1. A PDF from the book internal PDF and the cover picture using Adobe Acrobat.
2. An eBook in MOBI format using the conversion tools available through Amazon.
After this, they need to be uploaded to the BibleTales.online website and made available for purchase and download.
And then there is the audio…!
There is no rest for the wicked.
All in all, it is a lot of work, but not as much as the writing is in the first place. Working out how to do all these things the first time for “Early Days” was incredibly difficult. Doing it the second time for “As Good As It Gets” was still hard work which had to be done very carefully, but it was much easier than the first time.
Worked on a few writing projects today, but one of the things I needed to do for “Fiction Favours the Facts” and the “Terror on Every Side!” books was to fix the location of footnote numbers in the text, particularly for scriptural quotes. I have not been happy with what I have been doing since working on Volume 1 and wanted to make it more consistent. So I checked the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS). I’m not sure why I hadn’t done this before since I have checked many other style questions there. Anyway, I checked and according to the CMOS, such footnotes numbers should be outside any punctuation (except the dash) which is just what I had finally concluded that I should be doing, so that was good. So I made the necessary changes for “Fiction Favours the Facts” and “Terror on Every Side!” Volumes 1 and 3. God willing, I will work through Volume 2 sometime. Not a major change, but one that makes me, as a pedant, happier!
More writing about Zephaniah, including those reminders to be humble (Zephaniah 2:3; 3:11-12).
Rearranging the contents of chapters 2 and 3 yet again.
Looking at the messages to other nations in Jeremiah 46-49 which seem to be from the time at the end of Josiah’s reign or possibly the first few years of Jehoiakim’s reign.
One fact that stands out about these prophecies is that some prophesy recovery and some don’t:
Writing about the first plot to kill Jeremiah which God seems to have revealed to him (Jeremiah 11:18-23). It appears that if he hadn’t been warned, Jeremiah would have walked straight into a trap set by the men of Anathoth.
Would his brothers have had any involvement in this? In this early stage, I will assume no, although it seems that by the middle/end of Zedekiah’s reign, they too were dealing treacherously with Jeremiah (Jeremiah 12:6). This dating of chapter 12 is mostly based on the statement “I have forsaken my house.” Ezekiel describes a vision of this forsaking in Ezekiel 8-11 in the 6th month of the 6th year of Zedekiah.
Zephaniah was the fourth generation from Hezekiah and it is unusual to give 3 generations of ancestors. However, there is another example in Jeremiah 36:14: Jehudi the son of Nethaniah, son of Shelemiah, son of Cushi. Funnily enough, Cushi is the name of Zephaniah’s father (Zephaniah 1:1) and these are the only two occurrences of the name in the Bible.
The traitor Ishmael who killed Gedaliah was the son of Nethaniah so maybe this listing is to distinguish between this Nethaniah and a different one. Obviously Cushi is an uncommon name, so ending a list of ancestors with him is effective for unique identification.
However, this is the only Jehudi in the Bible, so maybe it was the fame of Cushi that is being appealed to here. If so, we don’t know what caused this fame.
Almost completed the full cover for the paperback version of “Fiction Favours the Facts”. All that is left to do is placing the barcode and generating a PDF with colours in CMYK format for printing. Made two different size of eBook covers also.
The age of ordination for priests is never made completely clear in the Bible.
Numbers 8:23 speaks of the Levites at age 25 and it seems to be suggesting that they started learning their work at that age so that they could begin work by themselves at age 30 (see Numbers 4:2-3). This probably applied to priests also.
David appears to have lowered this age to twenty years old (1 Chronicles 23:25-32) in acknowledgement of the fact that the tabernacle no longer needed to be carried around. From that age, they began to learn and also to help with minor tasks around the temple. By the age of 30, Levites and priests were considered ready to take on their inherited work in its entirety.
How did Pharaoh Neco and Josiah meet in battle? Neco was in a hurry to head north to support the Assyrians against Babylon, so it seems unlikely that there was any attempt to negotiate passage through the land. It seems more likely that he would have simply turned up on the border with his army and marched north along the coast.
During the few days that it would have taken them to march to the north of Israel, Josiah decided to fight despite the advice of Neco that he was doing God’s work.
He had very little time to make the decision and it was probably a bad decision.
