1And Moab rebelled against Israel after Ahab’s death. 2And Ahaziah fell through the lattice in his upper chamber and became ill, and he sent messengers and said, “Go, inquire of Baal-Zebub god of Ekron whether I shall survive this illness.” 3But the LORD had spoken to Elijah the Tishbite: “Rise, go up to meet the messengers of the king of Samaria and speak to them: ‘Is it for lack of a god in Israel that you go to inquire of Baal-Zebub god of Ekron?’ 4And therefore, thus said the LORD: ‘From the bed you mounted you shall not come down, for you are doomed to die.’” And Elijah went off. 5And the messengers came back to him, and he said to them, “Why have you come back?” 6And they said to him, “A man came up to meet us and said to us, ‘Go back to the king who sent you and speak to him: Thus said the LORD—Is it for lack of a god in Israel that he sent to inquire of Baal-Zebub god of Ekron? Therefore, from the bed you mounted you shall not come down, for you are doomed to die.’” 7And he said to them, “What is the manner of the man who came up to meet you and spoke to you these words?” 8And they said to him, “He is a hairy man, and a leather belt is bound round his waist.” And he said, “It is Elijah the Tishbite.” 9And he sent to him a captain of fifty with his men, and he went up to him, and, look, he was sitting on the hilltop. And he spoke to him: “Man of God! The king has spoken—come down.” 10And Elijah answered and spoke to the captain of the fifty: “And if I am a man of God, let fire come down from the heavens and consume you and your men!” And fire came down from the heavens and consumed him and his men. 11And he persisted and sent him another captain of fifty with his men, and he spoke out and said to him, “Man of God! Thus said the king: ‘Quick, come down.’” 12And Elijah answered and spoke to him: “If I am a man of God, let fire come down from the heavens and consume you and your men.” And fire came down from the heavens and consumed him and his men. 13And he persisted and sent a third captain of fifty with his men, and the third captain of the fifty went up and came and kneeled before Elijah and pleaded with him: “Man of God! May my life, pray, and the lives of these fifty servants of yours be precious in your eyes. 14Look, fire has come down from the heavens and consumed the two captains of the fifty and their men, and now, may my life be precious in your eyes.” 15And the LORD’s messenger spoke to Elijah: “Go down with him. Do not fear him.” And he rose and went down with him to the king. 16And he spoke to him: “Thus said the LORD—‘Inasmuch as you have sent messengers to inquire of Baal-Zebub god of Ekron—is it for lack of a god in Israel?—to inquire of his word, therefore from the bed you mounted you shall not come down, for you are doomed to die.” 17And he died according to the word of the LORD that Elijah had spoken, and Jehoram became king in his stead in the second year of Jehoram son of Jehoshaphat king of Judah, for he had no son. 18And the rest of the acts of Ahaziah that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Israel?
CHAPTER 1 NOTES
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1. And Moab rebelled against Israel after Ahab’s death. This notation locates the story temporally but is not otherwise linked to it, except to indicate that Israel’s dominance over vassal states was shaken in the political uncertainty after Ahab’s death.
2. inquire. The Hebrew verb darash is the technical term used for inquiring of an oracle. From the monotheistic point of view, it is of course outrageous that a king of Israel should go out of his way to inquire of a pagan oracle.
Baal-Zebub. This appears to mean “Lord of the flies,” and in the New Testament Baal-Zebub, or Beelzebub, is demoted from pagan deity to demon. A plausible scholarly proposal is that the original name was Baal-Zebul, “Baal the Prince,” and that the final consonant was changed by the Hebrew writers in order to make it a term of opprobrium.
3. But the LORD had spoken to Elijah. The entire episode is constructed through dialogue, with further cited speech nesting within the dialogue, and the verb “to speak” is repeated again and again.
the king of Samaria. This epithet diminishes the sphere of the king of Israel.
for lack of a god. The wording also could mean “for lack of gods.”
6. Go back to the king who sent you. In the reiterated pattern of verbatim repetition in this story, this clause stands out as an added element that was not part of Elijah’s speech to the messengers. The clause has the effect of underscoring the king’s responsibility for sending the messengers to a pagan oracle.
8. He is a hairy man, and a leather belt is bound round his waist. This is the first indication in the whole cycle of stories of Elijah’s appearance. There is something rough-hewn and perhaps forbidding in his distinctive look.
9. with his men. Literally, “with his fifty.” The usage is repeated.
10. let fire come down from the heavens. Celestial fire is Elijah’s prophetic medium. It came down to consume the sacrifice in the contest with the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel. At the end of his story, he will ascend to the heavens in a fiery chariot.
11. And he persisted. The literal sense is “and he went back.”
Quick, come down. In the verbatim repetition, “quick” is added, suggesting a mounting urgency after the failure of the first contingent of fifty.
12. spoke to him. The Masoretic Text has “to them,” but Elijah’s answer (“you and your men”) makes clear he is speaking to the captain, and two Hebrew manuscripts as well as the Septuagint and the Syriac show the singular.
13. these fifty servants of yours. The pleading captain is careful to address Elijah in deferential terms, as would a subject to his monarch, referring to his own troops as Elijah’s servants.
15. Do not fear him. The captain’s expressed terror of Elijah confirms that the prophet has nothing to fear from him.
16. is it for lack of a god in Israel? In the two preceding repetitions of this clause, it appeared at the beginning of the sentence, “Is it for lack of a god in Israel that you go …?” Here, instead, it appears as an outraged interjection in the middle of the sentence after the mention of Baal-Zebub.
therefore from the bed you mounted you shall not come down. The sentence of doom is an invariable element in the three repetitions, and always occurs at the end of the prophetic statement. The three repetitions of the prophecy are joined by the three repeated reports of a captain and his fifty men going up to Elijah. The folktale pattern, often deployed in the Bible, is used in which there are two identical repetitions and then a third that diverges from the first two (as in “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”),
17. And he died according to the word of the LORD. In the narrative report, nothing is allowed to intervene between Elijah’s pronouncement of the prophecy of doom directly to the ailing king and the king’s death.
and Jehoram became king … in the second year of Jehoram … king of Judah, for he had no son. The seeming confusion is the result of a historical coincidence: Jehoram, brother of the heirless Ahaziah, happened to have the same name as the king reigning in Judah at that time. In a culture that favored theophoric names, this one, which means “God is exalted,” might have been fairly common.
1And it happened, when the LORD was going to take Elijah up to the heavens in a whirlwind, that Elijah, and Elisha with him, went from Gilgal. 2And Elijah said to Elisha, “Stay here, pray, for the LORD has sent me to Bethel.” And Elisha said, “As the LORD lives and as you live, I will not forsake you.” And they went down to Bethel. 3And the acolyte prophets who were in Bethel came out to Elisha and said to him, “Did you know that today the LORD is about to take your master from over you?” And he said, “I, too, know. Be still!” 4And Elijah said to him, “Elisha, stay here, pray, for the LORD has sent me to Jericho.” And he said, “As the LORD lives and as you live, I will not forsake you.” And they came to Jericho. 5And the acolyte prophets who were in Jericho approached Elisha and said to him, “Do you know that today the LORD is about to take your master from over you?” And he said, “I, too, know. Be still!” 6And Elijah said to him, “Stay here, pray, for the LORD has sent me to the Jordan.” And he said, “As the LORD lives and as you live, I will not forsake you.” And the two of them went. 7And fifty men of the acolyte prophets had gone and stood opposite at a distance, and the two of them stood by the Jordan. 8And Elijah took his mantle and rolled it up and struck the water, and it parted on both sides, and the two of them crossed over on dry ground. 9And it happened as they crossed over that Elijah said to Elisha, “Ask, what may I do for you before I am taken from you?” And Elisha said, “Let there be, pray, a double portion of your spirit upon me.” 10And he said, “You have asked a hard thing. If you see me taken from you, let it be thus for you, and if not, it will not be.” 11And it happened as they were going along speaking, that, look, there was a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and they separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to the heavens in a whirlwind. 12And Elisha was watching and he was crying out, “My father, my father, Israel’s chariot and its horsemen!” And he saw him not again. And he had clung to his garments and torn them in two. 13And he lifted up Elijah’s mantle, which had fallen from him, and he went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan. 14And he took Elijah’s mantle that had fallen from him and struck the water and said, “Where is the LORD, God of Elijah?” And he, too, struck the water, and it parted on both sides, and Elisha crossed over. 15And the acolyte prophets who were in Jericho saw him from the other side and said, “Elijah’s spirit has rested upon Elisha.” And they came to meet him and bowed down before him to the ground. 16And they said to him, “Look, pray, your servants have fifty stalwart men. Let them go, pray, and seek your master, lest the spirit of the LORD has borne him off and flung him down on some hill or into some valley.” And he said, “You shall not send.” 17And they urged him incessantly, and he said, “Send.” And they sent fifty men and sought him three days but did not find him. 18And they came back to him while he was still staying in Jericho, and he said to them, “Did I not say to you, do not go?”
19And the men of the town said to Elisha, “Look, pray, it is good to live in the town as my master sees, but the water is bad and the land bereaves.” 20And he said, “Fetch me a new bowl and put salt in it.” And they fetched it for him. 21And he went out to the water source and flung the salt there and said, “Thus said the LORD: ‘I have healed these waters. There will no longer be death and bereaving.’” 22And the waters have been healed to this day, according to the word of Elisha that he spoke. 23And he went up from there to Bethel, and as he was coming up on the road, young lads came out from the town and jeered at him and said to him, “Away with you, baldy, away with you, baldy!” 24And he turned behind him and saw them and cursed them in the name of the LORD, and two she-bears came out of the forest and ripped apart forty-two boys. 25And he went from there to Mount Carmel and from there he came back to Samaria.
CHAPTER 2 NOTES
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2. Stay here, pray, for the LORD has sent me to Bethel. Elijah seems to have foreknowledge of his own departure from the earthly realm, and his initial sense is that this should be a private encounter between him and God, not to be witnessed by anyone else, not even by his disciple.
I will not forsake you. By this pronouncement, to be repeated twice, Elisha affirms that he is Elijah’s loyal follower and heir. In the event, his being able actually to see his master’s fiery ascension will justify his request of a double portion of the spirit investing Elijah.
3. the acolyte prophets. Literally, “the sons of the prophets.” The prefix “sons” suggests they are not full-fledged prophets, which means they are either acolytes or members of a professional guild of prophets rather than independent prophetic agents.
Did you know that … the LORD is about to take your master. Evidently, Elijah’s imminent departure has become general news, at least in prophetic circles.
from over you. The literal sense is “from your head.”
4. stay here, pray, for the LORD has sent me. This episode follows the folktale patterns manifested in the previous episode of three repetitions with verbatim restatements. Here, too, there is a swerve in the third repetition: in the third instance, Elijah and Elisha do not go to a town but to the Jordan, so there is no group of acolyte prophets for them to encounter, and this third iteration concludes with Elijah’s ascent to the heavens in a chariot of fire.
6. the LORD has sent me to the Jordan. The town of Jericho is close to the Jordan, as is clear in the next verse, when the fifty acolyte prophets can see Elijah and Elisha from a distance.
8. and it parted on both sides. This is, of course, a small-scale reenactment of the miracle performed by Moses in parting the waters of the Sea of Reeds. Here it is executed not with an upraised staff but with the rolled-up prophet’s mantle, which Elisha will then inherit from Elijah. The point of crossing the Jordan is to have Elijah pass through this liminal zone and thus to be on the other side, beyond the land of Israel proper, when he is taken up into the heavens.
9. a double portion of your spirit. Though this may seem to be a presumptuous wish by Elisha to surpass his master, it could just as easily reflect a sense of inadequacy: feeling himself to be no more than an ordinary man, Elisha wants a supercharge of the spirit in order to be Elijah’s successor.
10. If you see me taken from you, let it be thus for you. Elijah himself is not entirely sure that Elisha is worthy to bear a double portion of the spirit. If God unveils his eyes to witness Elijah’s miraculous ascension, that will be proof of his worthiness.
11. a chariot of fire, and horses of fire. As noted above, fire has been an important instrument for Elijah’s prophetic activities.
Elijah went up to the heavens in a whirlwind. This story takes us into new territory. Everywhere in the Hebrew Bible, death is the definitive end, Sheol, the underworld, a hole in the ground into which the once living person goes down. The single previous intimation of Elijah’s ascension is the cryptic notation about Enoch’s being “taken” by God in Genesis 5:24. Elijah does not die but rides up to the celestial sphere in a fiery chariot. His ascension prepares the way for the idea of Christ’s resurrection in Christian Scripture, and it is significant that Elijah and Moses are represented in the New Testament as the two chief precursors of Jesus.
12. My father, my father, Israel’s chariot and its horsemen. Elisha obviously refers to Elijah as his father because he is his master and mentor. The metaphor of the chariot and horsemen, suggested to him by the vision of the chariot of fire before his eyes, registers the idea that Elijah has been Israel’s true power, as chariotry is the driving power of an army.
And he had clung to his garments and torn them in two. Since Elijah had removed his mantle, this would be the tunic worn beneath the mantle. Elisha’s clinging to it reflects his impassioned desire not to part from his master. It seems that as Elijah left him for his ascent, part of the tunic tore away in Elisha’s hands. This is an ironic reversal of the request for a double portion of the spirit because he now holds half a garment.
14. Where is the LORD, God of Elijah? If the LORD is now to be with him as He was with Elijah, He will enable Elisha to replicate the miracles that Elijah performed.
he, too. There is an evident glitch in the Hebrew syntax. These two words in the Hebrew should appear after “and he struck.” The word order in the received text produces an odd bumpiness: “He too and he struck.”
15. And the acolyte prophets … saw him from the other side. Elisha’s parting of the waters, in full sight of the assembled Jericho prophets, becomes a public demonstration that he is Elijah’s prophetic heir.
19. Look, pray, it is good to live in the town. Having recognized Elisha as Elijah’s successor, endowed with his powers, the townsmen promptly turn to him with a request for help.
the water is bad and the land bereaves. This is cause and effect: the bad water contaminates the land, which then brings death to man and beast.
21. he … flung the salt there. The agency of the miracle is deliberately paradoxical. Salt water is not drinkable, but Elisha’s salt purifies the spring of its blight.
Thus said the LORD: “I have healed these waters.” Elisha pointedly attributes the purification of the spring to God’s intervention, not to a magical act on his part.
23. Away with you, baldy. Literally, “Go up, baldy.” We learn incidentally that Elisha is bald, in contrast to Elijah, who was a hairy man.
24. two she-bears came out of the forest and ripped apart forty-two boys. This murderous response to the boys’ mockery is morally scandalous. Is it meant to suggest that Elisha does not make responsible use of his prophetic powers, that after turning death to life at the spring he now spreads death? The early rabbis were so outraged by this story that they felt constrained to assert it never really happened. Their formulation, “neither bears nor forest,” became idiomatic in Hebrew for a cock-and-bull story.
1And Jehoram son of Ahab had become king over Israel in Samaria in the eighteenth year of Jehoshaphat king of Judah. And he was king twelve years. 2And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD, though not like his father nor like his mother, and he removed the pillar of Baal that his father had made. 3But he clung to the offenses of Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had led Israel to offend, he did not swerve from them. 4And Mesha king of Moab was a sheep-breeder and he would bring back to the king of Israel the wool of a hundred thousand lambs and of a hundred thousand rams. 5And it happened when Ahab died that the king of Moab rebelled against the king of Israel. 6And King Jehoram sallied forth from Samaria on that day, and he mustered all Israel. 7And he went and sent to Jehoshaphat king of Judah, saying, “The king of Moab has rebelled against me. Will you go with me against Moab to battle?” And he said, “I will go. I am like you, my people like your people, my horses like your horses.” 8And he said, “By what way shall we go up?” And he said, “The way of the Wilderness of Edom.” 9And the king of Israel went, and the king of Judah and the king of Edom with him, and they swung round on the way seven days, and there was no water for the camp or for the beasts that were at their heels. 10And the king of Israel said, “Woe, for the LORD has called forth these three kings to give them into the hand of Moab.” 11And Jehoshaphat said, “Is there no prophet of the LORD here, that we might inquire of the LORD through him?” And one of the servants of the king of Israel answered, “Elisha son of Shaphat is here, who attended Elijah.” 12And Jehoshaphat said, “The word of the LORD is with him.” And the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat and the king of Edom went down to him. 13And Elisha said to the king of Israel, “What do you and I have to do with one another? Go to your father’s prophets and to your mother’s prophets.” And the king of Israel said to him, “Don’t! For the LORD has called forth these three kings to give them into the hand of Moab.” 14And Elisha said, “As the LORD of Armies lives, in Whose attendance I have stood, were I not showing favor to Jehoshaphat king of Judah, I would not so much as look at you nor see you, 15but now, fetch me a lyre player.” And it happened, as the lyre player played, the hand of the LORD was upon him, 16and he said, “Thus said the LORD: ‘Dig out this wadi into hollows.’ 17For thus said the LORD: ‘You will not see wind and you will not see rain, but that wadi will fill with water, and you and your cattle and your beasts will drink.’ 18And this is easy in the eyes of the LORD, and he shall give Moab into your hand. 19And you shall strike every fortified town and every fine town, and every goodly tree you shall fell, and all the springs of water you shall stop up, and every goodly field you shall spoil with stones.” 20And it happened in the morning, as the grain offering was being offered up, that, look, water was coming from the way to Edom, and the land was filled with water. 21And all Moab had heard that the kings had come up to do battle with them, and every man of sword-wielding age was mustered, and they stood at the border. 22And they rose early in the morning, and the sun had dawned over the water, and from a distance Moab saw the water red as blood. 23And they said, “This blood is because the kings have surely been destroyed, each striking down his fellow, and they are now Moab’s booty.” 24And they came into the camp of Israel, and Israel rose up and struck Moab, and they fled before them, and they struck Moab again and again. 25And they laid waste the towns, and in every goodly field each of them flung stones and filled it, and every spring of water they stopped up, and every goodly tree they felled, till they left only the stones of Kir-Hareseth, and the slingers swung round and struck it. 26And the king of Moab saw that the battle was hard against him, and he took seven hundred sword-wielding men with him to break through to the king of Edom, but they were not able. 27And he took his firstborn son, who would have been king after him, and offered him up as a burnt offering on the wall, and a great fury came against Israel, and they journeyed away from him and went back to the land.
CHAPTER 3 NOTES
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4. he would bring back to the king of Israel. The context suggests that the verb here has an iterative sense: this is the tribute that Mesha, as vassal to Israel, would give annually to the king of Israel. David had initially reduced Moab to vassal status. At some point, perhaps during the reign of Baasha, Moab drove out the Israelite overlords, but King Omri again subjugated it.
a hundred thousand lambs. As with the numbers given for troops and casualties in these narratives, the figures here are hyperbolic.
5. when Ahab died. Mesha exploits the political disorder following upon Ahab’s death to rebel against Israel.
7. I am like you, my people like your people. This speech repeats almost verbatim Jehoshaphat’s words to the king of Israel in 1 Kings 22:4. Verse 11 then repeats, with small variations, Jehoshaphat’s words in 1 Kings 22:7. All this has the look of a story floating around in the scribal archives that was first ascribed to Ahab (although, perhaps symptomatically, without using his name) and then, in different circumstances with a different enemy and a different prophet, to Jehoram (though here, again, in the body of the story, he is not referred to by name). It is possible that the original story was actually about a third king whose identity, however, remains conjectural.
8. The way of the Wilderness of Edom. The allied forces, instead of taking a direct route by crossing the Jordan and then driving south to Moab, swing round (that verb is used in the next verse) in a long arc through the Negeb and then the wilderness of Edom to the east of the Dead Sea, thus approaching Moab from the south. Their likely intention would have been to avoid Moabite troops stationed along the northern and western perimeters of Moabite territory. But this move takes them on a seven-day march through the desert, during which they run out of water.
11. attended. The literal sense of the Hebrew idiom is “poured water on the hands of.”
13. Go to your father’s prophets and to your mother’s prophets. He is referring to the sycophantic court prophets or actually pagan prophets who surrounded Ahab and Jezebel.
14. were I not showing favor to Jehoshaphat. Elisha grudgingly agrees to seek a propitious oracle only for the sake of Jehoram’s Judahite ally Jehoshaphat.
15. as the lyre player played, the hand of the LORD was upon him. The use of stringed instruments and percussion instruments to induce a vatic trance through their hypnotic rhythm is known in many different traditions of ecstatic religion. In the Bible, it is typically linked with bands of professional prophets (see, for example, 1 Samuel 10:5–6). What is unusual here is that an individual prophet feels he has to have recourse to these musical stimuli in order to gain access to God’s word.
