I drop my kids off at school, stop for milk, sit in traffic. Then I check the news and remember that the tiny country I live in just struck targets deep inside Iran, fields one of the most sophisticated militaries on earth, and is being watched by every major power on the planet. This is a nation of nine million people. You can drive across it in two hours. It has existed in its modern form for 78 years, and as a people, for thousands. The strength of Israel defies every conventional explanation.
Open the Book of Kings. It was written for a time like this.
This month, Israel365 is going through all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, one book a day, every day in June. For the Book of Kings, Rabbi Elie Mischel, Director of Education at Israel365, sat down with Shira Schechter, Editor of The Israel Bible, for one of the most compelling conversations in the entire series. Because this is not ancient history. This is a guidebook. And if you live in 2026, you need to read it.
Here is the conversation’s central argument: Israel is now in its third shot.
The first was Solomon. By any measure, Solomon’s kingdom was the greatest success story in the Hebrew Bible. The wisest man who ever lived, builder of the First Temple, a king whose reputation drew the Queen of Sheba to Jerusalem from the ends of the earth. Under Solomon, Israel became a genuine world power, a spiritual center, a nation the surrounding world looked to with awe. And then it collapsed. Not because of a military defeat. Not because of a natural disaster. Because Solomon got overconfident.
Solomon looked at that guardrail and decided he understood it well enough to manage it. He would engage the most powerful cultures of the ancient world and influence them without being influenced in return. It did not work out that way. The boundaries between Israel’s identity and the surrounding cultures softened, gradually and then catastrophically. Within a generation the kingdom split in two and never recovered.
The second shot came with the Hasmoneans, the heroes of Hanukkah, who fought their way back to Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel. And then within two generations their grandchildren were no longer connected to God in the same way. The Romans walked in. Two thousand years of exile followed.
And now here we are. The third shot. Israel is 78 years old. The IDF is among the most powerful militaries on earth. The young generation in Israel is more connected to God than the generation before it. Birth rates are rising when the rest of the Western world is in demographic decline. Rabbi Elie and Shira say it plainly in their conversation: we are living in a moment that rhymes with Solomon’s. Which means the Book of Kings is not a history lesson. It is a warning.
The question Solomon could not answer is the same question Israel faces today. How do you influence the world without the world influencing you? How do you build a nation that is both spiritually rooted and globally engaged without losing the thing that made you worth listening to in the first place? Rabbi Elie’s answer is honest and uncomfortable. Solomon’s failure was not that he was evil. It was that he was overconfident in his own wisdom. He stopped approaching the Torah as something that shaped him and started treating it as a system he understood well enough to bend. The moment wisdom stops producing humility, it starts producing blindness. The guardrails exist for a reason. They were there in Solomon’s time. They are there now.
The first step, as Rabbi Elie and Shira conclude, is to go back to the book.
Not as literature. Not as history. As a guidebook for the exact moment we are living in. Here is how to get started. Subscribe to The Israel Bible YouTube channel, where every day this June a new video drops — Orthodox rabbis and leading Christian voices going through all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible together, free, all month long.
Join us on June 14th for Open the Book: A National Conversation on Biblical Literacy, a free live event bringing Jewish and Christian leaders together around what we lose when we stop reading this book.
And if you are ready to go deeper still, explore Bible Plus — hundreds of hours of Torah teaching from Israel-based scholars, this June at the lowest price of the year. For less than $1 a month, check out Bible Plus, today!
Solomon had every gift a leader could ask for and squandered it the moment he stopped listening to the book that made him great. The third chance does not come with a guarantee. But it comes with a warning, a roadmap, and the same God who gave Solomon his wisdom is still here, still faithful, and still waiting to see what we do with ours.
Please enjoy today’s conversation on the book of Kings, below. You can catch up on the entire series so far on the Israel Bible Youtube Channel
