Weighing in on a dispute between two modern interpreters of Chronicles, Peter Leithart argues that the book deliberately highlights similarities between Saul, the first Israelite king, and the wicked Ahaz, who ruled the kingdom of Judah many generations later. Each was succeeded by an archetypal good king: respectively, David and Hezekiah. And this isn’t the only internal parallel regarding Saul:

[Rudolph] Mosis . . . finds a contrast between Saul and Josiah with regard to the “word of the Lord.” Saul’s failure to guard the Lord’s word is one dimension of his transgression [“against the word of the Lord” which, according to Chronicles, brought about his demise], and King Josiah’s righteousness is evident in his insistence on following “the word of the Lord” (2 Chronicles 34:21). These are the only two places where the phrase “the word of the Lord” appears in Chronicles [in conjunction with the Hebrew word for “keep” or “guard.”] Josiah is the last to [follow God’s word], and Judah goes into exile because she rejects and mocks the prophets, the Lord’s messengers. The collapse of Saul’s house because of his transgression . . . foreshadows the complete collapse of exile.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].