Historically, Neco’s drive northward probably delayed the invasion of Israel by about 2-4 years.
Finished the work of uploading the files for publishing “Fiction Favours the Facts”. Now they are prepared by Ingram Spark for printing. God willing, they send me an electronic copy of the proof in 1-2 work days. Since this work appears to be done in the USA, this probably means Tuesday their time (Wednesday our time) but it might be Tuesday our time. We shall see.
Chris has finished a final rechecking of Terror on Every Side Volume 1 as an audiobook. Now I need to upload it to Author’s Republic for sale on various sites (iTunes, Audible, etc).
Volume 3 has reached a very sad stage where I must write about the death of Josiah. It appears that in this situation, Josiah went against God’s commands, but how was he meant to know that Pharaoh Neco was telling the truth that he was following God’s commands? God had promised he would die in peace and this seems to have been the first fighting in his entire reign. Maybe he should have known from God’s promise that he would die in peace that he should not seek war.
Presumably both Jeremiah and Zephaniah would have been available to ask, and possibly Huldah as well, yet he didn’t ask any of them. A pity. We have no specific comment from God as to whether his action was good or bad, but since we know that Neco was doing God’s work and sent a message to mind his own business (2 Chronicles 35:20-24) the most likely conclusion is that he was not right on this occasion. Again, what a pity.
Chapter 1 of Terror on Every Side! Volume 3 was sent out to pre-existing subscribers at 9am. It’s good to start the distribution again.
Did Jeremiah go with Josiah when he went to fight Pharaoh Neco? Elisha seems to have been with the army when Jehoshaphat king of Judah, Jehoram king of Israel, and the king of Edom attacked Moab (2 Kings 3), and a prophet was around immediately after a battle when Ahab let Ben Hadad go (1 Kings 20:35-42), so maybe prophets joined the army in the same way as anyone else did if they were asked to do so.
We are not told anything about this, but I suspect that Jeremiah would have advised him not to go if he had been asked. I can’t prove this at all, but I plan to assume it anyway. Furthermore, to make sure that he doesn’t go, I will put him outside Israel at the time!
Uploaded and finalised Terror on Every Side! Volume 1 audio. Now I need to wait for it to be approved.
Recorded 3 micro-tales ready for the audiobook release of “Fiction Favours the Facts”.
One particular point is worth noting from 2 Kings 23:29. In the KJV and quite a few other older translations, we read that Neco “went up against the king of Assyria”. History reports that Neco and the former king of Assyria were allies. Most new translations use something like “went up to the king of Assyria”. In looking at the interlinear text (eg. http://biblehub.com/text/2_
Note that if “against” is correct, this would still be easily understood anyway, because by then Nebuchadnezzar was king of Assyria, having taken over all the major cities of Assyria, including Haran, the last haven to which the former king of Assyria had fled. With Neco’s help, the former king managed to retake Haran in 609BC, but that was only a brief reprieve with the city being retaken the following year (in 608BC). From then on, it was all downhill for the remnants of the former Assyrian empire, finishing at the battle of Carchemish in 605BC. Egypt lost most of their power at the same time.
2 Kings 23:29-30 records that Neco killed Josiah as soon as he saw him. Taken by itself, this could fit with an arranged meeting at which Neco treacherously killed Josiah.
However, 2 Chronicles 35:20-24 reads much more like a pitched battle with the archers fatally wounding Josiah when they find him. The extra detail in this record is that Josiah disguised himself before entering the battle.
Overall, a reasonable picture seems to be that Josiah disguised himself, battle was joined and the Egyptians were specifically looking for Josiah as the leader of the army. Somehow, the Egyptians managed to identify Josiah at which time he was specifically attacked and fatally wounded by the archers.
I found it unexpectedly difficult to write about the death of Josiah. Reading about his death has always made me sad, but writing about it was even harder.
Received and approved the proof of “Fiction Favours the Facts” for printing the paperback.
Recorded the reading of four more micro-tales. Only four to go.
Checked tax status with Ingram Spark and then placed order for printed copies of “Fiction Favours the Facts”.
Sent out Bible Tales Newsletter on “Jeremiah in Greek”.
Recorded reading of 4 more micro-tales. I had thought that should be all, but I seem to have missed out on one, so one to go.
Writing about the response to the death of Josiah. I wonder how sad his sons were?