16. Dig out this wadi into hollows. In the rocky gulches in this region, rainwater would gather in the little hollows and crevices in the rock. In this miraculous instance, however, there will be no rain.
18. this is easy in the eyes of the LORD. Just as the LORD can easily provide water where there is no rain, He will be able to effect the defeat of the Moabites with no difficulty.
19. every fine town. The word for “fine” (or “choice”), mivḥor, is an odd formation (it should be mivḥar), and some scholars think it is an erroneous scribal duplication of the previous phrase, “every fortified town,” kol ʿir mivtsar.
every goodly tree you shall fell. This is in direct contradiction to Deuteronomy 20:19, which prohibits cutting down an enemy’s fruit trees.
22. from a distance Moab saw the water red as blood. The red look of the water is a result of the early light of dawn, perhaps reinforced, as many have proposed, by the reddish sandstone surrounding the wadi and its bed. God’s miraculous providing of water, then, serves a double purpose: first it revives the troops and their animals after the long march in the desert, and then it sets a trap for the Moabites.
23. each striking down his fellow. The Moabites assume that the potentially fragile alliance put together by the king of Israel has fallen apart violently.
and they are now Moab’s booty. They conclude that most, if not all, of the enemy are dead, and that they have no one to fight, only corpses to despoil.
24. and they struck Moab again and again. The Hebrew text looks defective at this point (with a confusing divergence between the consonantal text and the marginal correction), but this is the likely sense.
25. Kir-Hareseth. This is an alternate name for Kir-Moab, the Moabite capital.
26. he took seven hundred sword-wielding men with him to break through to the king of Edom. He musters an elite fighting unit in an attempt to break through the besieging forces, probably driving against the vassal king of Edom as the weakest element in the alliance of three kings. The attempt is foiled, and the Moabites are driven back into the town.
27. he took his firstborn. A king’s sacrifice of his own child, in an effort to placate the gods at a moment of military emergency, was a familiar practice in the ancient Near East.
and a great fury came against Israel. This denouement is surely perplexing from a monotheistic point of view. “Fury” (qetsef) is usually the term for God’s devastating rage against Israel when the people has transgressed. Here, however, Israel has done no wrong. And the descent of the fury explicitly reverses Elisha’s favorable prophecy. This turn of events might reflect an early tradition that accords Chemosh, the Moabite god, power that must be propitiated by human sacrifice, so that he will then blight the enemies of Moab. In any case, the story means to explain why Israel and its allies, after an initial victory, were obliged to retreat. A Moabite inscription on a stele, discovered in 1868, in which Mesha speaks in the first person, triumphantly proclaims a sweeping victory over Israel, though it is not altogether clear whether this victory is over Jehoram or his predecessor.
1And a certain woman from the wives of the acolyte prophets had cried out to Elisha, saying, “Your servant, my husband, died. And you know that your servant was a LORD fearer. And the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves.” 2And Elisha said to her, “What shall I do for you? Tell me, what do you have in the house?” And she said, “Your servant has nothing at all in the house except a cruse of oil.” 3And he said, “Go, borrow vessels for yourself from outside, from all your neighbors—empty vessels, and not just a few. 4And you shall come and close the door behind you and behind your sons, and you shall pour into these vessels, and the full ones you shall set aside.” 5And she went from him and closed the door behind her and behind her sons. They were bringing the vessels to her and she was pouring. 6And it happened when the vessels were full that she said to her son, “Bring me another vessel,” and he said to her, “There are no more vessels.” And the oil stopped. 7And she came and told the man of God, and he said, “Go, sell the oil and pay your debt, and you and your sons will live off what is left.”
8And one day Elisha was passing through Shunem, and there was a wealthy woman there. And she urged him to break bread, and so, whenever he passed through, he would turn aside there to break bread. 9And she said to her husband, “Look, pray, I know that he is a holy man of God who always passes by us. 10Let us make, pray, a little upper chamber and put a bed there for him and a table and chair and lamp, and so when he comes to us, he will turn aside there.” 11And one day he came there and turned aside to the upper chamber and slept there. 12And he said to Gehazi his lad, “Call this Shunammite,” and he called her, and she stood before him. 13And he said to him, “Say to her, pray: ‘Look, you have gone to all this bother for us. What can be done for you? Shall a word be said for you to the king or to the commander of the army?’” And she said, “In the midst of my people I dwell.” 14And he said, “What can be done for her?” And Gehazi said, “Why, she has no son, and her husband is an old man.” 15And he said, “Call her,” and he called her, and she stood in the doorway. 16And he said, “At this fixed time, at this very season, you will embrace a son.” And she said, “Don’t, my lord, man of God, don’t mislead your servant.” 17And the woman conceived and bore a son at that fixed time, at that very season, as Elisha had spoken to her. 18And the child grew, and one day he went out to his father, to the reapers. 19And he said to his father, “My head, my head!” And he said concerning the lad, “Carry him to his mother.” 20And he was carried and brought to his mother, and he stayed on her knees till noon, and he died. 21And she went up and laid him on the bed of the man of God, and closed the door on him and went out. 22And she called to her husband and said, “Send me, pray, one of the lads and one of the donkeys, that I may hurry to the man of God and come back. 23And he said, “Why are you going to him? Today is neither new moon nor sabbath.” And she said, “Farewell.” 24And she saddled the donkey and said to her lad, “Drive it and go. Do not hold me back in riding unless I say to you.” 25And she went and came to the man of God at Mount Carmel, and it happened, when the man of God saw her from a distance, that he said to Gehazi, “Here is that Shunammite. 26Now hurry to meet her, pray, and say to her, ‘Is it well with you? Is it well with your husband? Is it well with the child?’” And she said, “It is well.” 27And she came to the man of God on the mountain and clung to his legs. And Gehazi approached to push her back, and the man of God said, “Let her be, for she is deeply embittered, and the LORD has hidden it from me and not told me.” 28And she said, “Did I ask of my lord for a son? Did I not say, ‘You should not deceive me’?” 29And he said to Gehazi, “Gird your loins and take my staff in your hand and go. Should you meet a man, do not greet him, and should a man greet you, do not answer him. And you shall put my staff on the lad’s face.” 30And the lad’s mother said, “As the LORD lives and as you live, I will not forsake you.” And he rose and went after her. 31And Gehazi had gone before them and put the staff on the lad’s face, but there was no voice and no sound, and he turned back to meet him, and he told him, saying, “The lad has not awakened.” 32And Elisha came into the house, and, look, the lad was dead, laid out on his bed. 33And he came in and closed the door behind the two of them and prayed to the LORD. 34And he climbed up and lay over the child and put his mouth over his mouth and his eyes over his eyes and his palms over his palms and stretched out over him, and the child’s body grew warm. 35And he went back and walked in the house this way and that, and he climbed up and stretched out over him, and the lad sneezed a full seven times, and the lad opened his eyes. 36And he called to Gehazi and said, “Call this Shunammite,” and he called her, and she came to him, and he said, “Carry away your son.” 37And she came and fell at his feet and bowed to the ground, and she carried away her son and went out.
38And Elisha had gone back to Gilgal. And there was famine in the land, and the acolyte prophets were sitting before him. And he said to his lad, “Put the big pot on the fire and cook a stew for the acolyte prophets.” 39And one of them went out to the field to gather sprouts and found a field vine and gathered from it field gourds, as much as his garment could hold, and he came and sliced them into the stew pot, for they did not know. 40And they poured for the men to eat, and it happened, as they were about to eat, they cried out, “Death is in the pot, man of God!” And they could not eat. 41And he said, “Fetch flour.” And he flung it into the pot, and he said, “Pour for the people, that they may eat.” And there was nothing harmful in the pot.
42And a man had come from Baal-Shalishah, and he brought the man of God first fruits, twenty loaves of barley bread and fresh grain in his sack. And he said, “Give it to the people, that they may eat.” 43And his attendant said, “What? Shall I set this before a hundred men?” And he said, “Give it to the people that they may eat. For thus said the LORD, ‘Eat and leave over.’” 44And he set it before them, and they ate and left over, according to the word of the LORD.
CHAPTER 4 NOTES
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1. Your sevant, my husband. Almost everyone in these stories addresses Elisha deferentially. In this case, Elisha may have actually been the master of this group of acolyte prophets. In the story of the almost poisoned stew in verses 38–41, he appears to take upon himself the responsibility of providing food for them.
3. Go, borrow vessels. All these stories about Elisha’s performing miracles to aid people in distress have a strong folkloric character. They would provide direct inspiration for the stories about Jesus’s miracles in the Gospels—the cruse of oil that is constantly full, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the multiplication of the fish and loaves.
8. a wealthy woman. The usual sense of the Hebrew adjective is “great,” but it also has the meaning of “wealthy.” The fact that she has the means to add a room to her house and furnish it argues for the sense of “wealthy.”
9. a holy man of God. Throughout these stories, Elisha is referred to as a man of God, not prophet. That designation does not mean “clergyman,” as in modern English, but rather someone with divine powers, and those are manifested in the sundry miracles he performs.
12. Gehazi his lad. This is the first mention of him. Elisha’s elevated status is reflected in his having an attendant or factotum who performs sundry tasks for him and acts as his intermediary.
Call this Shunammite. This form of reference seems a bit condescending, and if he has taken the trouble to learn her name, he is not disposed to use it.
13. Say to her, pray. Even though the woman is now standing before Elisha, he does not address her directly but instead has Gehazi put the question to her on his behalf.
In the midst of my people I dwell. Though some understand this to mean that she has no need for royal favors because she has the support of people around her, the more likely meaning is that she views herself as an ordinary person, dwelling among the people, and thus wants no part of special treatment from the court.
14. Why, she has no son. It seems a little suspect that Elisha needs Gehazi to point out the fact of her childlessness. One wonders how much attention he has been paying to her.
and her husband is an old man. This might well be the source of her fertility problems. The phrase is a reminiscence of Sarah’s words in Genesis 18:12.
16. At this fixed time, at this very season, you will embrace a son. These formulaic words signal the unfolding of the annunciation type-scene. This one differs from all the others in that the word from the man of God is not dictated from above but is his own initiative as recompense for the woman’s kindness to him. This is also the only annunciation that does not lead to the birth of someone destined to play a significant role in the national story: the boy is never named, and he remains no more than the son of a prosperous farmer.
17. And the woman conceived and bore a son. In another divergence from the set pattern of the annunciation, there is no mention of the necessary fact that the husband “knew” his wife. Could there be further play here with the fact of his advanced age?
19. My head, my head! Like Isaac, another son born after an annunciation, this child is threatened with death out in the open.
20. and he stayed on her knees till noon, and he died. Her anguish is magnified by his still being alive when he is brought to her, then expiring as she desperately tries to succor him.
23. Why are you going to him? Today is neither new moon nor sabbath. The husband is surely being obtuse, for it is obvious enough why she wants to hurry off to the man of God. Sabbaths and new moons were times when special sacrifices were offered, which one could bring to a man of God so that he might partake of the part of the animal not burned on the altar.
Farewell. The Hebrew is shalom, the same word Gehazi used when he asked whether it is “well” with her and her family. In saying farewell, she simply ignores her husband’s obtuse question.
24. Drive it and go. The servant’s job is to run behind the donkey on which she is riding and prod it to move quickly with a switch or goad.
26. And she said, “It is well.” She says these words to Gehazi because she does not want to be detained in explaining the disaster but instead means to head directly to Elisha.
27. and the LORD has hidden it from me. Elisha is, after all, a prophet, but he seems in many respects out of touch with the woman’s life.
29. And you shall put my staff on the lad’s face. Elisha assumes that his staff is imbued with supernatural powers, but this effort to revive the child through an act of pure magic does not work.
30. I will not forsake you. She puts her trust not in magic staffs but in the person of Elisha and so wants him to stick with her and come back to Shunem with her, to which he agrees.
32. laid out on his bed. That is, laid out on Elisha’s bed.
34. and lay over the child and put his mouth over his mouth. Although this detail may look to a modern reader like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the intention of the ancient writer was more likely that the prophet imparted his own vital warmth, fueled by prophetic aura, to the child, reviving him in this fashion.
39. sprouts … field gourds. As with many other flora mentioned in the Bible, the exact identification of these plants remains uncertain. What is clear is that instead of a plant that would have been a proper ingredient for the stew, the ignorant gatherer brings back a poisonous plant.
41. Fetch flour. It is highly unlikely that flour would have the property of neutralizing the poison, so one must take this as a purely miraculous act.
42. sack. This is the traditional rendering of the unique Hebrew term tsiqalon, from whence it has passed into general usage in the language. But some scholars, proposing a Ugaritic cognate, argue that it refers to a kind of grain.
1And Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man in the presence of his master and highly esteemed, for through him the LORD had granted victory to Aram, and the man was a valiant warrior stricken with skin blanch. 2And Aram had sallied forth in raiding parties and captured a young girl from the land of Israel. 3And she said to her mistress, “Would that my master might come before the prophet who is in Samaria. Then he could cure him of his skin blanch.” 4And he sent and told his master, “Thus and so did the girl who is from the land of Israel speak.” 5And the king of Aram said, “Go forth, and I shall send a letter to the king of Israel.” And he went, and he took in his hand ten talents of silver and six thousand pieces of gold and ten changes of garments. 6And he brought the letter to the king of Israel, saying, “And now, when this letter comes to you, look, I have sent to you my servant Naaman, and you shall cure him of his skin blanch.” 7And it happened when the king of Israel read the letter, he rent his garments and said, “Am I God, to deal death and life, that this person has sent to me to cure a man from his skin blanch? For you must surely know and mark, pray, that he is seeking a pretext against me.” 8And it happened when Elisha, the man of God, heard that the king of Israel had rent his garments, he sent to the king, saying, “Why did you rend your garments? Let him come, pray, to me, that he may know there is a prophet in Israel.” 9And Naaman came with his horses and his chariot and stood at the entrance to Elisha’s house. 10And Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, “Go and bathe seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will be restored, and you will be clean.” 11And Naaman was furious, and he went off and said, “Look, I thought to myself, he will surely come out and stand and call in the name of the LORD his God and wave his hand toward the place and cure the skin-blanched person. 12Are not Amanah and Parpar the rivers of Damascus better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not bathe in them and be clean?” And he turned and went off incensed. 13And his servants approached and said, “Father! The prophet has spoken a great thing to you. Shall you not do it? How much more so as he said to you, bathe and be clean?” 14And he went down and dipped in the Jordan seven times, according to the word of the man of God, and his flesh was restored, like the flesh of a young lad, and he was clean. 15And he went back to the man of God, he and all his camp, and he came and stood before him and said “Now, pray, I know that there is no god in all the earth except in Israel, and so, take, pray, a gift from your servant.” 16And he said, “As the LORD lives, in Whose attendance I have stood, I will not take it.” And he pressed him to take it but he refused. 17And Naaman said, “If not, let your servant be given two mules’ load of soil, for your servant will no longer perform burnt offering or sacrifice to other gods but to the LORD. 18For this thing may the LORD forgive me: when my master comes to the house of Rimmon to worship there and he leans on my arm and I worship in the house of Rimmon, may the LORD forgive me in this thing for my worshipping in the house of Rimmon.” 19And he said to him, “Go in peace.” And he went away from him some distance. 20And Gehazi, lad of Elisha man of God, thought: “Look, my master has held back Naaman the Aramean, not taking from his hand what he brought. As the LORD lives, I will run after him and take something from his hand.” 21And Gehazi chased after Naaman, and Naaman saw him running after him and alighted from the chariot to meet him and said, “Is all well?” 22And he said, “It is well. My master sent me, saying, ‘Look, just now two lads from the high country of Ephraim of the acolyte prophets have come to me. Give them, pray, a talent of silver and two changes of garments.’” 23And Naaman said, “Be so kind as to take two talents.” And he pressed him, and he wrapped the two talents of silver in two bags, and the two changes of garments, and he gave them to his two lads, and they bore them off before him. 24And he came to the citadel and took them from their hand and lay them aside in the house and sent away the men, and they went off. 25And he had come and was standing by his master, and Elisha said to him, “From where have you come, Gehazi?” And he said, “Your servant has not gone anywhere.” 26And he said to him, “Did not my heart come along when a man turned back from his chariot to meet you? Is this the time to take silver and to take garments and olive trees and vineyards and sheep and cattle and slaves and slavegirls? 27May Naaman’s skin blanch cling to you and to your seed forever!” And he went out from before him skin-blanched as snow.
CHAPTER 5 NOTES
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1. for through him the LORD had granted victory to Aram. This clause establishes the universalist perspective of the story, in which a prophet of Israel will perform a wonder for a non-Israelite. From the viewpoint of the Hebrew writer, it is the LORD, the God worshipped by Israel, Who determines all events, though of course the Aramean general could not be aware that he owes his victories to YHWH.
2. the land of Israel. This designation is actually unusual and in all likelihood reflects the perception of the Arameans.
3. Would that my master might come before the prophet. The Hebrew has only the implied verb “be.” To be or stand before someone implies a relationship of deference or even subservience, and the idiom recurs in the story. One notes that the captive Israelite girl appears to be on good terms with her Aramean mistress, evincing solicitude for her mistress’s husband.
skin blanch. The Hebrew tsaraʿat is traditionally translated as “leprosy,” but the leading symptom mentioned in this narrative and elsewhere is a complete loss of pigmentation, whereas leprosy involves lesions and lumps in the skin and sometimes a slightly paler color but not the ghastly whiteness of which the biblical texts speak. This is, then, a disfiguring skin disease that remains unidentified, and hence the present translation, here and elsewhere, coins a name not to be found in dermatological manuals that refers to the whiteness.
5. I shall send a letter to the king of Israel. The king of Aram decides to intervene on behalf of his general on the highest diplomatic level, king to king. He barely registers the advice that came from the captive girl to turn to the prophet because his letter to the king of Israel makes no mention of it, in consequence of which the Israelite king is panicked.
ten talents of silver and six thousand pieces of gold. This vast treasure is meant to be a gift or payment to the Israelite prophet.
7. he is seeking a pretext against me. Confronted with the bare request from the Aramean king in his very brief missive to cure Naaman, the Israelite king construes the entire maneuver as a trap: when he fails to cure Naaman, the king of Aram will attack him.
8. when Elisha … heard that the king of Israel had rent his garments. Word of this public gesture of mourning or grief would have quickly spread.
9. And Naaman came with his horses and his chariot. Now we learn that the general has come to Samaria with a full military retinue.
and stood at the entrance of Elisha’s house. Nevertheless, the distinguished general does not presume to march into the house of the man of God, but stands at the entrance, awaiting word. The word comes to him only through an intermediary, a messenger (evidently not Elisha’s personal attendant Gehazi).
11. he will surely come out and stand and call in the name of the LORD his God and wave his hand. Naaman had expected personal intervention by the prophet that involved invocation of the deity’s powerful name and magical hand gestures, probably over the “place” of the disease.
12. Are not Amanah and Parpar the rivers of Damascus better than all the waters of Israel? Damascus, after all, is situated at a fertile confluence of rivers, and to the Damascene eye, the Jordan is no more than a muddy rivulet. If simple bathing could cure the disease, he would have been better off doing it in Aram.
13. The prophet has spoken a great thing to you. They intuit that the ostensibly simple command to dip seven times in the Jordan is actually the direction for a miraculous cure.
How much more so. It is a great thing that can be effected through an easy act.
14. like the flesh of a young lad. There is an interesting echo of the phrase here, naʿar qaton, with the designation of the captive girl who gave the advice, naʿarah qetanah, “a young girl.”
15. stood before him. The posture, as noted above, is deferential.
there is no god in all the earth except in Israel. The miraculous cure converts the Aramean general into a monotheist.
16. I will not take it. Elisha does not seek payment for services. His payment is in the triumph of Naaman’s conversion.
17. let your servant be given two mules’ load of soil. Naaman assumes that proper sacrifice to YHWH can be offered only on the soil of Israel, and so he requests permission to take some of it back with him to Aram. Some scholars see in this a reflection of the quandary of the Israelites exiled after 721 B.C.E., though that is not a necessary inference.
18. the house of Rimmon. This is the temple of the national god of Aram, evidently a storm god.
to worship. Literally, “to bow down,” this gesture being a synecdoche for worship.
and he leans on my arm. Given Naaman’s position as accompanier of the king in the temple, which would be an official duty, he can scarcely avoid going through the outward motions of Rimmon worship.
21. Is all well? Seeing Elisha’s attendant running after him, Naaman is alarmed that something may be amiss as far as the prophet is concerned.
