Jeroboam

(Context: 1 Kings 12:20)

My friends, priests, fellow leaders, people of Shechem, and citizens of the united tribes of the renewed nation of Israel: With both humility and pride, I joyfully accept my coronation as king. With humility, since you have chosen me, a workman from the lowest of families, for this highest of honors; with pride, since with this act the people have come together to throw off the yoke of tyranny and corruption, to return this nation to the role that the prophets of its god have foretold.

Jehu

(Context: 2 Kings 9:3)

I act. I don’t think. I don’t feel. I act. I move forward by God’s command, true as my arrows, powerful as my chariot, clear as a reflection from my shining sword.

I never asked to be king. But when the Lord gives you a command, you follow it or you die.

Benjamin

(Context: Genesis 35:18)

Picture my face. Age it by a few years (though fewer than before, since I am now almost as old as she was when she died), make it thinner, with sharper eyes and straighter, paler hair, and make it, of course, female. That was the face of my mother, or so I am told.

Picture me again, a few years younger than I am now, the face now rounder, the eyes perpetually lost in waking dreams. That was my brother, at the time that he died. Or so, again, I am told. I was so young when he died, barely able to speak sentences on my own, that my memories of him are as vague as what memories I seem to have of my mother. And I know that my memories of her are false, since she died (as I am so often told) when I was born.

Asa

(Context: 2 Chronicles 15:16)

And so my mother is gone. Still alive, still well, but gone from the palace, from her place of authority. She has slipped away under the silent gaze of the moon to a place where she will be hidden, safe from capture, safe from harm, safe from me.