Judges through Esther

Light on History

     

As one can anticipate from the titles of the particular lectures, this collection focuses on individuals in the history of the nation of Israel from entry into the Promised Land to the fall of the Southern Kingdom (e.g., Samuel, David, Elijah, etc.). I wish that Dr. Belcher had taken the time to address the course of history for the divided kingdoms as nations and not focus so intently on just a few of its leaders. This leaves the listener without essential background information necessary to interpret these books and the prophets. In fairness to Dr. Belcher, he announced in Lecture 1 (which was devoted primarily to how he would conduct and grade the class and is not useful for those of us who did not take the course for credit) that he would deliberately defer issues of history to the assigned reading. I wish that this collection included a list of what that assigned reading was.

Dr. Belcher speaks in a style that is very easy to follow. He is objective and fair to all pespectives although his own perspective is very clear. Unfortunately, the production quality of the recording is bad, peppered with background noises and with volume cutting in and out.