22. My master sent me. Gehazi is obliged to implement his greedy act by an outright lie: that his master needs some of the proffered gift for two newly arrived acolyte prophets. He does not dare ask for the whole splendid gift, though Naaman generously gives him twice the amount of silver he requested.
26. Did not my heart come along. At this juncture, for purposes necessary to the plot in which Gehazi’s base act is exposed, Elisha exercises clairvoyance.
olive trees and vineyards and sheep and cattle and slaves and slavegirls. These items, of course, are not part of the gift Gehazi extracted from Naaman, but Elisha implies that the talents of silver could serve to purchase these standard markers of wealth in the agricultural-pastoral society.
27. May Naaman’s skin blanch cling to you. In the final turn of the universalist screw in this story, the rapacious and dishonest Israelite is stricken with the disease of which the Aramean general, now a devout follower of the God of Israel, has been cured.
1And the acolyte prophets said to Elisha, “Look, the place where we dwell is too cramped for us. 2Let us, pray, go to the Jordan and each of us take from there one beam and make us a place to dwell there.” And he said, “Go.” 3And one of them said, “Be so kind, pray, as to go with your servants.” And he said, “I will go.” 4And he went with them, and they came to the Jordan and cut down trees. 5And it happened, as one of them was felling the beam, that the iron blade dropped into the water, and he cried out, “Woe, my master, it is borrowed!” 6And the man of God said, “Where did it fall?,” and he showed him. And he cut off a stick and flung it there, and the iron blade floated up. 7And he said, “Lift it up for yourself,” and he stretched out his hand and took it.
8And the king of Aram had been battling against Israel, and he took counsel with his servants, saying, “At such-and-such a place is my encampment.” 9And the man of God said to the king of Israel, saying, “Keep yourself from passing through this place, for the Arameans are deployed there.” 10And the king of Israel sent to the place of which the man of God had spoken to him and warned about it, and he kept himself from there more than once. 11And the king of Aram’s heart stormed over this thing, and he called to his servants and said to them, “”Will you not tell me? Who of ours is for the king of Israel?” 12And one of his servants said, “No, my lord the king! Rather, it is Elisha, the prophet who is in Israel, who can tell the king of Israel the very words you speak in your bedchamber.” 13And he said, “Go, see where he is, that I might send and fetch him.” And it was told to him, saying, “Look, he is in Dothan,” 14and he sent horses there and chariots and a heavy force, and they came by night and surrounded the town. 15And the man of God’s attendant woke early to rise up, and he went out, and, look, a force was drawn round the town, and horses and chariots. And his lad said to him, “Woe, my master, what can we do?” 16And he said, “Do not fear, for there are more with us than with them.” 17And Elisha prayed and said, “LORD, open his eyes, pray, that he may see.” And the LORD opened the lad’s eyes, and he saw, and look, the mountain was filled with horses and chariots of fire around Elisha. 18And they came down to him, and Elisha prayed to the LORD and said, “Strike this nation with blinding light.” And he struck them with blinding light according to the word of Elisha. 19And Elisha said to them, “This is not the way, and this is not the town. Come after me, that I may lead you to the man whom you seek.” And they went after him to Samaria. 20And it happened, when they came to Samaria, that Elisha said, “LORD, open the eyes of these people, that they may see.” And the LORD opened their eyes and they saw, and, look, they were in the midst of Samaria. 21And the king of Israel said to Elisha when he saw them, “Shall I indeed strike them down, my father?” 22And he said, “You shall not strike. Whom you have captured with your sword and your bow you may strike. Set out bread and water before them, that they may eat and drink and go to their master.” 23And he made a great feast for them, and they ate and they drank, and he sent them off, and they went to their master. And the raiding parties of Aram no longer came into the land of Israel.
24And it happened afterward that Ben-Hadad king of Aram gathered all his camp and came up and laid siege against Samaria. 25And there was a great famine in Samaria, and, look, they laid siege against it till a donkey’s head cost eighty pieces of silver and a quarter of a qab of pigeon-droppings five pieces of silver. 26And as the king of Israel was passing on top of the wall, a woman cried out to him, saying, “Rescue me, my lord the king!” 27And he said, “Don’t! Let the LORD rescue you. From where can I rescue you, from the threshing floor or from the winepress?” 28And he said to her, “What’s the matter with you?” And she said, “This woman said to me, ‘Give over your son, that we may eat him today, and my son we shall eat tomorrow.’ 29And we cooked my son and ate him and I said to her the next day, ‘Give over your son, that we may eat him,’ but she has hidden her son.” 30And it happened when the king of Israel heard the woman’s words, he rent his garments as he was passing on top of the wall, and the people saw, and, look, sackcloth was on his flesh underneath. 31And he said “So may God do to me and even more, if the head of Elisha son of Shaphat stays on him today.” 32And Elisha was sitting in his house and the elders were sitting with him. And he sent a man ahead of him before the messenger could come to him. And he had said to the elders, “Do you see that this murderer’s son has sent to take off my head? See, when the messenger comes, close the door and squeeze him against the door. Is that not the sound of his master’s footsteps after him?” 33He was still speaking with them when, look, the king came down to him and said, “This evil is from the LORD. What more can I hope for from the LORD?”
CHAPTER 6 NOTES
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1. Look, the place where we dwell is too cramped for us. From this petition, one may infer that Elisha as master prophet was responsible for decisions regarding the living arrangements of the acolyte prophets as well as for providing them with food. It also is evident that they constituted a sizable group.
3. Be so kind, pray, as to go with your servants. They feel dependent on his guidance and his sustaining presence.
5. Woe, my master, it is borrowed. An axehead was a valuable item, and we have already seen that the acolyte prophets were relatively poor.
6. the iron blade floated up. This particular intercession on behalf of a follower is, even more transparently than the previous one, an act of pure magic.
8. And the king of Aram had been battling against Israel. It is not possible to determine with any confidence which kings they are from these generalized terms. It also looks as if these episodes in sequence were originally independent stories collected and strung together editorially. There is no hint here that in the previous episode an Israelite prophet cured an Aramean general, who then went off happily, converted to monotheism.
his servants. The Hebrew term that has the general meaning of “servants” or “slaves” refers in royal contexts to the king’s courtiers, who may well be high officials.
9. Keep yourself from passing through this place. Elisha again exercises prophetic clairvoyance, a power duly recognized by the Aramean king’s courtiers in verse 12.
16. Do not fear, for there are more with us than with them. At this point, it is not yet clear that he is referring to supernatural forces. Elisha, more than any other of the early prophets, repeatedly resorts to miraculous powers. His master Elijah was obliged to flee for his life when Ahab sought to kill him, but Elisha when mortally threatened can immediately count on chariots of fire and mysterious cavalry.
17. LORD, open his eyes, pray, that he may see. Elisha, with his prophet’s vision, has already seen the supernatural army on the mountains. The narrative will go on to play with a counterpoint of opening the eyes and blinding them with dazzling light.
18. Strike this nation with blinding light. Blinding light, sanweirim, is also what the divine messengers at Sodom (Genesis 19:11) use to disable the mob of would-be rapists, and a connection between these two groups impelled by nefarious intention may be suggested.
19. the man whom you seek. Your targeting of a man of God is misconceived. If you are Israel’s enemy, let me show you Israel’s king.
20. And the LORD opened their eyes and they saw. Unlike the opening of the servant’s eyes, which enables him to see supernatural allies, what they see is that they are in the heart of the enemy capital, a potentially fatal place for them, as the king’s words in the next verse make clear.
23. And he made a great feast for them. The king, taking Elisha’s cue that these miraculously captured warriors are not legitimate prisoners of war, goes one better than the prophet’s instructions and lays out a generous feast for the Arameans, not merely bread and water.
25. And there was a great famine in Samaria. Starvation in besieged towns cut off from all food supplies was one of the great terrors of ancient warfare, a fact reflected in many biblical texts. The famine here is a counterpoint to the royal feast at the end of the preceding episode.
till a donkey’s head cost eighty pieces of silver and a quarter of a qab of pigeon-droppings five pieces of silver. The besieged population is so desperate for food that even the most inedible part of an unclean animal commands a prince’s ransom. Some scholars understand the term for pigeon-droppings as a reference to carob pods, but that dilutes the hyperbolic power of the statement—that even animal filth was consumed by the starving people, and at a stiff price. Qab is a unit of dry measure, probably a little over a liter.
26. Rescue me. This cry, hoshiaʿ, was the set term in pleading for justice from the king.
27. From where can I rescue you, from the threshing floor or from the winepress? These are, of course, places where food and drink are produced, and they are inaccessible to anyone in the besieged town. Thus the king assumes she is pleading for food. The phrase has the ring of a set idiom.
28. Give over your son, that we may eat him today. Cannibalism in time of siege is invoked a number of times in Prophetic poetry, and it appears to have been a reality in the ancient world, but only here do we get a direct representation of the grisly act in dialogue, as part of a narrative.
30. when the king of Israel heard … the woman’s words, he rent his garments. The situation of the two women, one asking for justice from the king after her child has been cannibalized, is reminiscent of the two whores with the dead child and the living child in 1 Kings 3. This king, however, has no option to exercise Solomonic wisdom after the woman’s child has been eaten, and instead, despairing, he rends his garments in an act of mourning.
sackcloth was on his flesh underneath. The king is wearing some sort of royal robe, but it has now been torn open, and the sackcloth beneath is visible.
31. So may God do to me and even more, if the head of Elisha son of Shaphat stays on him today. The king’s fury against Elisha may be triggered by his recognition of the prophet’s supernatural powers. If the man of God is able to blind and capture a heavy force of Aramean warriors, his failure to intervene on behalf of the besieged town must be a deliberately hostile act.
32. the elders were sitting with him. The elders would constitute a political group outside the monarchy, and harking back to the premonarchic period. They may even be a center of opposition to the king.
And he sent a man ahead of him. Again, he sees what is about to happen through clairvoyance.
the messenger. The term, which designates any agent, human or divine, here refers to an assassin, not to someone bringing a message.
this murderer’s son. This could well refer to Jehoram, the son of Ahab, whom Elijah excoriated as a murderer, though some scholars prefer to understand it as “murderous person.”
close the door and squeeze him against the door. Elisha reduces the would-be hit man to an object of farce, pinned between the door and the wall.
33. the king came down to him. The received text says “messenger,” malʾakh, but the king has been following close after his messenger, his footsteps audible, and in the next moment in this scene (7:2), we see the king, who has just been addressed by Elisha, leaning on the arm of his official. Malʾakh, then, is in all likelihood a scribal error for melekh, “king.” See the second comment on 2 Samuel 11:1, where the orthographic closeness of these two words is pointedly put into play.
1And Elisha said, “Hear the word of the LORD. Thus said the LORD: ‘At this time tomorrow, a seah of fine flour will sell for a shekel, and two seahs of barley for a shekel in the gate of Samaria.’” 2And the official on whose arm the king was leaning answered the man of God and said, “Look, the LORD is about to make casements in the heavens! Can this thing be?” And he said, “You are about to see with your own eyes, but you shall not eat from there.” 3And four men stricken with skin blanch were at the entrance to the gate, and they said to one another, “Why are we sitting here till we die? 4Should we say, ‘Let us come into the town,’ with famine in the town, we would die there, and if we stay here, we shall die. And now, come, let us slip off to the camp of Aram. If they let us live, we shall live, and if they put us to death, we shall die.” 5And they rose at twilight to go into the camp of Aram, and they came to the edge of the camp of Aram, and, look, there was no one there. 6And the LORD had made the sound of chariots, the sound of horses heard in the camp of Aram, the sound of a great force, and every man said to his comrade, “Look, the king of Israel has hired against us the Hittite kings and the kings of Egypt to come against us.” 7And they rose and fled at twilight, and they abandoned their tents and their horses and their donkeys in the camp just as it was, and they ran for their lives. 8And these men stricken with skin blanch came to the edge of the camp and came into one tent and ate and drank and carried away silver and gold and garments, and they went off and hid them, and they returned and came into another tent and carried things away from there and went off and hid them. 9And they said to each other, “We are not doing right. This day is a day of good tidings and we remain silent. If we wait till morning’s light, guilt will befall us. And now, come, let us go and tell it at the king’s house.” 10And they came and called out to the gatekeepers of the town and told them, saying, “We came into the camp of Aram, and, look, there was no one there and no human sound, only horses tethered and donkeys tethered, and tents just as they had been.” 11And the gatekeepers called and told it at the king’s house within. 12And the king arose in the night and said to his servants, “Let me tell you, pray, what the Arameans have done to us: they knew we were starving, and they have gone out of the camp to hide in the field, saying, ‘When they come out of the town we shall catch them alive and enter the town.’” 13And one of his servants answered and said, “Let them take, pray, five of the remaining horses that are left in the town—look, they are like all the multitude of Israel who are left in it; look, they are like all the multitude of Israel who have come to an end, and let us send and see.” 14And they took two teams of horses, and the king sent after the camp of Aram, saying, “Go and see.” 15And they went after them to the Jordan, and, look, the whole road was filled with garments and gear that the Arameans had flung down in their haste, and the messengers came back and told the king. 16And the people went out and plundered the camp of Aram, and so, a seah of fine flour sold for a shekel and two seahs of barley for a shekel, according to the word of the LORD. 17And the king had appointed over the gate the official on whose arm he had leaned, and the people trampled him in the gate and he died, as the man of God had spoken, as he had spoken when the king came down to him. 18And it happened when the man of God spoke to the king, saying, “Two seahs of barley will sell for a shekel and a seah of fine flour for a shekel at this time tomorrow in the gate of Samaria,” 19the official answered the man of God and said, “And look, the LORD is about to make casements in the heavens! Can such a thing be?” And he said, “You are about to see with your own eyes, but you shall not eat from there.” 20And so it happened to him, and the people trampled him and he died.
CHAPTER 7 NOTES
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1. a seah of fine flour will sell for a shekel. The prices stipulated here are the antithesis of the astronomic prices for virtually inedible stuff mentioned in 6:25. This is, then, a concrete way of saying that the deadly famine will suddenly come to an end. It should be kept in mind that in this early period, the shekel is not a coin but a weight of silver (about 11.5 grams). A seah is roughly 7.3 liters.
2. the official on whose arm the king was leaning. Since Naaman performs the same function for the king of Aram, one may infer that this was a set court duty for a high-ranking figure. But Naaman in mentioning this role of his has become a convinced believer in the power of YHWH, whereas this official is a doubter.
Look, the LORD is about to make casements in the heavens. This remark, which invokes a memorable phrase from the Flood story (Genesis 7:11), is obviously sarcastic, the idea being that Elisha imagines the LORD will somehow rain down food from the sky for the starving Israelites.
but you shall not eat from there. Elisha’s words are veiled, ominously hinting at the dire fate that will befall the official.
3. And four men stricken with skin blanch were at the entrance to the gate. This disfiguring skin disease was thought to be contagious, requiring quarantine, according to the laws of Leviticus. (But the requirement of quarantine is ignored in the case of a high-ranking figure such as Naaman.) The diseased men are thus outside the town, in a liminal space between the besieged city and the Aramean camp. The schadenfreude in this account of the flight of the Arameans is heightened by the fact that the discovery of their precipitous retreat is made by outcasts.
4. If they let us live, we shall live. Given that they are bound to die of starvation either inside the town or outside the walls, they decide that they may as well throw themselves on the mercy of the Arameans, who might just feed them and let them live rather than kill them.
6. the king of Israel has hired against us the Hittite kings and the kings of Egypt. If this story of an Aramean army renouncing a siege has a historical kernel, it would be here—that an alliance of kings induced the Arameans to retreat. In their fearful dialogue, they make the monarchs of both Egypt and the Hittites plurals.
7. they … fled at twilight. As in many languages, the Hebrew word for twilight, neshef, can refer either to sunset or dawn. Here the likely scenario is that the Arameans depart as the sun sets, their flight thus unseen from the town; the diseased men enter the camp just after the besiegers have fled; they then bring the report of what they have seen to the king in the middle of the night.
9. guilt will befall us. The Israelites will berate them, or worse, for not having brought the news at once of the flight of the Arameans.
10. the gatekeepers. The Hebrew shows a singular noun, but “to them” is unambiguously plural. In the next verse, “gatekeepers” has the plural ending. The gates of the town were of course bolted, and so the diseased men had to make a special plea to the gatekeepers to be admitted within in order to bring their great news to the king. The gatekeepers do not let them in, but carry the news to the king.
12. Let me tell you, pray, what the Arameans have done to us. True to the fearful character that the king of Israel exhibited when he received the letter from the king of Aram about curing Naaman, he now concludes that this is a trap the Arameans have set to lure the Israelites outside the town.
13. five of the remaining horses that are left in the town. The implication is that most of the horses have been eaten. Some scholars think that “five” does not indicate a precise number but means “a few.”
look, they are like all the multitude of Israel. The repetition of this clause in immediate sequence might be an inadvertent scribal duplication (dittography), though it could equally be an expression of the speaker’s emotional turmoil in contemplating the terrible fact that there are so few survivors in the town.
they are like all the multitude of Israel who have come to an end. In the first iteration of this clause, the verb is “who are left.” Now it is “who have come to an end.” There is a grim overlap between surviving and dying: if the horses are like the people, barely surviving and on the way to joining those who have already died, there is nothing lost in sending them out on this mission.
14. two teams of horses. This seems the likely sense of the Hebrew, which is literally “two chariots of horses.”
15. And they went after them to the Jordan. What may be happening is that the horses are sent down the road, with the king’s men driving them from behind with cries and perhaps long whips, ready to fall back if the horses are spotted by Aramean troops. They evidently bypass the empty camp, where they fear an ambush, and discover—a significant use of the presentative “look” to mark their visual point of view—evidence that the flight is real in the garments and gear strewn over the road.
17. the people trampled him in the gate. This is a credible detail: the people, on the point of death by starvation, stampede through the gate to get at the food and riches they have heard are available in the Aramean camp (or to get to those who have already expropriated the flour and are selling it at the prices announced in the previous verse), and so they inadvertently trample the official. Elisha’s obscure prophecy is now violently fulfilled.
18. two seahs of barley will sell for a shekel and a seah of fine flour for a shekel. The story concludes with an elaborate verbatim repetition of Elisha’s prophecy and the words of the official. The only variation is that here the barley is first, the fine flour second, and the particle that means “and” is added to the official’s first word. In this instance, the point of the repetition with no substantive changes is to underscore how the general prophecy, and then the prophecy specifically addressed to the official in rebuke of his skepticism, are literally and completely fulfilled.
1And Elisha had spoken to the woman whose son he revived, saying, “Arise and go, you and your household, and sojourn wherever you would sojourn, for the LORD has called forth famine and it actually has come to the land for seven years.” 2And the woman arose and did according to the man of God’s word, and she went, she and her household, and sojourned in the land of the Philistines seven years. 3And it happened at the end of seven years that the woman came back from the land of the Philistines, and she went out and cried to the king for her house and for her field. 4And the king was speaking to Gehazi, the man of God’s lad, saying, “Recount to me, pray, all the great things that Elisha did.” 5And it happened as he was recounting to the king that Elisha revived the dead, that, look, the woman whose son he had revived came crying out to the king for her house and for her field. And Gehazi said, “This is the woman, and this is her son whom Elisha revived.” 6And the king asked the woman, and she recounted to him, and he gave her a certain eunuch, saying, “Return all that is hers and all the yield of the field from the day she left the land till now.”
7And Elisha came to Damascus, with Ben-Hadad king of Aram ill, and it was told to him, saying, “The man of God has come here.” 8And the king said to Hazael, “Take tribute in your hand and go to meet the man of God and inquire of the LORD through him, saying, ‘Will I survive this illness?’” 9And Hazael went to meet him and took tribute in his hand, from all the bounty of Damascus, a load of forty camels, and he came and stood before him and said, “Your son Ben-Hadad king of Aram has sent me to you, saying, ‘Will I survive this illness?’” 10And Elisha said to him, “Go, say to him, ‘You will surely survive,’ but the LORD has shown me that he is doomed to die.” 11And his face froze and he was dumbfounded a long time, and the man of God wept. 12And Hazael said, “Why is my lord weeping?” And he said, “Because I know the harm that you will do to the Israelites. Their fortresses you will send up in flames, and their young men you will slay by the sword, and their infants you will smash, and their pregnant women you will split open.” 13And Hazael said, “How could your servant, a dog, do this great thing?” And Elisha said, “The LORD has showed you to me as king over Aram.” 14And he went from Elisha and came to his master, and he said to him, “What did Elisha say to you?” And he said, “He said, ‘You will surely survive.’” 15And it happened the next day that he took a cloth and soaked it in water and spread it over his face, and he died. And Hazael became king in his stead.
