The Daily Audio Bible Reading for Friday April 28, 2017 (NIV)

¹⁸ Then Gideon approached the two kings, Zebah and Zalmunna.

²⁰ Gideon directed his firstborn son, Jether, to kill them, but Jether was afraid and couldn’t draw his sword since he was only a boy.

So Gideon executed them, and he took the crescents that had adorned the necks of their camels.

²² Then the people of Israel spoke to Gideon.

(The enemy they defeated had gold earrings, as was the fashion of the Ishmaelites.)

So they spread a cloak, and each of the men threw in an earring he had taken as spoils of battle; ²⁶ and the weight of the gold earrings was over 42 pounds of gold, which does not include the crescents, the ornaments, and the purple garments they had taken from the kings of Midian, and the collars they had taken from the necks of their camels.

²⁷ Gideon made it into a priestly vest, sometimes used in seeking oracles, and put it in his hometown of Ophrah. But the people of Israel made an idol of it, and it became a snare to Gideon and to his family as well.

²⁸ This is how Midian was subdued by the people of Israel, and Midian never lifted up its head to trouble them again. During the time of Gideon, the land had 40 years of peace. ²⁹ Jerubbaal (Gideon), son of Joash, went to live in his own home. ³⁰ Gideon had 70 sons who were his own children, for he had many wives and concubines, ³¹ and his concubine in Shechem bore him a son whom he named Abimelech.

³² Gideon, son of Joash, died after many years of life and was buried with his father Joash at Ophrah in the land of the Abiezrites.

³³ As soon as Gideon died, the Israelites turned away from the Lord, and they began to prostitute themselves again to the Baals. They made Baal-berith their chief god. ³⁴ The people of Israel did not remember the Eternal One, their True God, who had rescued them from the oppression of enemies on every side, ³⁵ and they were not kind to the house of Jerubbaal (Gideon) despite all the good he had done for Israel.

9 Abimelech, the son of Jerubbaal, went to Shechem to the clan of his mother.

³ So Abimelech’s mother’s kinsmen went out and repeated these words to the leaders of Shechem, and they were favorably disposed toward him because they said, “He is our brother.” ⁴ They gave Abimelech 70 pieces of silver out of the treasury of Baal-berith, and he used the money to hire some reckless and worthless men who followed him and did his dirty work.

⁵ He went to his father’s house in Ophrah and killed all 70 of his half-brothers, the sons of Jerubbaal, on one stone. (Only Jotham, the youngest, was left alive, because he hid.) ⁶ Then all the leaders of Shechem and Beth-millo came together and crowned Abimelech king by the great oak tree at the pillar in Shechem.

⁷ When Jotham was told what had happened, he climbed to the top of Mount Gerizim.

²¹ When he had said these words, Jotham fled for his life to Beer, where he stayed because he was afraid of his brother Abimelech.

⁴⁴ At this point, it was about noon, and a darkness fell over the whole region. The darkness persisted until about three in the afternoon, ⁴⁵ and at some point during this darkness, the curtain in the temple was torn in two.

And with those words, He exhaled—and breathed no more.

⁴⁷ The Centurion^[b]—one of the soldiers who performed the execution—saw all this, and he praised God.

⁴⁸ The crowds of common people who had gathered and watched the whole ordeal through to its conclusion left for their homes, pounding on their own chests in profound grief. ⁴⁹ And all who knew Jesus personally, including the group of women who had been with Him from the beginning in Galilee, stood at a distance, watching all of these things unfold.

⁵⁰ Meanwhile a man named Joseph had been at work. He was a member of the council, a good and fair man, ⁵¹ from a Judean town called Arimathea. He had objected to the plans and actions of the council; he was seeking the kingdom of God. ⁵² He had gone to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. ⁵³ He removed the body from the cross and wrapped it in a shroud made of fine linen. He then laid the body in a cavelike tomb cut from solid rock, a tomb that never had been used before. ⁵⁴ It was Preparation Day—the day before the holy Sabbath—and it was about to begin at sundown. ⁵⁵ The women who had accompanied Jesus from the beginning in Galilee now came, took note of where the tomb was and how His body had been prepared, ⁵⁶ then left to prepare spices and ointments for His proper burial. They ceased their work on the Sabbath so they could rest as the Hebrew Scriptures required.

24 Early on Sunday morning, even before the sun had fully risen, these women made their way back to the tomb with the spices and ointments they had prepared. ² When they arrived, they found the stone was rolled away from the tomb entrance, ³ and when they looked inside, the body of the Lord Jesus was nowhere to be seen. ⁴ They didn’t know what to think. As they stood there in confusion, two men suddenly appeared standing beside them. These men seemed to glow with light. ⁵ The women were so terrified that they fell to the ground facedown.

⁸ The women did remember Jesus’ words about this, ⁹ so they returned from the tomb and found the eleven and recounted for them—and others with them—everything they had experienced. ^10-11 The Lord’s emissaries^[c] heard their stories as fiction, a lie; they didn’t believe a word of it. (By the way, this group of women included Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, along with a number of others.) ¹² Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. When he reached the opening, he bent down, looked inside, and saw the linen burial cloths lying there. But the body was gone. He walked away, full of wonder about what had happened.

Psalm 99