16And in the fifth year of Jehoram son of Ahab king of Israel—Jehoshaphat had been king of Judah—Jehoram son of Jehoshaphat became king, king of Judah. 17He was thirty-two years old when he became king, and he was king in Jerusalem eight years. 18And he went in the way of the kings of Israel, as the house of Ahab had done, for Ahab’s daughter had become his wife, and he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD. 19But the LORD did not want to destroy Judah, for the sake of David His servant, as He had said to him to grant a lamp for his sons perpetually. 20In his days did Edom rebel from under the hand of Judah, and they set a king over themselves. 21And Jehoram crossed over to Zair, all the chariots with him, and it happened that as he arose in the night, the Edomites surrounding him struck him, and the captains of the chariots, and the troops fled to their tents. 22And Edom has rebelled from under the hand of Judah until this day. Then did Libnah rebel at that time. 23And the rest of the acts of Jehoram and all that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Judah? 24And Jehoram lay with his fathers and was buried in the City of David, and Ahaziah his son became king in his stead. 25In the twelfth year of Jehoram son of Ahab king of Israel, Ahaziah became king, king of Judah. 26Ahaziah was twenty-two years old when he became king, and he was king one year in Jerusalem. And his mother’s name was Athaliah daughter of Omri king of Israel. 27And he went in the way of the house of Ahab and did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD like the house of Ahab, for he was kin by marriage to the house of Ahab. 28And Jehoram son of Ahab went to battle with Hazael king of Aram at Ramoth-Gilead, and the Arameans struck down Jehoram. 29And King Jehoram came back to heal in Jezreel from the blows that the Arameans had struck him at Ramah when he did battle with Hazael king of Aram, and Ahaziah son of Jehoram king of Judah had gone down to see Jehoram son of Ahab in Jezreel, for he was ill.
CHAPTER 8 NOTES
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1. And Elisha had spoken to the woman. The syntax and the form of the Hebrew verb indicate a pluperfect, as reflected in the translation—a careful indication of tense because the action about to be reported unfolds seven years after Elisha’s words to the woman. Oddly, in this episode she is never referred to as “the Shunammite.”
4. And the king was speaking to Gehazi. There is no hint here that Gehazi has been stricken with a ghastly skin disease. This is one of several indications that the stories about Elisha brought together in this cycle probably originated independently. The fact that Gehazi is a presence in the court recounting the great acts of his master has led some interpreters to infer that in this particular story Elisha is assumed to have died.
5. crying out to the king. The Hebrew verb used here has a technical sense of making a plea for justice from the king.
for her house and for her field. These substantial possessions have obviously been seized by others during her seven years’ absence.
6. a certain eunuch. Although this is the plain meaning of the Hebrew noun saris, it is possible that the term came to designate a particular kind of court official, without reference to genital mutilation.
all the yield of the field from the day she left the land till now. She is legally entitled not only to resume possession of the land but to receive all the profit made from it during her absence.
8. Take tribute in your hand and go to meet the man of God. If there is any continuity between this story and the story of Naaman, Elisha’s powers would be well-known and respected in the Aramean court.
inquire of the LORD through him. Ben-Hadad does not assume that YHWH is the one and only God, but he has reason to think that this Hebrew deity served by Elisha has great potency.
9. a load of forty camels. This makes the tribute a very grand gift.
10. Go, say to him, “You will surely survive,” but the LORD has shown me that he is doomed to die. Elisha’s response is devious: you can tell him he will survive his grave illness, which will be technically true because he is to die from quite a different cause. Some interpreters imagine that Elisha is encouraging Hazael to assassinate Ben-Hadad, but this is implausible because Elisha foresees that when he becomes king, Hazael will ravage the people of Israel. What has happened is simply that God has revealed to him both Ben-Hadad’s fate and the future course of war between Aram and Israel.
11. And his face froze. This is the likely sense of the somewhat obscure Hebrew, which is literally, “and he made his face stand [still].”
and he was dumbfounded. The received text shows wayasem, “and he put.” But two Hebrew manuscripts and the Vulgate have wayishom, to be desolate or dumbfounded, which is much more likely. The subject of both these verbs must be Hazael, who is astounded, and at a loss, to hear Elisha’s stark prophecy.
13. How could your servant, a dog, do this great thing? The humble self-designation reflects the fact that Hazael, though he is some sort of court official, is not of the royal line. In an inscription by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, Hazael is in fact referred to as “son of no one.” One notes that he has no moral compunctions about the prospect of perpetrating the most barbaric cruelties on the men, women, and infants of Israel; on the contrary, these were common acts in military conquest and thus part of what constituted a “great thing” that he is not sure he is worthy to do.
The LORD has showed you to me as king over Aram. These words may not be intended to instigate the assassination, but they certainly have the effect of giving Hazael the idea.
15. he took a cloth and soaked it in water and spread it over his face. The subject of the verb is Hazael. He kills the king by suffocating him (there will be no blood visible and perhaps the courtiers will conclude that Ben-Hadad died of his illness). The king, of course, in his greatly weakened state is in no shape to resist the murderous act.
21. as he arose in the night, the Edomites surrounding him struck him. The Masoretic Text reads: as he arose in the night, he struck the Edomites surrounding him. This reading may reflect scribal wishful thinking. To begin with, it is syntactically peculiar, and the clear indication is that the Israelites were defeated in a successful rebellion by the Edomites. Furthermore, the “troops,” ʿam, who flee to their tents—that is, to their homes—is a term generally referring to Israelite troops, not, as it appears here in the received text, to Edomites.
26. his mother’s name was Athaliah daughter of Omri. In verse 18 she is identified as Ahab’s daughter, though perhaps the Hebrew bat could encompass granddaughter. In any case, the familial connection through marriage with the house of Ahab leads to trouble.
1And Elisha the prophet had called to one of the acolyte prophets and said to him, “Gird your loins and take this cruse of oil in your hand and go to Ramoth-Gilead. 2And you shall come there and see there Jehu son of Jehoshaphat son of Nimshi. And you shall come and raise him up from the midst of his brothers and bring him into the inner chamber. 3And you shall take the cruse of oil and pour it on his head and say, ‘Thus said the LORD: I have anointed you king over Israel.’ And you shall open the door and flee and you shall not wait.” 4And the lad went, the prophet lad, to Ramoth-Gilead. 5And he came and, look, the commanders of the force were sitting there, and he said, “I have a word for you, commander.” And Jehu said, “For whom among all of us?” And he said, “For you, commander.” 6And he rose and entered the house and poured oil on his head and said to him, “Thus said the LORD God of Israel: ‘I have anointed you king over the LORD’s people, over Israel. 7And you shall strike down the house of Ahab your master, and I will be avenged for the blood of My servants the prophets and for the blood of all the LORD’s servants from the hand of Jezebel. 8And all the house of Ahab shall perish, and I will cut off from Ahab every pisser against the wall and ruler and helper in Israel. 9And I will make the house of Ahab like the house of Jeroboam son of Nebat and like the house of Baasha son of Ahijah. 10And Jezebel the dogs shall devour in the field of Jezreel, with none to bury her.’” And he opened the door and fled. 11And Jehu had gone out to his master’s servants, and someone said to him, “Is all well? Why did this madman come to you?” And he said to them, “You know this man and how he talks.” 12And they said, “It’s a lie! Tell us, pray.” And he said, “Thus and so he said to me, saying, ‘Thus said the LORD: “I have anointed you king over Israel.”’” 13And they hastened and each of them took his garment and they put them beneath him on the top of the stairs, and they blew the ram’s horn and said, “Jehu is king.” 14And Jehu son of Jehoshaphat son of Nimshi plotted against Jehoram, and Jehoram had been on watch at Ramoth-Gilead—he and all Israel—against Hazael king of Aram. 15And King Jehoram had gone back to Jezreel to heal from the blows that the Arameans struck him when he did battle with Hazael king of Aram. And Jehu said, “If you agree, let no fugitive come out of the town to tell in Jezreel.” 16And Jehu mounted and went to Jezreel, for Jehoram was in bed there, and Ahaziah king of Judah had gone down to see Jehoram. 17And the lookout was stationed on the tower in Jezreel, and he saw Jehu’s throng as it came, and he said, “I see a throng.” And Jehoram said, “Take a horseman and send out to meet them and say, ‘Do you come in peace?’” 18And the horseman went to meet him and said, “Thus said the king: ‘Do you come in peace?’” And Jehu said, “What do you have to do with peace? Turn round behind me!” And the lookout told, saying, “The messenger came to them and has not come back.” 19And he sent a second horseman, and he came to them and said, “Thus said the king: ‘Do you come in peace?’” And Jehu said, “What do you have to do with peace? Turn round behind me.” 20And the lookout told, saying, “He came to them and has not come back, and the driving is like Jehu son of Nimshi’s driving, for he drives madly.” 21And Jehoram said, “Hitch up!” And his chariot was hitched up, and Jehoram king of Israel, and Ahaziah king of Judah went out, each in his chariot, and they went out to meet Jehu and found him in the field of Naboth the Jezreelite. 22And it happened when Jehoram saw Jehu that he said, “Do you come in peace, Jehu?” And he said to him, “What do the whoring of Jezebel your mother and her abundant witchcraft have to do with peace?” 23And Jehoram whipped round the reins and fled, and he said to Ahaziah, “Treachery, Ahaziah!” 24And Jehu bent the bow in his hand and struck Jehoram between his shoulders, and the arrow came out through his heart, and he collapsed in his chariot. 25And he said to Bidkar his officer, “Bear him off, fling him into the field of Naboth the Jezreelite. For remember! You and I rode side by side after Ahab his father, and the LORD delivered this message about him: 26‘I surely saw the blood of Naboth and his sons last night,’ says the LORD, ‘and I will pay you back in this field,’ says the LORD. And, now, bear him off, fling him into the field according to the word of the LORD.” 27And Ahaziah king of Judah had seen, and he fled on the road to Beth-Gan, and Jehu pursued him and said, “Him, too, strike down.” And they struck him in the chariot on the Ascent of Gur which is by Jibleam, and he fled to Megiddo and died there. 28And his servants took him by chariot to Jerusalem and buried him there in his grave with his fathers in the City of David. 29And in the eleventh year of Jehoram son of Ahab, Ahaziah had become king over Judah. 30And Jehu came to Jezreel, and Jezebel had heard, and she put kohl round her eyes and did up her hair and looked out through the window. 31And Jehu had entered the gate, and she said, “Is all well, you Zimri, killer of his master?” 32And he lifted his face toward the window and said, “Who is with me, who?” And two or three eunuchs looked down at him. 33And he said, “Push her out.” And they pushed her out, and her blood splattered against the wall and on the horses, and they trampled her. 34And he came and ate and drank, and he said, “Look to this cursed creature and bury her, for she is the daughter of a king.” 35And they went to bury her, but they found of her only the skull and the legs and the palms of the hands. 36And they came back and told him, and he said, “It is the word of the LORD that He spoke through His servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, ‘In the field of Jezreel the dogs shall devour the flesh of Jezebel. 37And Jezebel’s carcass shall be like dung upon the ground in the field of Jezreel, so that they cannot say, “This is Jezebel.”’”
CHAPTER 9 NOTES
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2. you shall come there and see there Jehu son of Jehoshaphat. All along, prophets have been involved in power struggles around the throne, but Elisha’s initiative in this instance is the most blatant of these involvements: he sends one of his people to anoint Jehu as king and to prompt Jehu to assassinate the reigning king, Jehoram.
bring him into the inner chamber. The actual anointment is clandestine, and the acolyte prophet is accordingly enjoined to flee once he has performed the act, lest there be an adverse reaction on the part of the military people around Jehu when they learn what has occurred.
8. I will cut off from Ahab every pisser against the wall. This pungent epithet for males, reserved for curses, is usually pronounced by human speakers but here is used by God in the momentum of the curse-formula.
11. his master’s servants. There is an ironic point in the use of this designation for Jehu’s fellow officers. “His master” would have to be the king, against whom Jehu is about to rebel, abetted by the other commanders of the army.
Why did this madman come to you? The groups of prophets, bonded together in a kind of guild, were known for working themselves into ecstatic states, often with the help of musical instruments, as the two stories of Saul among the prophets in 1 Samuel illustrate. Calling a prophet a madman, then, makes perfect sense, and that equation occurs elsewhere in biblical literature.
12. It’s a lie. The other officers immediately see that Jehu’s response to their question about the acolyte prophet (“You know this man and how he talks”) is an evasion. Jehu then feels constrained to divulge the truth about his clandestine anointment, counting on their support.
13. each of them took his garment. What they appear to be doing is constructing a kind of improvised throne, seating him on the top of the stairs. This is a literal realization of Elisha’s injunction regarding Jehu to “raise him up from the midst of his brothers.”
the top of the stairs. The Hebrew gerem hamaʿalot is unique to this verse and its meaning has been inferred from the context. In modern Hebrew, gerem has been adopted for “stairwell.”
14. Jehu … plotted against Jehoram. As the details of the narrative make clear, the conspiracy is a military coup whereby Jehu, as one of the army officers, seizes the throne after killing its occupant.
Jehoram. The Hebrew here and at several other points uses a shortened form, Joram, but the translation, to avoid confusion, shows the full form of the name throughout.
15. If you agree. This is probably no more than a polite way of delivering an order, though it is possible that Jehu does not fully trust his fellow officers to follow his commands in implementing the coup, despite their gesture of support in elevating him on the improvised throne.
17. Jehu’s throng. The word choice is realistic: from the distance, the lookout is able to identify a crowd of advancing soldiers, which he correctly assumes to be led by Jehu.
18. What do you have to do with peace? Jehu’s implacably hostile intentions are manifest in his dialogue.
Turn round behind me. He also makes clear that he is the stronger party, and that the messenger had better abandon Jehoram and join the usurper.
20. the driving is like Jehu son of Nimshi’s driving, for he drives madly. The lookout is too far off to see Jehu’s face but can recognize his wild style of driving a chariot. In this we get a new element of characterization of Jehu: he is known, at least in royal circles, for riding in his chariot at breakneck speed. This wild energy is of a piece with his quickness as an assassin, about to be manifested.
21. And Jehoram said, “Hitch up!” In still another instance of the pattern of two repetitions with a divergence in the third repetition, Jehoram, after the defection of the two messengers, goes out himself to parlay with Jehu, naïvely imagining they can come to terms.
and Ahaziah king of Judah went out. Exhibiting what will prove to be fatal imprudence, Ahaziah chooses to express his solidarity with Jehoram by joining him in going to meet Jehu.
22. What do the whoring of Jezebel your mother and her abundant witchcraft have to do with peace? In this switch from the twice-repeated formula, Jehu makes himself the mouthpiece of Elisha’s prophetic wrath against the whole house of Ahab. “Whoring” may mean, as it often does elsewhere in the Bible, going after strange gods, although an innuendo of sexual promiscuity is distinctly possible—calling a man’s mother a whore to his face is, after all, an especially blatant insult.
23. whipped round the reins. The literal sense is “turned over his hands.”
24. struck Jehoram between his shoulders. There is no chivalry in this efficient killing: Jehu shoots the fleeing Jehoram in the back.
25. You and I rode side by side after Ahab his father. This is a piece of delayed exposition that sharpens our sense of Jehu’s animus toward Jehoram: he and Bidkar were actually present when Ahab expropriated the field of Naboth after his judicial murder.
26. the blood of Naboth and his sons. No sons were mentioned in the story of the killing of Naboth. Either this detail reflects a variant version of the story, or the sons, fatherless and landless, are considered as good as dead.
27. Him, too, strike down. Jehu shows Machiavellian ruthlessness here. Ahaziah king of Judah was in no way involved in the egregious crimes, cultic and moral, of the house of Ahab, but he became Jehoram’s ally, and, as such, he might be a potential threat to Jehu, who therefore makes sure to have him killed.
And they struck him. This phrase (a single Hebrew word) is absent from the received text but appears in three ancient versions as well as in two Hebrew manuscripts. Without it, the sentence is semantically and syntactically incoherent.
28. buried him there in his grave with his fathers. Unlike Jehoram, who is flung into the field his father stole, there to be devoured by scavengers, Ahaziah is granted a proper burial.
30. she put kohl round her eyes and did up her hair. Though some interpreters take this as an expression of her desire to show a noble appearance, it looks more like an effort at the very end to exhibit her female attractiveness, thus picking up the sexual sense of “the whoring of Jezebel.”
31. you Zimri, killer of his master. Confronted by the man who has killed her son and who she must know is now determined to kill her, Jezebel remains fierce and contemptuous. Zimri (1 Kings 16:8–18) slaughtered the whole house of Baasha and usurped the throne but was himself killed seven days later.
32. Who is with me, who? As with Jehoram’s two messengers, Jehu counts on the fact that the attendants of the house of Ahab, seeing his superior force, will turn against their masters. Pointedly, Jehu does not deign to answer Jezebel’s biting words to him.
two or three eunuchs. As before, these may simply be court officials.
34. Look to this cursed creature. The Hebrew uses merely the feminine indicative haʾarurah hazo’t (“this cursed one”) to express contempt.
bury her, for she is the daughter of a king. Although Jehu despises Jezebel, he is conscious of the respect due to royal personages—perhaps out of self-interest since he has just become king himself. For the moment, he puts out of his mind the explicit prophecy that has been delivered to him (verse 10), “And Jezebel the dogs shall devour in the field of Jezreel, with none to bury her.”
36. It is the word of the LORD. After the fact, Jehu, though he has just appeared to be concerned that Jezebel receive a proper burial, affirms her being consumed by canine scavengers as a fitting fulfillment of God’s curse on her.
37. so that they cannot say, “This is Jezebel.” There may be a political angle to this fulfillment of the curse: nothing recognizable of Jezebel’s body is left, nothing for any potential loyalists to venerate (as the Bolsheviks reduced the murdered family of the Czar to ashes for just this reason).
1And Ahab had seventy sons in Samaria. And Jehu wrote letters and sent them to the rulers of Samaria, to the elders of the town and to Ahab’s tutors, saying, 2“And now, when this letter comes to you, and the sons of your master are with you, and the chariots and the horses are with you, and the fortified towns and the weapons, 3you shall see to the best and the most fitting of your master’s sons and put him on his father’s throne, and battle for your master’s house.” 4And they were very, very afraid, and they thought, “Look, two kings could not stand up against him, and how can we stand?” 5And he who was appointed over the palace and he who was appointed over the town and the elders and the tutors sent to Jehu, saying, “We are your servants, and all that you say to us we shall do. We shall make no one king. Do what is good in your eyes.” 6And he wrote them a letter again, saying, “If you are mine and heed my voice, take off the heads of the men who are your master’s sons and bring them to me at this time tomorrow in Jezreel.” And the king’s sons, seventy men, were with the town’s notables who had reared them. 7And it happened, when the letter came to them, that they took the king’s sons and slaughtered the seventy men and put their heads in baskets and sent them to him in Jezreel. 8And the messenger came and told him, saying, “They have brought the heads of the king’s sons.” And he said, “Put them in two piles at the entrance of the gate until morning.” 9And it happened in the morning that he came out and stood and said to all the people, “Well, you are innocent! Look, I plotted against my master and killed him, but who struck down all these? 10Know, then, that nothing will fail of the word of the LORD that He spoke against the house of Ahab, but the LORD has done what He spoke through his servant Elijah.” 11And Jehu struck down all who were left of the house of Ahab in Jezreel, and all his notables and his intimates and his priests, till he left him no remnant. 12And he rose and went and came to Samaria. When he was at Beth-Eked-ha-Roim on the way, 13Jehu encountered the kinsmen of Ahaziah king of Judah, and he said, “Who are you?” And they said, “We are the kinsmen of Ahaziah, and we are going down to see if all is well with the king’s sons and the sons of the queen mother.” 14And he said, “Seize them alive,” and they seized them alive, and they slaughtered them at the pit of Beth-Eked, forty-two men, he did not leave a man of them. 15And he went from there and encountered Jehonadab son of Rechab coming toward him, and he greeted him and he said to him, “Is your heart steadfast with me as my heart is with yours?” And he said to him, “It certainly is.” “Give me your hand.” And he gave him his hand, and he took him up to him in the chariot. 16And he said, “Come with me and see my zeal for the LORD.” And he drove him in his chariot. 17And he came to Samaria and struck down all who were left of Ahab in Samaria till he destroyed them, according to the word of the LORD that He spoke to Elijah. 18And Jehu gathered all the people and said to them, “Ahab served Baal a little. Jehu will serve him abundantly. 19And now, call to me all the prophets of Baal, all his servants and all his priests, let no one be missing, for I am about to have a great sacrifice to Baal—whoever is missing shall not live.” But Jehu dealt deviously in order to destroy the servants of Baal. 20And Jehu said, “Call a solemn assembly to Baal,” and they called. 21And Jehu sent out through all Israel, and all the servants of Baal came, and not a man remained who did not come. And they came to the house of Baal, and the house of Baal was filled from corner to corner. 22And he said to the one appointed over the wardrobe, “Bring out garments for all the servants of Baal,” and he brought out garments for them. 23And he came into the house of Baal, and Jehonadab son of Rechab with him, and he said to the worshippers of Baal, “Search and see if there are here with you any servants of the LORD besides the servants of Baal alone.” 24And they came to perform sacrifices and burnt offerings, and Jehu had set for himself eighty men outside. And he said, “Any man who escapes of the men whom I have brought into your hands—his life for that man’s life!” 25And it happened when he finished performing the burnt offering, that Jehu said to the sentries and to the captains, “Come, strike them down. Let no man get away.” And they struck them down by the sword, and the sentries and the captains flung them out, and they went to the town of the house of Baal. 26And they brought out the sacred pillars of the house of Baal and burned them. 27And they smashed the sacred pillar of Baal, and they smashed the house of Baal and turned it into latrines, to this very day. 28And Jehu destroyed Baal from Israel. 29But Jehu did not swerve from the offenses of Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had led Israel to offend—the golden calves that were in Bethel and in Dan. 30And the LORD said to Jehu, “Inasmuch as you have done well what is right in My eyes, according to all that was in My heart you have done to the house of Ahab, four generations of your sons shall sit on the throne of Israel.” 31But Jehu did not watch out to go by the teaching of the LORD God of Israel with all his heart. He did not swerve from the offenses of Jeroboam, who had led Israel to offend. 32In those days the LORD began to trim away Israel, and Hazael struck them down through all the borderland of Israel, 33from the Jordan, where the sun rises, all the land of Gilead, the Gadites and the Reubenites and the Manassites, from Aroer, which is by the Wadi of Arnon, and Gilead and Bashan. 34And the rest of the acts of Jehu, and all that he did, and all his valor, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Israel? 35And Jehu lay with his fathers, and they buried him in Samaria, and Jehoahaz his son became king in his stead. 36And the time Jehu had been king over Israel in Samaria was twenty-eight years.
CHAPTER 10 NOTES
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1. And Ahab had seventy sons. The number is formulaic, as in the case of the seventy sons of Gideon in the story of Abimelech (Judges 9). “Sons” in this instance probably refers to all the descendants of Ahab, encompassing at least two generations.
Ahab’s tutors. These are the tutors engaged by Ahab to look after the education and well-being of his sons and grandsons.
3. you shall see to the best and the most fitting of your master’s sons. With characteristic deviousness, Jehu does not initially present the elders and tutors with a command but with an ostensible exhortation to elect a new king who can lead the loyalists of the house of Ahab against the forces of Jehu. He of course counts on their knowledge of his just manifested lethal efficiency that will make this proposal strike terror in their hearts.
6. take off the heads of the men who are your master’s sons. After his oblique opening move, Jehu confronts them with the brutal command to commit mass murder on his behalf.
bring. The received text reads “come” (a different conjugation of the same verbal stem), but three ancient versions and a few Hebrew manuscripts show “bring,” which is more plausible because the killers send the heads in baskets rather than coming themselves.
8. Put them in two piles at the entrance of the gate. This grisly detail is another stroke of Jehu’s ruthless calculation: the bloody evidence of the elimination of the whole house of Ahab is set out for public exhibition. Presumably, no one will now dare to oppose Jehu.
9. Well, you are innocent. This declaration is of course sarcastic (and “well” has been added in the translation to intimate the tone). Jehu has managed to make the leaders of the Samaritan establishment his accomplices in murder: they can scarcely condemn him for killing the two kings when they are directly responsible for many more deaths.
10. the LORD has done what He spoke through His servant Elijah. Throughout the bloody trajectory Jehu traces, he justifies his acts as the fulfillment of the dire prophecy against the house of Ahab. At the same time, the ruthless elimination of any conceivable claimant to the throne from the line he has overthrown surely serves his political interests.
13. kinsmen. Though the Hebrew noun has the primary meaning of “brothers,” the narrative context here suggests that the more extended sense of the word is being used.
we are going down to see if all is well with the king’s sons and the sons of the queen mother. All of these sons have just been beheaded. The kinsmen of Ahaziah, perhaps because they have been on their way to visit the royal family of their allies in Samaria, appear not to have heard about the murder of Jehoram and Ahaziah, or they scarcely would be going to visit Jehoram’s kinfolk.
14. he did not leave a man of them. Jehu is absolutely consistent in this.
15. Jehonadab son of Rechab. The Rechabites were known for their ascetic practice (see Jeremiah 35:6–7), so perhaps Jehu embraces Jehonadab as an ally because he feels he can count on Jehonadab’s fanatic devotion to YHWH and his concomitant animosity toward the followers of Baal. Jehonadab is a variant form of “Jonadab”—the Hebrew sometimes uses one spelling and sometimes the other, as does this translation (cf. Jeremiah 35:4ff.).
Give me your hand. These words are evidently spoken by Jehu, even though there is no formula here for the introduction of speech.
17. he … struck down all who were left of Ahab. After the murder of the seventy sons, there evidently were still relatives of Ahab’s left to eliminate, unless “of Ahab” refers more broadly to people loyal to Ahab.
19. But Jehu dealt deviously. The narrator wants to make sure the audience immediately understands that Jehu’s proposal of a great sacrifice to Baal is mere subterfuge.
22. Bring out garments for all the servants of Baal. Extending the deception, Jehu presents festive garments to the followers of Baal, as if to enhance the pomp and ceremony of the occasion. “Servants” throughout this passage of course means “worshippers.”
24. his life for that man’s life. “That man” has been added for the sake of clarity.
25. they went to the town of the house of Baal. “Town” here is a little confusing because presumably the temple of Baal is in Samaria, where they all are (unless one assumes it was located in a nearby suburb). One proposed emendation is instead of ʿir, town, to read devir, inner sanctum.
27. they smashed the sacred pillar. There may be a textual confusion here, not only because of the switch from plural to singular pillar but also because a burnt pillar does not need to be smashed.
29. the golden calves that were in Bethel and in Dan. From the viewpoint of the Judahite writer, these cultic objects were pagan images, though in historical fact they were probably only an alternative iconography (in Judahite worship cherubim were used) to represent the sanctuary where YHWH dwelled. The failure to “swerve from the offenses of Jeroboam” mentioned earlier in this verse probably refers to the golden calves.
32. trim away Israel. The verb refers, quite accurately, to chopping off fringe areas.
through all the borderland of Israel. The noun gevul can mean either “border” or “territory.” Since the incursions of the Aramean king were limited to the area east of the Jordan occupied by the two and a half tribes, the word as it is used here probably is intended to make us think of a border region.
1And Athaliah, Ahaziah’s mother, saw that her son was dead, and she arose and destroyed all the royal seed. 2And Jehosheba, Ahaziah’s sister, the daughter of King Jehoram, took Joash, Ahaziah’s son, and stole him away from the king’s sons who had been put to death—him and his nurse—in the bedchamber, and they hid him from Athaliah, and he was not put to death. 3And he was with her hiding in the house of the LORD six years, while Athaliah was reigning over the land. 4And in the seventh year Jehoiada sent and took the commanders of the hundreds of the Cherithites and the sentries and brought them to him at the house of the LORD and made a pact with them and imposed a vow on them in the house of the LORD. And he showed them the king’s son. 5And he charged them, saying, “This is the thing that you must do: a third of you, who begin your weekly duty, are to keep guard at the king’s house, 6and a third in the Horse Gate and a third in the gate behind the sentries, and you shall keep watch over the house. 7And the two contingents among you, all who have finished their weekly duty, shall keep guard over the house of the LORD for the king. 8And you shall draw round the king, every man with his weapons in his hand. And whosoever enters the colonnades shall be put to death. And be you with the king when he goes out and when he comes in.” 9And the commanders of the hundreds did as all that Jehoiada the priest had charged, and each took his men, those beginning their weekly duty with those finishing their weekly duty, and they came to Jehoiada the priest. 10And the priest gave to the commanders of the hundreds the spears and the shields that were King David’s, which were in the house of the LORD. 11And the sentries stood, each with his weapons in his hand, from the south corner of the house to the north corner of the house, by the altar and by the house, all round the king. 12And he brought out the prince and put the crown on him and the regalia, and he made him king and anointed him, and they clapped their hands and said, “Long live the king!” 13And Athaliah heard the sound of the sentries and the people, and she came to the people at the house of the LORD. 14And she saw, and, look, the king was standing by the pillar as was the custom, and the commanders and the trumpets were by the king, and all the people of the land were rejoicing and blowing the trumpets. And Athaliah rent her garments and called out, “A plot, a plot!” 15And Jehoiada the priest charged the commanders of the hundreds, the mustered men of the force, and said to them, “Take her out from the colonnades, and put to death by the sword whoever comes after her,” for the priest said, “Let her not be put to death in the house of the LORD.” 16And they locked hands on all sides of her, and she came into the king’s house by way of the Horse Entrance and was put to death there. 17And Jehoiada made a pact between the LORD and the king and the people to be a people of the LORD, between the king and the people. 18And all the people of the land came to the house of Baal and smashed it, its altars and its images they utterly shattered, and Mattan priest of Baal they killed in front of the altars. And the priest appointed guards over the house of the LORD. 19And he took the commanders of the hundreds and the Cherithites and the sentries and all the people of the land, and they brought the king down from the house of the LORD, and they entered the king’s house through the Gate of the Sentries, and he sat on the royal throne. 20And all the people of the land rejoiced, while the town was quiet. And Athaliah they had put to death in the king’s house.
CHAPTER 11 NOTES
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1. saw. The Masoretic Text shows, in defiance of Hebrew grammar, “and saw,” but many Hebrew manuscripts omit the “and.”
and destroyed all the royal seed. This shocking act, which makes Athaliah far more horrendous than Medea, is not explained. One should keep in mind that Athaliah appears to be the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, and she takes after her mother in viciousness. Seeing that her son Ahaziah has been killed, she ruthlessly grasps an opportunity for herself by murdering her sons and grandsons so that she can seize the throne without rivals.
2. Jehosheba. She is both the aunt of the infant Joash whom she saves and wife of Jehoiada the priest, who plots the overthrow of Athaliah.
3. hiding in the house of the LORD. Jehosheba’s husband, as priest (evidently, high priest), would have had jurisdiction over the temple precincts and would have been able to devise a safe hiding place within the temple.
while Athaliah was reigning over the land. Given that she has violently usurped the throne, her reign is indicated only through a participial aside, and the formulaic statement (“and X was king/queen in his stead”) is avoided.
4. And in the seventh year Jehoiada sent. Perhaps the initiative occurs in the seventh year merely because it is the formulaic number for several years, though seven years would have given Joash time to grow from infant to young boy, at which point he could be placed on the throne with a regent as political executive.
the Cherithites. The received text says “Charite,” but this is in all likelihood a shortened form or error for Cherithites, Cretan warriors who served as a palace guard.
the sentries. This may be a designation for a particular group of palace guards. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “runners.”
6. the Horse Gate. The Hebrew says the Sur Gate, but the meaning of Sur is obscure, and verse 16 speaks of “the Horse Entrance,” mevoʾ hasusim. Thus, sur may well be an error for sus, “horse.”
8. be you with the king when he goes out and when he comes in. Jehoida pointedly refers to Joash as “the king,” even before his coronation, in order to publicly confirm his royal status. Joash, after having been kept in hiding almost seven years, must be zealously protected in this moment of transfer of power.
10. the shields. Others interpret the Hebrew term as “quivers” or “lances.”
12. the regalia. The Hebrew ʿedut usually means “covenant,” but it is hard to imagine that any form of the covenant could be placed on the new king, so it seems more likely that the word here is a homonym, derived from ʿadi, “ornament.”
14. all the people of the land. Some scholars contend that the Hebrew ʿam haʾarets refers to a particular group of Davidic loyalists in Jerusalem.
15. Let her not be put to death in the house of the LORD. Jehoiada, conscious of a cultic taboo, wants no blood shed within the Temple.
17. between the king and the people. Although this phrase sounds redundant, it may be that the repetition is deliberate, in order to emphasize the new solidarity between king and people that stands in contrast to Athaliah’s autocratic seizure of power.
18. the house of Baal. This is new information: that during Athaliah’s reign a functioning temple of Baal stood in Jerusalem. We are probably meant to infer that Athaliah, in addition to her murderous lust for power, followed the pagan ways of her mother Jezebel and encouraged a cult of Baal in Jerusalem.
Mattan priest of Baal. He has a good Hebrew name, so the functionaries of the cult of Baal in Jerusalem are Judahites, not foreign priests.
19. they brought the king down from the house of the LORD, and they entered the king’s house through the Gate of the Sentries. With the vicious queen dead, they can now bring Joash from the Temple, where he was hidden, in a grand triumphal march to the palace.
20. And Athaliah they had put to death in the king’s house. This concluding notice is not redundant. Cast in the pluperfect, it is a recapitulative statement of Athaliah’s death that also reminds us that as Joash is brought into the palace, the usurper who occupied it for seven years has been eliminated.
1Seven years old was Joash when he became king. 2In the seventh year of Jehu, Joash became king, and he was king in Jerusalem forty years. And his mother’s name was Zibiah from Beersheba. 3And Joash did what was right in the eyes of the LORD all his days, as Jehoiada the priest had taught him. 4But the high places were not removed—the people were still sacrificing and burning incense on the high places. 5And Joash said to the priests, “All the silver of sacred gifts that is brought to the house of the LORD, silver currency for each person the value in silver, and any silver that a man’s heart prompts him to bring to the house of the LORD—6let the priests take, every man from his acquaintance, and they shall repair the breaches of the house wherever a breach is found there.” 7And it happened in the twenty-third year of King Joash, that the priests did not repair the breaches of the house. 8And King Joash called to Jehoiada the priest and to the priests and said to them, “Why are you not repairing the breaches of the house? And now, do not take silver from your acquaintances but give it for repairing the breaches of the house.” 9And the priests agreed not to take silver from the people, and not to repair the breaches of the house. 10And Jehoiada took a certain chest and bored a hole in its door and set it by the altar on the right. When a man came into the house of the LORD, the priests, guardians of the threshold, put into it all the silver brought to the house of the LORD. 11And so, when they saw there was abundant silver in the chest, the king’s scribe came up, and the high priest, and they wrapped it in bundles and counted the silver that was found in the house of the LORD. 12And they gave the silver that had been measured out to those performing the tasks, who were appointed for the house of the LORD, and they brought it out to the carpenters and to the builders working in the house of the LORD, 13and to the masons and to the quarriers of stone to buy timber and quarried stone to repair the breaches of the house of the LORD, whatever was laid out for repair of the house. 14But no silver bowls, snuffers, basins, trumpets, nor golden vessels nor silver vessels were made in the house of the LORD from the silver brought to the house of the LORD. 15But they would give it to those performing the tasks, that with it they should restore the house of the LORD. 16And they made no reckoning for the men to whom they gave the silver, to those performing the tasks, as they worked in good faith. 17Silver for guilt offerings and silver for offense offerings would not be brought to the house of the LORD. It would be for the priests.
18Then did Hazael king of Aram come up and do battle against Gath and take it. And Hazael set his face to go up against Jerusalem. 19And Joash king of Judah took all the consecrated things that Jehoshaphat and Jehoram and Ahaziah his fathers, kings of Judah, had consecrated, all his consecrated things, and all the gold that was found in the treasuries of the house of the LORD and in the house of the king, and he sent them to Hazael king of Aram, and he went away from Jerusalem. 20And the rest of the acts of Joash, and all that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Judah? 21And his servants rose up and hatched a plot and struck down Joash in Beth-Millo going down to Silla. 22And Jozabad son of Shimat and Jehozabad son of Shomer his servants struck him down, and he died. And they buried him with his fathers in the City of David, and his son Amaziah became king in his stead.
CHAPTER 12 NOTES
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1. Seven years old. In the King James Version this appears as verse 21 of chapter 11.
3. as Jehoiada the priest had taught him. This clause is an addition to the recurrent formula about the behavior of the virtuous kings. It surely reflects a political reality in which Jehoiada the high priest served as regent while the child-king was growing up.
4. But the high places were not removed. This repeated formula registers the view of the editor of the Book of Kings that worship on the high places constituted actual or at least potential paganism and violated the principles of the exclusive legitimacy of the cult in the Jerusalem temple. In point of historical fact, Jehoiada as regent could certainly have taken steps to eliminate the local altars on the high places if he regarded them as sinful, so we may infer that he, his priestly colleagues, and the king did not think worship on the high places was forbidden.
5. All the silver. Though many translations represent kesef as “money” (its later sense), in the ninth century B.C.E. there were no coins in Israelite society, and probably still not in the period when this narrative was composed. What the writer has in mind are small weights of silver.
silver currency for each person the value in silver. The exact meaning of the entire formulation about silver, persons, and sacred gifts is somewhat obscure, and widely different interpretations have been proposed.
6. let the priests take, every man from his acquaintance. The gist of this royal order is that the gifts in silver brought to the Temple are no longer to be passed on to the priests for their personal use but are to be dedicated to repairs of the temple building. These new instructions may reflect a power struggle between the king and the priests, with the adult Joash seeking to break loose from the domination of his guardian and uncle, Jehoiada, as his direct challenge to the high priest in verse 8 seems to suggest.
9. and not to repair the … house. This is only an ostensible contradiction. The idea is that Joash doesn’t trust the priests to use the funds for the repair of the Temple. Instead, he will have all the collected silver placed in a chest, to be duly counted and paid out to the workers by a committee of two, one being the king’s scribe and personal representative and the other the high priest. They in turn pass the silver on to an appointed group (verse 12) that pays it out to the work crews.
11. they wrapped it in bundles and counted the silver. There would probably be bundles of like weights of silver. One sees that all precautions are taken that none of the donated silver be diverted for any use except the repair of the Temple.
17. It would be for the priests. This verse indicates a compromise with the priests. They no longer have access to general donations, but silver given for guilt offerings and offense offerings still goes to them.
19. And Joash king of Judah took all the consecrated things. This amounts to the payment of a high ransom to Hazael in order that he abandon his siege of Jerusalem. The title “king of Judah” is perhaps added here to make an ironic point, for Joash is scarcely behaving in a kingly fashion in emptying out the royal and temple treasuries in order to persuade a hostile king to relinquish his attack.
21. his servants. As elsewhere in royal contexts, these are court officials.
hatched a plot and struck down Joash. No explanation is given here for the conspiracy and regicide. In the parallel passage in 2 Chronicles 24:25, the killing of Joash is said to be an act of revenge for his killing the son of the now deceased Jehoiada. It is hard to know whether the report in Chronicles has a historical basis, but it does suggest a tradition in which the conspiracy was motivated by a conflict between king and priests, and it is possible that the two assassins were priests. Joash’s surrendering of the temple treasures and not just the royal treasures to the king of Aram could easily have alienated priestly circles.
1In the twenty-third year of Joash son of Ahaziah king of Judah, Jehoahaz son of Jehu became king over Israel in Samaria, for seventeen years. 2And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD and went after the offenses of Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had led Israel to offend. He did not swerve from it. 3And the LORD’s wrath flared up against Israel, and He gave them continuously into the hand of Hazael king of Aram and into the hand of Ben-Hadad son of Hazael. 4And Jehoahaz implored the LORD, and the LORD heeded him, for He saw Israel’s oppression, for the king of Aram oppressed them. 5And the LORD gave Israel a rescuer, and they came out from under the hand of Aram, and the Israelites dwelled in their tents as in former days. 6But they did not swerve from the offenses of the house of Jeroboam, who had led Israel to offend, the way in which he had gone, and the asherah, too, stood in Samaria. 7For Jehoahaz was left no troops except fifty horsemen and ten chariots and ten thousand foot soldiers, for the king of Aram had destroyed them and made them like dust to be trampled. 8And the rest of the acts of Jehoahaz and all that he did and his valor, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Israel? 9And Jehoahaz lay with his fathers, and they buried him in Samaria. And Joash his son was king in his stead.
10In the thirty-seventh year of Joash king of Judah, Joash son of Jehoahaz became king over Israel in Samaria for sixteen years. 11And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD, he did not swerve from all the offenses of Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had led Israel to offend, the way in which he had gone. 12And the rest of the acts of Joash and all that he did, and his valor with which he battled against Amaziah king of Judah, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Israel? 13And Joash lay with his fathers, and Jeroboam sat on his throne, and Joash was buried in Samaria with the kings of Israel.
14And Elisha had fallen ill with the illness of which he would die, and Joash king of Israel went down to him and wept in his presence and said, “My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and its horsemen!” 15And Elisha said to him, “Fetch a bow and arrows.” And he fetched him a bow and arrows. 16And he said to the king of Israel, “Set your hand on the bow.” And he set his hand, and Elisha placed his hands over the king’s hands. 17And he said, “Open the window to the east,” and he opened it. And Elisha said, “Shoot!” And he shot. And he said, “An arrow of rescue for the LORD, and an arrow of rescue against Aram! And you shall strike Aram in Aphek till its destruction.” 18And he said, “Take the arrows.” And he took them. And he said to the king of Israel, “Strike to the ground!” And he struck three times and he stopped. 19And the man of God was furious with him, and he said, “To strike five or six times—then you would have struck Aram till its destruction! And now, three times you shall strike Aram.” 20And Elisha died and they buried him, and the raiding parties of Moab came into the land, they came for a year. 21And as they were burying a man, they saw a raiding party and they flung the man into Elisha’s grave, and the man went and touched Elisha’s bones, and he revived and rose up on his feet. 22And Hazael king of Aram oppressed Israel all the days of Jehoahaz, 23and the LORD showed grace to them and pitied them and turned to them for the sake of His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and He did not desire to destroy them, He did not fling them away from His presence till now. 24And Hazael king of Aram died, and Ben-Hadad his son became king in his stead. 25And Joash came back and took the towns from the hand of Ben-Hadad son of Hazael which he had taken from the hand of Jehoahaz his father in battle. Three times did Joash strike him, and he brought back Israel’s towns.
CHAPTER 13 NOTES
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5. the LORD gave Israel a rescuer. The appearance of this familiar formula recurring in the Book of Judges is a little surprising here in the Book of Kings. It is unlikely that the formula would refer to an Israelite king. Though the “rescuer” might conceivably be an ad hoc military leader, it is doubtful that the political arrangements of the monarchy would have allowed the operation of such a Judge-like figure. One scholarly proposal is that the reference is to the Assyrian king, Adad-Nirari III, who assumed the throne in 810 B.C.E. and four years later launched a campaign against Aram. His incursions would have had the effect of loosening Aram’s grip on Israel.
7. ten thousand foot soldiers. Because the cavalry and the chariots of Israel, which has become a vassal to Aram, are reduced to a symbolic number (fifty and ten, respectively), it is unlikely that so large a number of infantry as ten thousand would have been allowed by their conquerors. Perhaps the text originally read not ʿaseret ʾalafim, “ten thousand,” but ʾalpayim, “two thousand.”
10–13. These four verses are a striking testimony to the use of formulas in the Book of Kings. Except for the names, there is not a word in the four verses that is not part of the recurrent formula. But there may be an editorial glitch here because after Joash receives his formulaic burial, he becomes an active figure in the narrative (13:14–25, 14:8–14), and then a second notice of his death is introduced (14:15–16).
14. My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and its horsemen. This evidently proverbial epithet for a leader, which Elisha himself had applied to Elijah when he was about to die (2 Kings 2:12), expresses Joash’s perception that Elisha has been a source of power and guidance for his kingdom.
15. Fetch a bow and arrows. As the king despairs because he is about to lose Elisha, the prophet gives him a portent that Joash will continue to triumph after the death of the man of God.
16. and Elisha placed his hands over the king’s hands. This looks like an act through which the prophet—repeatedly seen as a wonder worker—imparts something of his supernatural power to the king.
17. An arrow of rescue for the LORD. The shooting of the arrow thus becomes a prophetic symbol, a metonymy for the exercise of military might. The Hebrew teshuʿah, usually “rescue,” can mean “victory” in military contexts, but because Israel has been subjugated by Aram, “rescue” may be the more salient meaning here.
19. And now, three times you shall strike Aram. Joash will drive back Aram three times but fail to destroy it utterly. This detail of the beating of the arrows on the ground is meant to explain a historical difficulty: Elisha, given his unique power, could have prophesied, and intended to prophecy, total victory over Aram. In point of historical fact, Israel’s military success against Aram was partial and temporary. This failure is explained in folktale fashion as the failure of the principal agent to carry out the entire magical act expected of him by the man of God.
21. and the man went and touched Elisha’s bones, and he revived and rose up. The first clause is formulated as a kind of prolepsis: instead of “the body,” we have “the man”; and “he went and touched” makes the corpse sound as though it were already a living person. It should be noted that Elisha’s miracle-working power is imagined to be invested in his body, so that even after death he is able to work wonders. The Elisha cycle began with a (scandalous) episode in which he summoned bears to kill forty-two boys. Now, at the end of the cycle, his bones perform the opposite act of reviving the dead.
25. Three times did Joash strike him. The Elisha cycle concludes with two different manifestations of the posthumous power of the prophet. First, his bones impart life to the man who has died; then, the explicit terms of his prophecy to Joash, marked by the triple pounding of the arrows on the ground, are fulfilled on the battlefield.
1In the second year of Joash son of Joahaz king of Israel, Amaziah the son of Joash had become king, king of Judah. 2He was twenty-five years old when he became king, and twenty-nine years he was king in Jerusalem, and his mother’s name was Jehoaddan from Jerusalem. 3And he did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, but not like David his forefather; as all that Joash his father had done he did do. 4But the high places were not removed—the people were sacrificing and burning incense on the high places. 5And it happened, when the kingdom was firmly in his hand, that he struck down his servants who had struck down the king his father. 6But the sons of the killers he did not put to death, as it is written in the Book of the Teaching of Moses, as the LORD charged, saying, “Fathers shall not be put to death over sons, and sons shall not be put to death over fathers, but each man shall be put to death for his own offense.” 7He struck down Edom in Salt Valley, ten thousand of them, and he seized the Rock in the battle and called its name Jokthel to this day. 8Then did Amaziah send messengers to Joash son of Jehoahaz son of Jehu king of Israel, saying, “Come let us face each other down.” 9And Joash king of Israel sent to Amaziah king of Judah, saying, “The thistle which is in Lebanon sent to the cedar which is in Lebanon, saying, ‘Give your daughter to my son as wife,’ and the beast of the field which is in Lebanon came by and trampled the thistle. 10You indeed have struck down Edom, and you are carried away by your own heart. Enjoy your glory, and stay in your house. Why should you provoke evil, and you will fall, you and Judah with you?” 11But Amaziah did not heed. And Joash king of Israel came up, and they faced each other down, he and Amaziah king of Judah, in Beth-Shemesh, which is Judah’s. 12And Judah was routed by Israel, and every man fled to his tent. 13But Joash king of Israel caught Amaziah son of Joash son of Ahaziah king of Judah in Beth-Shemesh, and he came to Jerusalem and breached the wall of Jerusalem from the Gate of Ephraim as far as the Corner Gate, four hundred cubits. 14And he took all the gold and the silver and all the vessels that were found in the house of the LORD and in the treasuries of the house of the king, and all the hostages, and he went back to Samaria. 15And the rest of the acts of Joash that he did, and his valor with which he battled against Amaziah king of Judah, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Israel? 16And Joash lay with his fathers and was buried in Samaria with the kings of Israel. And Jeroboam his son became king in his stead. 17And Amaziah son of Joash king of Judah lived fifteen years after the death of Joash son of Joahaz king of Israel. 18And the rest of the acts of Amaziah, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Judah? 19And they hatched a plot against him in Jerusalem, and he fled to Lachish, and they sent after him to Lachish, and they sent after him to Lachish and put him to death there. 20And they bore him off on horses, and he was buried in Jerusalem with his fathers in the City of David. 21And all the people of Judah took Azariah, when he was sixteen years old, and they made him king in Amaziah his father’s stead. 22He it was who built Elath and settled it for Judah after the king lay with his fathers.
23In the fifteenth year of Amaziah son of Joash king of Judah, Jeroboam son of Joash became king, king over Israel, in Samaria, for forty-one years. 24And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD, he did not swerve from all the offenses of Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had led Israel to offend. 25He it was who brought back the territory of Israel from Lebo-Hamath to the Arabah Sea, according to the word of the LORD God of Israel which He spoke through His servant Jonah son of Amittai the prophet, who was from Gath Hepher. 26For the LORD had seen the very bitter affliction of Israel, and there was no ruler or helper, and none aiding Israel. 27And the LORD had not spoken to wipe out the name of Israel from under the heavens, but He rescued them by the hand of Jeroboam son of Joash. 28And the rest of the acts of Jeroboam and all that he did, and his valor with which he battled and brought back Damascus and Hamath to Judah in Israel, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Israel? 29And Jeroboam lay with his fathers, with the kings of Israel, and Zachariah his son became king in his stead.
CHAPTER 14 NOTES
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5. when the kingdom was firmly in his hand. After Amaziah’s father, Joash, was murdered, the son was installed on the throne because evidently the quarrel of the conspirators was with Amaziah personally and not with the Davidic dynasty. (In the northern kingdom, where there was no authorized dynasty, one royal line was repeatedly replaced by another after a coup.) But, understandably, the new king did not feel safe to move against his father’s killers until he had fully consolidated his power.
6. the Book of the Teaching of Moses. This designation almost certainly refers to Deuteronomy, which is here quoted almost verbatim (Deuteronomy 24:16). Deuteronomy, or its initial core, was not composed until around 621 B.C.E., so the comment here is an intervention in the older story of the Deuteronomistic editor. In point of political fact, Amaziah may have refrained from killing the offspring of the conspirators in order not to alienate the court circles from which they came.
8. Come let us face each other down. No reason is given for this provocative and imprudent military challenge. It has been suggested that Amaziah’s success against Edom (verse 7) may have encouraged him to think he could right old wrongs—perhaps a territorial dispute—with the northern kingdom. Joash’s words in verse 10 lend evidence to this interpretation.
9. The thistle … the cedar. This homey parable is vaguely reminiscent of the one declaimed by Jotham in Judges 9. As is often the case in biblical parables, the parabolic details match the situation to which they refer somewhat loosely. The request for the hand of the daughter does not entirely fit Amaziah’s eagerness for military confrontation, and both the cedar and the wild beast have to refer, rather awkwardly, to Joash.
13. Joash king of Israel caught Amaziah. From the subsequent narrative, one must infer that he then returned Amaziah to his Judahite subjects, but it is not explained why. Perhaps Joash thought it sufficient to humiliate the king of Judah and strip him of his treasures but did not want to give cause for still further embitterment between the two kingdoms.
breached the wall of Jerusalem. This huge breach in the walls of the town would of course have left it entirely exposed to attack.
19. And they hatched a plot against him. Once again, no reason is given for the determination of the conspirators—presumably people in the royal court—to kill the king. One possibility would be simmering resentment over his rash military provocation of the northern kingdom and its disastrous results—the breaching of the wall, the emptying of royal and temple treasuries. As with the assassination of Amaziah’s father, the hostility is directed against the king, not the dynasty, for his son is allowed to ascend the throne.
25. Jonah son of Amittai. The name of this prophet, about whom nothing is known beyond the mention of his prophecy here, is then picked up by a writer of the Second Commonwealth period for the central figure of the narrative Book of Jonah.
26. For the LORD had seen the very bitter affliction of Israel. The writer faces a quandary here: this Jeroboam is said to follow all the evil ways of Jeroboam I, yet the historical record evidently shows military triumphs in his reign. These are explained as God’s compassion for suffering Israel and His promise not to allow them to be destroyed, even under an evil king.
27. the LORD had not spoken to wipe out the name of Israel from under the heavens. One cannot be sure exactly when these words were written. In effect, with the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom in 721 B.C.E. (just two decades after the end of Jeroboam’s reign), Israel was wiped out, though perhaps one could say that its name remained.
28. brought back Damascus. The verb here is an extravagant flourish, for Damascus had not once been a possession of Israel. What is realistically indicated is some military success against the kingdom of Aram.
to Judah in Israel. This formulation of the Masoretic Text is enigmatic because only the most forced explanation could place Judah within Israel. The Peshitta lacks “to Judah” and reads “to Israel,” and this could be what the original text had.
1In the twenty-seventh year of Jeroboam king of Israel, Azariah son of Amaziah became king, king of Judah. 2Sixteen years old he was when he became king, and fifty-two years he was king in Jerusalem. And his mother’s name was Jecoliah from Jerusalem. 3And he did what was right in the eyes of the LORD as all that Amaziah his father had done. 4But the high places were not removed—the people were still sacrificing and burning incense on the high places. 5And the LORD infected the king and he was stricken with skin blanch till his dying day, and he dwelled in the quarantine house, and Jotham the king’s son was appointed over the palace, judging the people of the land. 6And the rest of the acts of Azariah and all that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Judah? 7And Azariah lay with his fathers, and they buried him with his fathers in the City of David, and Jotham his son became king in his stead.
8In the thirty-eighth year of Azariah king of Judah, Zachariah son of Jeroboam became king of Israel for six months. 9And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD as his forefathers had done. He did not swerve from the offenses of Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had led Israel to offend. 10And Shallum son of Jabesh hatched a plot against him and struck him down in the presence of the people and put him to death, and he became king in his stead. 11And the rest of the acts of Zachariah, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Israel? 12This was the word of the LORD that He spoke to Jehu, saying, “A fourth generation of yours shall sit on the throne of Israel.” And so it was. 13Shallum son of Jabesh had become king in the thirty-ninth year of Uzziah king of Judah, and he was king in Samaria for a month. 14And Menahem son of Gadi came up from Tirzah and came to Samaria and struck down Shallum son of Jabesh and put him to death, and he became king in his stead. 15And the rest of the acts of Shallum and his plot that he hatched, why, they are written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Israel. 16Then did Menahem strike Tapuah and everything in it and its territories from Tirzah, for it had not yielded, and he struck it, and its pregnant women he ripped apart. 17In the thirty-ninth year of Azariah king of Judah, Menahem son of Gadi became king over Israel in Samaria for ten years. 18And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD. He did not swerve all his days from the offenses of Jeroboam son of Nebat who had led Israel to offend. 19Pul king of Assyria came against the land, and Menahem gave Pul a thousand talents of silver so that his hand would be with him to make the kingdom firm in his hand. 20And Menahem exacted the silver from Israel, from all the prosperous men, to give to the king of Assyria, fifty shekels of silver from each man. And the king of Assyria turned back and did not stay there in the land. 21And the rest of the acts of Menahem and all that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Israel? 22And Menahem lay with his fathers, and Pekahiah his son became king in his stead. 23In the fiftieth year of Azariah, king of Judah, Pekahiah son of Menahem became king over Israel in Samaria for two years. 24And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD. He did not swerve from the offenses of Jeroboam son of Nebat who led Israel to offend. 25And Pekah son of Remaliah his officer hatched a plot against him and struck him down in the king’s house, with Argob and Arieh, and with him were fifty men of the Gileadites. And he put him to death and became king in his stead. 26And the rest of the acts of Pekahiah and all that he did, why they are written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Israel.
27In the fifty-second year of Azariah king of Judah, Pekah son of Remaliah became king over Israel in Samaria, for twenty years. 28And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD. He did not swerve from the offenses of Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had led Israel to offend. 29In the days of Pekah king of Israel, Tiglath-Pileser king of Assyria came and took Ijon and Abel-Beth-Maacah and Janoah and Kedesh and Hazor and Gilead and the Galilee, the whole land of the Naphtalite, and he exiled them to Assyria. 30And Hosea son of Elah hatched a plot against Pekah son of Remaliah and struck him down and put him to death, and he became king in his stead in the twentieth year of Jotham son of Uzziah. 31And the rest of the acts of Pekah and all that he did, why they are written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Israel.
32In the second year of Pekah son of Remaliah king of Israel, Jotham son of Uzziah became king, king of Judah. 33Twenty-five years old he was when he became king, and sixteen years he was king in Jerusalem. And his mother’s name was Jerusha daughter of Zadok. 34And he did what was right in the eyes of the LORD as all that Uzziah his father had done. 35But the high places were not removed. The people were still sacrificing and burning incense on the high places. He did build the Upper Gate of the house of the LORD. 36And the rest of the acts of Jotham that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Judah? 37In those days the LORD began to let loose against Judah Rezin king of Aram and Pekah son of Remaliah. 38And Jotham lay with his fathers and was buried with his fathers in the City of David his father. And Ahaz his son became king in his stead.
CHAPTER 15 NOTES
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5. he was stricken with skin blanch till his dying day. No reason is given for this terrible affliction: Azariah is said to have done what was right in the eyes of the LORD, apart from allowing worship on the high places to continue, as all his predecessors had done. One may conclude that we have here the report of a historical datum—that Azariah suffered from a disfiguring skin disease, presumed to be contagious, all his life. The fact that God is said to have done the afflicting simply reflects the general assumption of this and other biblical writers that all things are caused by God.
the quarantine house. The Hebrew name of this place appears to reflect a term that means “free.” It is a “free house” either because the condition of freedom is associated, as in one Ugaritic text, with death (here, a living death), or because someone in such a place is free of all civic obligations.
Jotham the king’s son was appointed over the palace. The Hebrew for “palace” is simply “house,” but it is clearly the king’s house, and here it is rendered as “palace” in order to avoid its seeming to refer to the quarantine house. In any case, Jotham becomes a kind of regent because of his father’s illness. Upon his father’s death (verse 7), he officially becomes king.
13. he was king … for a month. The northern kingdom by this point in history, in the eighth century B.C.E., exhibits extreme political instability—monarch after monarch is assassinated as coup follows coup. The Deuteronomistic editor makes some attempt to provide a theological explanation for these upheavals—“This was the word of the LORD that he spoke to Jehu”—but he cannot encompass all the rapid changes in this way. Thus no reason is given for the fact that Shallum reigns only a month before he is murdered by Menahem.
16. Tapuah. The received text reads “Tipsah,” a city on the eastern bank of the Euphrates that Menahem surely could not have reached. One version of the Septuagint shows, more plausibly, Tapuah, a town in the tribal region of Ephraim and Manasseh.
for it had not yielded. The Hebrew wording, literally, “it had not opened,” is a little odd.
and its pregnant women he ripped apart. This barbaric practice seems to have been embraced by several nations in the ancient Near East. See 2 Kings 8:13 and Amos 1:13, where it is vehemently denounced.
19. Menahem gave Pul a thousand talents of silver so that his hand would be with him to make the kingdom firm in his hand. Menahem pays a huge tribute to Pul, thus accepting vassal status. Having seized the throne by assassinating his predecessor, he could well need foreign support against opposing groups in the court.
25. Pekah. This actually is the same first name as Pekahiah, simply without the theophoric suffix.
with Argob and Arieh. These mystifying names have variously been interpreted as names of architectural structures within the palace, towns from which the killers came, and personal names.
29. and he exiled them to Assyria. Although the Assyrians sometimes merely reduced conquered kingdoms to vassal status, they followed a general imperial policy of exiling the conquered population in order to integrate the new territory as a province of the Assyrian empire. Assyrian inscriptions indicate that the westward thrust recorded here took place in 732 B.C.E., just a decade before the final destruction of the kingdom of Israel by Assyria and the exile of a large part of its population.
1In the seventeenth year of Pekah son of Remaliah, Ahaz son of Jotham became king, king of Judah. 2Twenty years old was Ahaz when he became king, and sixteen years he was king in Jerusalem, and he did not do what was right in the eyes of the LORD his God like David his forefather. 3And he went in the way of the kings of Israel, and even his son he passed through the fire like the abominations of the nations that the LORD had dispossessed before the Israelites. 4And he sacrificed and burned incense on the high places and on the hills and under every lush tree. 5Then did Rezin king of Aram and Pekah son of Remaliah king of Israel come up to Jerusalem for battle, but they were not able to battle against it. 6At that time Rezin king of Aram restored Elath to Aram and drove out the Judahites from Elath, while the Edomites came to Elath and dwelled there till this day. 7And Ahaz sent messengers to Tiglath-Pileser king of Assyria saying, “I am your servant and your son. Come up and rescue me from the hand of the king of Aram and from the hand of the king of Israel, who are risen against me.” 8And Ahaz took the silver and the gold that were in the house of the LORD and the treasuries of the king’s house, and he sent them to the king of Assyria as a bribe. 9And the king of Assyria heeded him, and the king of Assyria went up against Damascus and seized it and exiled its people to Kir, but Rezin he put to death. 10And King Ahaz went to meet Tiglath-Pileser in Damascus, and he saw the altar that was in Damascus, and Ahaz sent to Uriah the priest the image of the altar and its design in all its fashioning. 11And Uriah the priest built an altar according to all that King Ahaz had sent from Damascus, so did Uriah the priest do, until the return of King Ahaz from Damascus. 12And the king came from Damascus, and the king saw the altar, and the king approached the altar and went up on it. 13And he turned his burnt offering and his grain offering to smoke and poured out his libation and cast the blood of his well-being sacrifices on the altar. 14And the bronze altar that was before the LORD he moved forward from the front of the house, from between the altar and the house of the LORD and set it along with the altar to the north. 15And King Ahaz charged Uriah the priest, saying, “On the large altar, turn to smoke the morning’s burnt offering and the evening’s grain offering and the king’s burnt offering and his grain offering and the burnt offering of all the people and their grain offering and their libations, and all the blood of the burnt offering and all the blood of the sacrifice you shall cast upon it, and the bronze altar shall be to gaze upon.” 16And Uriah the priest did as all that King Ahaz had charged him. 17And King Ahaz cut off the frames of the laver stands and removed the lavers from them and took down the basin from the bronze oxen that were beneath it and set it on the stone pavement. 18And the covered passage for the sabbath that they had built in the house and the king’s outer entrance he took away from the house of the LORD—because of the king of Assyria. 19And the rest of the acts of Ahaz that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Judah? 20And Ahaz lay with his fathers and was buried with his fathers in the City of David, and Hezekiah his son became king in his stead.
CHAPTER 16 NOTES
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3. and even his son he passed through the fire. This expression, featuring the verb “to pass through” (or “pass over”), is used elsewhere in reference to the pagan cult of the Molech. It is unclear whether the expression refers to actually burning the son as an offering to the god or to a symbolic act of passing him through or over the fire. The translation preserves the ambiguity of the Hebrew, avoiding a rendering such as “consigned to the fire” that some modern translators favor.
4. under every lush tree. This phrase, which recurs in a number of different biblical texts, evidently refers to the worship of nature deities.
6. Rezin king of Aram restored Elath to Aram. It is puzzling that Rezin, in the midst of laying siege against Jerusalem, should have gone on an expedition to Elath in the far south. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the consonantal text has Arameans settling in Elath, but the Masoretic marginal gloss corrects this to Edomites. (The graphic difference in Hebrew between “Aram” and “Edom” is minimal because the letters resh and dalet are similar in appearance.) The original verse may have read: the king of Edom restored Elath to Edom. The Edomites could easily have taken advantage of the fact that the Judahite forces were distracted by the siege of Jerusalem.
7. I am your servant and your son. This is obviously an expression of subservience or vassaldom.
8. Ahaz took the silver and the gold that were in the house of the LORD. The mechanics of this act are spelled out in verses 17–18.
as a bribe. This amounts to protection money. The Hebrew shoḥad always has a negative connotation and it is a mistake to translate it as “gifts.” Tiglath-Pileser was in any case engaged in a series of campaigns against Aram, Israel, Phoenicia, and the Philistines and thus scarcely needed encouragement, but the payment of silver and gold would have been an expression of Ahaz’s fealty to Assyria.
9. exiled its people. The Hebrew merely says “exiled it,” but since “it,” although grammatically referring to the city, actually refers to its inhabitants, an expansion in translation is called for here.
10. Ahaz sent to Uriah the priest the image of the altar and its design in all its fashioning. In the present instance, this is not an attempt to adapt pagan practice, for the narrator makes no critical comment, and the new altar erected in Jerusalem is adapted for the cult of YHWH and is not subsequently destroyed. Instead, Ahaz, a provincial monarch, comes to the metropolis of Damascus, where, as a kind of cultic tourist, he sees and marvels at the large and impressive altar constructed according to the most modern design, and he decides to adopt it for his own temple.
13. he turned his burnt offering and his grain offering to smoke. There are indications elsewhere that the king, on special ceremonial occasions such as the dedication of a new altar, officiated at the sacrifices, which otherwise were the province of the priests.
15. the large altar. This is the new altar, built according to the model of the altar in Damascus.
17. cut off the frames of the laver stands. As in the account of the sacred furnishings of Solomon’s temple, it is difficult to reconstruct the details of the cultic vessels, but the general idea is that Ahaz stripped the precious metals from them to send as his tribute to Tiglath-Pileser.
1In the twelfth year of Ahaz king of Judah, Hosea son of Elah became king in Samaria over Israel, for nine years. 2And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD though not like the kings of Israel who were before him. 3Against him did Shalmaneser king of Assyria come up, and Hosea became vassal to him and rendered tribute to him. 4And the king of Assyria discovered a plot of Hosea’s, that he had sent messengers to So king of Egypt and had not brought up tribute to the king of Assyria as every year, and the king of Assyria seized him and locked him in the prison-house. 5And the king of Assyria went up through all the land and went up to Samaria and besieged it for three years. 6In the ninth year of Hosea, the king of Assyria took Samaria and exiled Israel to Assyria and settled them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan and in the towns of Media. 7And so, because the Israelites had offended the LORD their God Who brought them up from the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and they had feared other gods 8and had gone by the statutes of the nations whom the LORD had dispossessed before Israel, and that the kings of Israel had made for them, 9and the Israelites had done acts that were not right against the LORD their God and had built themselves high places in all their towns from watchtowers to fortress towns. 10And they had set up for themselves pillars and sacred poles on every high hill and under every lush tree. 11And they had burned incense there on all the high places like all the nations that the LORD had exiled before them, and they did evil things to vex the LORD. 12And they had worshipped the foul idols about which the LORD said, “You shall not do this thing.” 13And the LORD had made every prophet, every seer, warn Israel, saying, “Turn back from your evil ways and keep My commands and My statutes, according to all the teaching that I charged your fathers, and that I sent to you through My servants the prophets.” 14But they did not heed, and they stiffened their necks like the necks of their fathers, who did not trust the LORD their God. 15And they spurned His statutes and His covenant that He had sealed with their fathers, and His precepts that He imparted to them, and they went after empty breath and did empty things, and after the nations that were all round them, of whom the LORD had charged not to do like them. 16And they forsook the LORD their God and made themselves a molten image of two calves, and they made a sacred pole and bowed down to all the array of the heavens, and they worshipped Baal. 17And they passed their sons and their daughters through the fire and worked sorcery and divined, and they gave themselves over to do what was evil in the eyes of the LORD to vex him. 18And the LORD was greatly incensed against Israel, and He removed them from His presence. None remained but the tribe of Judah alone. 19Judah, too, had not kept the commands of the LORD their God, and they went in the way of the statutes of Israel which they had done. 20And the LORD spurned all the seed of Israel, and He abused them and gave them into the hand of plunderers, until He flung them from His presence. 21For He had torn Israel from Judah, and they made Jeroboam son of Nebat king, and he drove Israel away from following the LORD and led them to commit a great offense. 22And the Israelites went in all the offenses of Jeroboam that he had done, they did not swerve from it, 23until the LORD had removed Israel from His presence, as He had spoken through His servants the prophets, and He exiled Israel from its land to Assyria, till this day. 24And the king of Assyria brought people from Babel and from Kirthah and from Ivvah and from Hamath and from Sepharvaim and settled them in the towns of Samaria instead of the Israelites, and they took hold of Samaria and settled in its towns. 25And it happened at the beginning of their settling there, that they did not fear the LORD, and the LORD sent lions against them, and they set about killing them. 26And they said to the king of Assyria, saying, “The nations that you exiled and resettled in the towns of Samaria do not know the rules of the god of the land, and he sent lions against them, and here they are killing them, for they do not know the rules of the god of the land.” 27And the king of Assyria charged, saying, “Bring there one of the priests whom you have exiled from there, and let him settle there and teach the rules of the god of the land.” 28And one of the priests whom they had exiled from Samaria came and settled in Bethel, and he set about teaching them how they should fear the LORD. 29And each nation would make its own god and put it in one of the houses on the high places that the Samaritans had made, each nation in the town in which it had settled. 30And the people of Babel made Succoth-Benoth, and the people of Kith made Nergal, and the people of Hamath made Ashima. 31And the Avvites made Nibhaz and Tirhak, and the Sepharvites were burning their children in fire to Adrammelech and Anammelech, the gods of Sepharvaim. 32And they were fearing the LORD, and they made priests for the high places for themselves from their pick, and they would officiate in the houses of the high places. 33The LORD they would fear but their gods they would serve according to the practice of the nations from which they had been exiled. 34Till this day they do according to their first practices. They do not truly fear the LORD and they do not act according to their statutes and their practice and the teaching and the commands that the LORD charged the sons of Jacob, whose name He set as Israel. 35And the LORD sealed a covenant with them and charged them, saying, “You shall not fear other gods nor shall you bow down to them, nor shall you serve them nor shall you sacrifice to them. 36But the LORD Who brought you up from the land of Egypt with great power and with an outstretched hand, Him shall you fear and to Him shall you bow down and to Him shall you sacrifice. 37And the statutes and the laws and the teaching and the commands that He wrote for you, you shall keep to do always, and you shall not fear other gods. 38And the covenant that I sealed with you, you shall not forget, and you shall not fear other gods. 39But the LORD your God shall you fear, and He will save you from the hand of all your enemies.” 40But they did not heed; rather, they went on doing according to their first practice. 41And these nations would fear the LORD and serve their idols. Their children too, and the children of their children, as their fathers had done, they do till this day.
CHAPTER 17 NOTES
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2. not like the kings of Israel who were before him. The destruction of the northern kingdom, then, is not attributed to egregious behavior on the part of its last king but rather to the cumulative transgressions of its inhabitants, which are duly set forth in verses 7–23.
3. Shalmaneser king of Assyria. Though Shalmaneser in fact attacked Israel and other territories in Canaan-Phoenicia in 725 B.C.E., he died in 721 and, according to Assyrian royal inscriptions, the actual conquest was consummated by Sargon II. Either this information was not available to the Hebrew historian, writing perhaps a century and a half after the events, or he chose to simplify his narrative by speaking of a single “king of Assyria” invading Samaria.
4. So. No such royal name appears in Egyptian records, and this may be a distortion of an Egyptian title or of a different Egyptian name.
the king of Assyria seized him. If Hosea was the Assyrian emperor’s prisoner, one must assume that the court officials in Samaria remained loyal to him (no replacement is mentioned) and thus continued the battle against the Assyrians during the three years of siege.
6. the king of Assyria … exiled Israel to Assyria and settled them. This was a general imperial policy of the Assyrians. They removed the native population of a conquered territory—though it is not clear whether in fact the entire Israelite population was exiled, as is implied here—and replaced it with people from the existing empire in order to make the territory an Assyrian province. The sundry groups enumerated in verse 24 who are brought to Samaria are all inhabitants of territories conquered by the Assyrians, and so the verb “exiled” is properly applied to their displacement from their native lands to Samaria.
7. because the Israelites had offended the LORD their God. The catastrophic event of the utter destruction of the kingdom of Israel calls for a grand theological explanation, cast in Deuteronomistic terms, and so a ringing sermonic catalogue of the transgressions of the Israelites is introduced that runs all the way to verse 23. It is notable that all the transgressions are cultic—there is no mention of ethical failings or injustice.
feared. This is the core meaning of this reiterated Hebrew verb, although in cultic contexts it obviously refers to modes of worship rather than to the emotion of fear.
8. and that the kings of Israel had made for them. The syntactic connection of this clause to the rest of the sentence is ambiguous in the Hebrew. “For them” has been added in the translation as an interpretive guess, assuming that the clause refers to the two molten images of calves.
14. like the necks of their fathers. The reference is in all likelihood to the stubborn and rebellious Wilderness generation.
16. a molten image of two calves. As before, the writer construes this as idol worship, though these were very probably icons of the throne of YHWH, like the cherubim in the southern kingdom.
the array of the heavens. Worship of celestial deities was a prominent feature of the last phase of First Commonwealth history.
19. Judah, too, had not kept the commands of the LORD. Evidently, it was not destroyed—rather, not yet—because of God’s promises to David. “Commands,” here and below, is singular in the Hebrew but is in effect a collective noun.
25. the LORD sent lions against them. Lions were abundant in ancient Israel, a fact reflected in the five different terms for “lion” in biblical Hebrew; and so it is possible that the displacement of population, with hunting perhaps in abeyance, created the circumstances for an incursion of lions. In any case, the lion attacks seem to be represented as a miraculous intervention against the new inhabitants of Samaria.
32. they were fearing the LORD, and they made priests for the high places. That is, they added YHWH to their cult while continuing to worship pagan gods.
34. Till this day they do according to their first practices. The whole account of the cultic practices of the Samaritans, as many scholars have inferred, looks suspiciously like the work of a post-exilic Judahite writer promoting a separatist view of the Samaritans. In this representation, the population of Samaria after 721 B.C.E. was entirely a foreign implant, and the cult performed in Samaria was not a legitimate worship of YHWH but a promiscuous mingling of pagan and Yahwistic practices. Historically, this perception may have been wrong both in regard to the composition of the Samaritan population and in regard to the nature of its cult.
They do not truly fear the LORD. The adverb “truly” has been added in the translation to spell out what the Hebrew implies because otherwise there might be a confusion—earlier the Samaritans are said to fear the LORD, that is, to perform the outward offices of the LORD’s service.
they do not act according to their statutes and their practice. It would make better sense if this read “His statutes and His practice,” though there is no textual warrant for this reading.
Jacob, whose name He set as Israel. This reminder of Jacob’s portentous name change underscores the notion that the people of Israel have a grand divinely ordained destiny in which the paganizing Samaritans have no part.
35. You shall not fear other gods nor shall you bow down to them. This entire sentence is an approximate quotation of the first of the Ten Commandments.
38. and you shall not fear other gods. This prohibition against worshipping other gods is repeated here three times, strongly stamping the Samaritans as a showcase instance of dereliction from the God Who gave the Decalogue to Israel.
41. fear the LORD and serve their idols. The verbs “fear” and “serve” are clearly equivalent terms for performing acts of worship. In this instance, instead of the pejorative designation—gilulim (“foul idols”) associated with gelalim, “turds,” as in verse 12—the more neutral general noun, pesilim, “idols,” is used. This may be because when Israelites worship idols (verse 12), the act is especially disgusting, whereas one would expect benighted pagans to serve idols.
1And it happened in the third year of Hosea son of Elah king of Israel that Hezekiah son of Ahaz became king, king of Judah. 2Twenty-five years old he was when he became king, and twenty-nine years he was king in Jerusalem. And his mother’s name was Avi daughter of Zachariah. 3And he did what was right in the eyes of the LORD as all that David his forefather had done. 4He it was who took away the high places and smashed the pillars and cut down the sacred pole and pulverized the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for at that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it, and it was called Nehushtan. 5In the LORD God of Israel he put his trust, and after him there was none like him among all the kings of Judah and among those that were before him. 6And he clung to the LORD, he did not swerve from Him, and he kept His commands that the LORD had charged Moses. 7And the LORD was with him. Wherever he sallied forth, he prospered. And he rebelled against the king of Assyria and did not serve him. 8He it was who struck down the Philistines as far as Gaza and its territories, from watchtowers to fortress towns. 9And it happened in the fourth year of King Hezekiah, which was the seventh year of Hosea son of Elah king of Israel, that Shalmaneser king of Assyria went up against Samaria and laid siege against it. 10And he took it at the end of three years, in the sixth year of Hezekiah, which was the ninth year of Hosea king of Israel—Samaria was taken. 11And the king of Assyria exiled Israel to Assyria and led them to Halah and Habor at the River of Gozan and to the towns of Media. 12Because they had not heeded the voice of the LORD their God and had broken His covenant, all that Moses servant of the LORD had charged, yet they did not heed and they did not do it. 13And in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, Sennacherib king of Assyria went up against all the fortified towns of Judah and took them. 14And Hezekiah king of Judah sent to the king of Assyria at Lachish, saying. “I have offended. Turn back from me. Whatever you fix for me I will bear.” And the king of Assyria imposed upon Hezekiah king of Judah three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold. 15And Hezekiah gave all the silver that was in the house of the LORD and in the treasuries of the house of the king. 16At that time Hezekiah cut away the doors of the LORD’s temple and the columns that Hezekiah king of Judah had overlaid, and he gave them to the king of Assyria. 17And the king of Assyria sent Tartan and Rabsaris and Rabshakeh from Lachish to King Hezekiah in Jerusalem with a heavy force. And they went up and came to Jerusalem, and they went up and came and took a stance at the conduit of the Upper Pool, which is by the road to the Fuller’s Field. 18And they called out to the king, and Eliakim son of Hilkiah who was appointed over the house came out to them, with Shebnah the scribe and Joah son of Asaph the recorder. 19And Rabshakeh said to them, “Say, pray, to Hezekiah, Thus says the great king, the king of Assyria: ‘What is this great trust that you show? 20You thought, mere words are counsel and valor for battle. Now, in whom did you trust that you should have rebelled against me? 21Now, look, you have trusted in this shattered reed, in Egypt, which when a man leans on it, enters his palm and pierces it. So is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who trust in him. 22And should you say to me, In the LORD our God we trust, is it not He Whose high places and altars Hezekiah took away, and he said to Judah and to Jerusalem: Before this altar you shall bow down in Jerusalem?’ 23And now, wager, pray, with my master, with the king of Assyria, and I shall give you two thousand horses if you can give yourself riders for them. 24And how could you turn away the agent of one of the least of my master’s servants and trust Egypt for chariots and horses? 25Now, was it without the LORD that I have come up against this place to destroy it? The LORD said to me, Go up against this land and destroy it.” 26And Eliakim son of Helkiah, and Shebnah and Joah with him, said to Rabshakeh, “Speak, pray, to your servants Aramaic, for we understand it, and do not speak Judahite in the hearing of the people who are on the wall.” 27And Rabshakeh said to them, “Did my master send me to you and to your master to speak these words? Did he not send to these men sitting on the wall—to eat their own turds and to drink their own urine—together with you?” 28And Rabshakeh stood and called out in a loud voice in Judahite and spoke and said, “Listen to the words of the great king, the king of Assyria. 29Thus said the king. ‘Let not Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to save you from my hand. 30And let not Hezekiah have you trust in the LORD, saying, the LORD will surely save us, and this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.’ 31Do not listen to Hezekiah, for thus said the king of Assyria: ‘Make terms with me and come out to me, and eat each man of his vine and each man of his fig tree, and drink each man the water of his well, 32until I come and take you to a land like your land—a land of grain and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a land of olive trees and oil and honey. And live, and do not die, and do not listen to Hezekiah when he misleads you, saying, the LORD will save us. 33Did the gods of the nations ever save each its land from the hand of the king of Assyria? 34Where were the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where were the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena and Ivvah? And where were the gods of Samaria? Did they save Samaria from my hand? 35Who is there of all the gods of the lands that saved their land from my hand, that the LORD should save Jerusalem from my hand?’” 36And the people were silent and did not answer a word to him, for it was the king’s command, saying, “You shall not answer him.” 37And Eliakim son of Hilkiah, who was appointed over the house, and Shebna the scribe and Joah son of Asaph the recorder with him, came to Hezekiah, their garments rent, and they told him Rabshakeh’s words.
CHAPTER 18 NOTES
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4. He it was who took away the high places. Hezekiah is the first king to do this. As with Josiah a century later, the motive may have been political as well as religious, for an exclusive cult in Jerusalem would clearly consolidate the power of the Judahite king. One can assume that there was some resentment against this new policy, for the high places were popularly viewed as legitimate—and convenient—locations for the worship of YHWH. In Rabshakeh’s provocative speech, he appears to play to this resentment by describing the removal of the high places as an offense against YHWH.
the bronze serpent that Moses had made. The fashioning of the bronze serpent to counter the plague of serpents is reported in Numbers 21. Archaeologists have found numerous serpents, evidently cultic objects, and it looks as if these were objects of worship in popular religion, which were then retrojected on Moses in the story told in Numbers.
Nehushtan. The name is transparently derived from neḥoshet, “bronze,” with a probable pun on naḥash, “serpent.”
7. he rebelled against the king of Assyria. After the death of Sargon II, there was widespread rebellion against the Assyrian overlords in the northern regions of the empire, and Hezekiah evidently exploited the upheaval to reject his own vassal condition.
9. Shalmaneser king of Assyria went up against Samaria. The report beginning here and concluding in verse 12 is a recapitulation of 17:6ff. Evidently, the historical context of the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom needs to be recalled here as Judah is threatened with a similar fate.
13. in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah. Sennacherib’s campaign in Phoenicia, Philistia, and Judah in 701 B.C.E. is elaborately documented in Assyrian annals and bas-reliefs.
all the fortified towns of Judah. According to the Assyrian annals, the imperial forces captured forty-six Judahite towns—which may be an imperial exaggeration. The principal one was Lachish, where Sennacherib is headquartered in the next verse. The Assyrians left a vivid bas-relief of their archers, in characteristic high-pointed caps, assaulting this town.
14. Whatever you fix for me I will bear. Hezekiah’s act of submission, expressed in his readiness to pay whatever tribute Sennacherib imposes, is contradicted by the narrative episode that begins in verse 17, where Hezekiah is represented as part of an alliance with Egypt opposing the Assyrians. It would appear that two different sources, for reasons that are unclear, have been spliced together rather than blended.
17. And the king of Assyria sent. This entire episode appears, with only minor variations, in Isaiah 36. That passage was evidently drawn from here.
Tartan and Rabsaris and Rabshakeh. Although these three terms are presented in the Hebrew text without definite articles, as though they were proper names, each is actually a title: vizier, high chamberlain (literally, “head eunuch”), and head steward. In any case, all are clearly high officials in the Assyrian court.
18. who was appointed over the house. That is, the palace.
21. this shattered reed. Reeds, of course, grow in abundance along the Nile.
which when a man leans on it, enters his palm and pierces it. The metaphor is quite realistic. The reed looks as if it could provide support, but it easily breaks when you lean on it, and the jagged edges of the break can pierce the skin.
23. I shall give you two thousand horses if you can give yourself riders for them. Hezekiah’s attempted rebellion is so hopelessly pathetic, Rabshakeh says, that he could not even muster sufficient cavalrymen were he given the horses.
24. agent. The Hebrew aptly uses an Assyrian imperial administrative title, paḥat (compare the English “pasha,” which has a shared linguistic background).
26. Speak, pray, to your servants Aramaic. Aramaic was the most widely shared language in the lands of the Assyrian empire east of the Jordan, and so by the late eighth century B.C.E. it had been adopted as the diplomatic lingua franca. Thus, an educated Judahite court official would have been fluent in Aramaic.
do not speak Judahite. “Judahite,” of course, is Hebrew, but that term for the language never appears in the Bible. It is not explained how an Assyrian court official had a command of Hebrew.
27. Did he not send to these men sitting on the wall. The verb “send” is merely implied in the Hebrew. Rabshakeh makes clear that his entire speech—itself a brilliant deployment of political rhetoric—is precisely intended for the ears of the people. His purpose is to drive a wedge between the rebellious Hezekiah and the people, convincing them that the uprising is hopeless, and that, in fact, the fate of deportation to Assyria will be a happy one.
30. let not Hezekiah have you trust in the LORD. Rabshakeh appears to be shifting grounds. First he claimed that it was YHWH Who sent the Assyrians against Judah (verse 25), which was a way of conveying to the people the idea that their destruction was divinely ordained and irreversible. Now he takes a different tack: no national god has ever availed against the great king of Assyria.
31. Make terms with me. The literal sense is “make a gift [or blessing] with me,” but in context, as Rashi and the King James Version after him understood, the expression means to offer terms of surrender.
eat each man of his vine and … his fig tree, and drink each man the water of his well. The vine and the fig tree appear in a repeated proverbial expression about peaceful and prosperous life. Eating from the vine and the fig tree and drinking well-water are a vivid antithesis to the representation of the starving besieged population eating its own excrement and drinking its own urine.
32. a land like your land. The catalogue of agricultural bounty that follows closely resembles the recurrent list of all the good things of the Land of Israel. Rabshakeh in this fashion depicts life in exile in Assyria as a new promised land.
34. where were the gods of Samaria. The Masoretic Text merely has “that they saved Samaria from my hand” immediately after the question about the sundry gods of the lands in the northern region of the empires. One version of the Septuagint and a fragment of Kings from the Cairo Genizah show the clause here translated, which makes the verse coherent.
1And it happened when King Hezekiah heard, that he rent his garments and covered himself in sackcloth and went into the house of the LORD. 2And he sent Eliakim, who was appointed over the house, and Shebna the scribe and the elders of the priest, covered in sackcloth, to Isaiah the prophet son of Amoz. 3And they said to him, “Thus said Hezekiah: ‘A day of distress and chastisement and insult is this day.
For children have come to the birth-stool,
and there is no strength to give birth.
4Perhaps the LORD will have heard all the words of Rabshakeh, whom his master the king of Assyria sent, to defame the living God, and He will chastise for the words that the LORD your God heard, and you will offer prayers for the remnant that still exists.’” 5And the servants of King Hezekiah came to Isaiah. 6And Isaiah said to them, “Thus shall you say to your master: ‘Thus said the LORD: Do not fear the words that you have heard, with which the flunkies of the king of Assyria reviled Me. 7I am about to send an ill spirit into him, and he shall hear a rumor and go back to his land, and I shall make him fall by the sword in his land.’” 8And Rabshakeh went back and found the king of Assyria battling against Libnah, for he had heard that he had journeyed on from Lachish. 9And he heard about Tirhakah king of Cush, saying, “Look, he has sallied forth to do battle with you.” And he turned back and sent messengers to Hezekiah, saying, 10“Thus shall you say to Hezekiah king of Judah, saying, ‘Let not your god in whom you trust deceive you, saying, Jerusalem will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.’ 11Look, you yourself have heard what the kings of Assyria did to all the lands, annihilating them—and will you be saved? 12Did the gods of the nations save them, when my fathers destroyed Gozan and Haran and Rezeph and the Edomites who are in Telassar? 13Where is the king of Hamath, and the kings of Arpad and the king of Lahir, Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivvah?” 14And Hezekiah took the letters from the hand of the messengers and read them, and Hezekiah went up to the house of the LORD and spread them out before the LORD. 15And Hezekiah prayed before the LORD God of Israel enthroned on the cherubim: “You alone are God of all the kingdoms of the earth. You it was made heaven and earth. 16Incline Your ear and listen; open, LORD, Your eyes and see; and listen to the words of Sennacherib that he sent to insult the living God. 17Indeed, LORD, the kings of Assyria destroyed nations and their lands 18and consigned their gods to the fire—because they are not gods but the work of human hands, wood and stone, and they destroyed them. 19And now, O LORD our God, rescue us, pray, from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that You alone are the LORD our God.” 20And Isaiah son of Amoz sent to Hezekiah, saying, “Thus said the LORD God of Israel: ‘Of which you prayed to Me about Sennacherib king of Assyria I have listened.’ 21This is the word that the LORD spoke about him:
the maiden, Zion’s daughter.
Jerusalem’s daughter.
22Whom did you insult and revile,
and against whom have you lifted your voice,
against Israel’s Holy One.
23By your messengers you insulted the Master
and thought, “When I ride in my chariots,
I will go up to the heights of the mountains,
the far reaches of Lebanon.
I will cut down its lofty cedars,
its choicest cypresses
and will come to its uttermost heights,
and the woods of its undergrowth.
24It is I who have dug and drunk
and dried up with the soles of my feet
all Egypt’s rivers.”
25Have you not heard from afar
that which I did from time of old?
I fashioned it, brought it to pass—
and fortified towns
have turned into heaps of ruins.
26Their inhabitants, impotent,
are cast down and put to shame,
become the grass of the field
and green growth,
by the east wind blasted.
27And your stayings and comings and goings I know
and your raging against Me.
28Because of your raging against Me,
and your din that came up in My ears
I will put My hook in your nose
and My bit between your lips,
and will turn you back on the way
on which you came.’
29“And this is the sign for you: eat aftergrowth this year, and in the second year stubble, and in the third year sow and harvest and plant vineyards and eat their fruit. 30And the remnant of the house of Judah shall add root beneath and put forth fruit above. 31For from Jerusalem shall come forth the surviving remnant from Mount Zion. The LORD’s zeal shall do this. 32Therefore, thus said the LORD about the king of Assyria: ‘He shall not enter this city and he shall not shoot an arrow there, and no shield shall go before him, nor shall he raise a siege-work against it. 33In the way he comes he shall go back, and he shall not enter this city, said the LORD. 34And I will defend this city to rescue it, for My sake and for the sake of David My servant.’”
35And it happened on that night that the LORD’s messenger went out and struck down the Assyrian camp, a hundred eighty-five thousand. And when they rose early in the morning—look, they were all dead corpses. 36And Sennacherib king of Assyria pulled up stakes and went off and returned to Nineveh. 37And it happened as he was bowing down in the house of his god Nisroch, that Adrammelech and Sarezer struck him down with the sword, and they escaped to the land of Ararat. And Esharaddon his son became king in his stead.
CHAPTER 19 NOTES
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3. For children have come to the birth-stool. The poetic style makes these words seem initially cryptic, but the obvious meaning is that the children about to be born cannot emerge because when the mothers come to the birth-stool, they do not have the strength to push the babies out. The delegation from the king may want to speak to the prophet in his own characteristic language by first addressing him in a line of verse. In any case, the line forcefully frames their message to Isaiah with an image of desperate impotence that represents the plight of the people. As in the previous chapter, this entire episode is replicated, with only minor textual variants, in the Book of Isaiah (chapter 37). Isaiah in this narrative resembles Elijah and Elisha in being seen by others as a holy man who has the power to intercede on their behalf with God. Unlike them, however, he is a “literary prophet” who delivers his prophecies in the form of poetry, as he does here in the poem that runs from verse 21 to verse 28.
5. And the servants of King Hezekiah came to Isaiah. Their arrival was clearly implied by the end of verse 2. Perhaps one should construe the verb as a pluperfect, although its form does not indicate that. The same seemingly redundant clause also appears in Isaiah 37:5.
6. flunkies. The Hebrew neʿarim, youths or people in a subservient status, is usually represented in this translation as “lads,” but its use here by Isaiah, instead of the expected ‘avadim, “servants,” has a pejorative connotation.
7. an ill spirit. The Hebrew says only “a spirit,” but since it induces fear followed by flight, it appears to be a troubling spirit.
he shall hear a rumor. What this might be is never spelled out. If the prophecy is to be consistent with what is reported at the end of the chapter, it would be the news that his army has been stricken with a plague.
9. king of Cush. Cush is Nubia, just south of Egypt and politically linked with it. Egypt was a key player in the uprising against the Assyrian imperial forces, and so it is not surprising that the Nubian king would oppose Sennacherib. The connection of this report with the story of the siege against Jerusalem is not entirely clear. Perhaps Sennacherib is impelled to finish off Jerusalem quickly so that he can turn his forces to the south.
14. spread them out. The Hebrew reads “spread it out,” but the first part of the verse speaks of multiple letters.
15. You alone are God of all the kingdoms of the earth. These words are a direct rebuttal of the arrogant words spoken by Rabshakeh in verse 12. Hezekiah will make his rejoinder to the Assyrian boast still more explicit in verse 17.
21. She scorns you, mocks you. The “you” is of course Sennacherib. Zion, scorned by Sennacherib’s spokesman, has nothing but contempt for the presumptuous Assyrian king.
She wags her head at you. In biblical poetry, this is a conventional gesture of scorn.
22. raised your eyes up high / against Israel’s Holy One. Isaiah ups the ante of denunciation: Sennacherib’s presumption in declaring that he will destroy the Judahite kingdom is cast as an assault on the God of heaven and earth.
23. I will go up the heights of the mountains, / the far reaches of Lebanon. Although Sennacherib’s imperial campaign did include Phoenicia, here he is besieging Jerusalem. The mountains of Lebanon, however, are the proverbial loftiest heights in biblical poetry, and yarketey levanon, “the far reaches of Lebanon,” contains an echo of yarketey tsafon, “the far reaches of Tsafon,” the dwelling place of the gods. Sennacherib’s declaration at this point sounds rather like that of the overweening king who is brought down to Sheol in Isaiah 14. The cutting down of lofty cedars also figures in Isaiah 14:8.
its uttermost heights. The received text here reads melon, “night encampment,” but the parallel phrase in Isaiah 37:24 as well as one Hebrew manuscript shows merom, “heights” (a singular rendered here as a plural for the sake of the English idiom).
the woods of its undergrowth. The Hebrew karmel usually means “farmland,” which would be anomalous on the Lebanon heights, but as Yehuda Felix has noted, it can also mean “low shrubs” (compare Isaiah 29:17). This would be the sparse vegetation on the mountaintops above the treeline.
24. the waters of foreigners. The phrase, slightly opaque, is part of Sennacherib’s boast of conquest: he has seized the territories of nations and even sunk wells to exploit their water resources.
and dried up with the soles of my feet / all Egypt’s rivers. This is an antithetical act to the digging of wells—Egypt, blessed by the Nile, abounds in water. Here the Assyrian king makes himself, at least through the hyperbole, a divine figure with the power to dry up rivers as he treads upon them.
26. thatch on the roofs / by the east wind blasted. The speech Isaiah attributes to Sennacherib concludes with a metaphor common in biblical poetry of the nations as mere grass, blasted by the hot wind blowing from the eastern desert.
28. I will put My hook in your nose / and My bit between your lips. Sennacherib had imagined himself a god. Now the God of Israel describes him as a dumb helpless beast to be driven where God wants.
turn you back. This is Isaiah’s prophecy of Sennacherib’s flight back to Assyria.
29. eat aftergrowth this year. The “you” now is Hezekiah, and the verbs will then switch to the plural, referring to the people. Because the invading army has laid waste to the countryside, there will be no crops for two years—and yet, as a “sign,” the Judahites will survive.
35. the LORD’s messenger went out and struck down in the Assyrian camp, a hundred eighty-five thousand. The lifting of the siege is a historical event, though the reason for it is uncertain. If the report here is authentic, it would be because a plague swept through the Assyrian camp. But one must say that the writer has a vested interest in representing this event as a miraculous intervention, demonstrating God’s commitment to protect Jerusalem (in contrast to Samaria, destroyed by an Assyrian king twenty years earlier).
37. Adrammelech and Sarezer struck him down with the sword. The two figures named are Sennacherib’s sons. One gets the impression from the narrative report that the assassination took place directly after the emperor’s return to Nineveh. In fact, Sennacherib was murdered twenty years after the military campaign of 701 B.C.E. The writer, however, wants to present this killing in the temple of a pagan god as an immediate fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy (verse 7) and a prompt retribution against the boasting conqueror depicted in Isaiah’s poem.
And Esharaddon his son became king in his stead. Esharaddon had been Sennacherib’s chosen successor. It was evidently this choice that led Adrammelech, abetted by one of his brothers, to kill his father, hoping to seize the throne. One infers that he then discovered no support in the court for his claim to the crown and thus was obliged to flee with his brother to Ararat in the far north.
1In those days Hezekiah fell mortally ill, and Isaiah son of Amoz the prophet came to him and said to him, “Thus said the LORD: ‘Charge your household, for you are about to die and you will not live.’” 2And he turned his face to the wall and prayed to the LORD, saying, 3“Please, O LORD, recall, pray, that I walked before You truthfully and with a whole heart and did what was good in Your eyes.” And Hezekiah wept. 4And it happened that Isaiah had not gone out of the central court, when the word of the LORD came to him, saying, 5“Go back, and you shall say to Hezekiah prince of My people, ‘Thus said the LORD God of David your forefather: I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears. I am about to heal you. On the third day you shall go up to the house of the LORD. 6And I will add to your days fifteen years, and from the hand of the king of Assyria I will save you and this city, and I will defend this city for My sake and for the sake of David My servant.’” 7And Isaiah said, “Fetch a clump of figs.” And they fetched it and put it on the burning rash, and he revived. 8And Hezekiah said to Isaiah, “What is the sign that the LORD will heal me and I will go up on the third day to the house of the LORD?” 9And Isaiah said, “This is the sign for you from the LORD that the LORD will do the thing which He spoke: should the shadow go down ten steps or should it go back ten steps?” 10And Hezekiah said, “It is easy for the shadow to incline down ten steps and not for the shadow to go backward ten steps.” 11And Isaiah the prophet called out to the LORD, and He turned back the shadow that had gone down on the Steps of Ahaz, backward ten steps. 12At that time Berodach-Baladan son of Baladan king of Babylonia sent letters and a gift to Hezekiah, for he heard that Hezekiah had fallen ill. 13And Hezekiah heard of the envoys and showed them all his house of precious things, the silver and the gold and the spices and the goodly oil, and his armory and all his treasuries. There was nothing that Hezekiah did not show them in his house and in his kingdom. 14And Isaiah the prophet came to King Hezekiah and said to him, “What did these men say to you and from where did they come to you?” And Hezekiah said, “From a distant land, from Babylonia.” 15And he said, “What did they see in your house?” And Hezekiah said, “All that is in my house they saw. There was nothing that I did not show them of my treasuries.” 16And Isaiah said, “Listen to the word of the LORD: 17‘Look, a time is coming when everything that is in your house and that your fathers stored up till this day will be borne off to Babylonia. Nothing will remain,’ said the LORD. 18‘And from your sons who will issue from you, whom you will beget, he will take and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylonia.’” 19And Hezekiah said to Isaiah, “The word of the LORD that you have spoken is good.” And he thought, “Why, there will be peace and trust in my days.” 20And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah and all his valor, and his making the pool and the conduit so that he could bring water into the town, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Judah? 21And Hezekiah lay with his fathers, and Manasseh his son was king in his stead.
CHAPTER 20 NOTES
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1. In those days Hezekiah fell mortally ill. The editor of the Book of Isaiah will continue to replicate material from 2 Kings—this passage occurs in Isaiah 38 and 39. Again, we have integral citation with only minor textual variants. The formulaic phrase at the beginning, “In those days,” is a noncommittal temporal indicator, and it is unclear whether Hezekiah’s grave illness occurred before or after the siege of Jerusalem reported in the previous chapter.
5. the LORD God of David your forefather. This epithet serves as a reminder of God’s commitment to preserve the Davidic dynasty, and Hezekiah is presented as a king who does what is right in the eyes of the LORD, like David his forefather.
6. and from the hand of the king of Assyria I will save you. This clause could be an indication that Hezekiah’s illness preceded the siege of Jerusalem, but the inference is not entirely certain because even after the lifting of the siege, Assyria would have remained a potential threat.
7. Fetch a clump of figs. Isaiah here appears not to be performing a miracle but to be practicing folk medicine. Hezekiah, however, in the next verse requests a portent that he will be cured.
burning rash. Only here do we learn that sheḥin, burning rash, which is Job’s affliction, is a potentially fatal disease.
and he revived. Given that Hezekiah in the next verse remains uncertain that he will recover, the sense of “revived” (literally, “lived”) here is that after the application of the fig poultice he experienced some relief from the torment of the burning rash.
9. should the shadow go down ten steps. What is evidently in question is a kind of sundial, but one that is not a horizontal disk but rather a series of steps set into a wall, ten on the left side to show the shadow of the ascending sun and ten on the right side for the descending sun. A device of this sort has been found in Egypt. The King James Version and modern Hebrew understand maʿalot as “degrees,” but these were probably actual steps, which is what the word usually means.
10. It is easy for the shadow to incline down ten steps. This would be the natural course of the shadow, so Hezekiah chooses instead the miraculous reversal of the progress of the shadow. That also becomes a figure for the reversal of his seemingly imminent death.
11. the Steps of Ahaz. The sundial in question proves to be a well-known marker in Jerusalem commissioned by King Ahaz.
12. king of Babylonia. The Babylonians were threatened by the Assyrian empire to the north and so were eager to make common cause with the kingdom of Judah.
13. the envoys. The received text has only “about them,” and this identification is added in the translation for clarity.
17. a time is coming when everything that is in your house … will be borne off to Babylonia. This dire prophecy is presented as punishment for Hezekiah’s imprudence in exposing all his treasures to the eyes of the Babylonian visitors. Many scholars think that the episode was added over a century later in an effort to explain the despoiling of Jerusalem during the reign of Jehoiakim in 597 B.C.E. or in the final destruction of the city in 586 B.C.E.
18. they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylonia. Although sarisim sometimes may refer to court officials who are not necessarily castrated, one suspects that the core meaning that involves castration is invoked here: there could be no greater curse for a king than to have his sons turned into eunuchs, incapable of begetting offspring.
19. The word of the LORD that you have spoken is good. This response by Hezekiah to the grim prophecy is astonishing. On the surface, he seems to be saying to Isaiah that he accepts the word of the LORD, that it must be good because it is God’s will. In the next sentence, however, he thinks to himself that what is good about it is that the disaster will not happen in his lifetime—something that in fact Isaiah has not clearly told him. This self-centered view of national catastrophe puts the virtuous Hezekiah in a somewhat questionable light.
20. his making the pool and the conduit so that he could bring water into the town. The conduit is a remarkable engineering feat that one can walk through to this day. It is a tunnel sloping gradually down from outside to inside, devised to introduce water into the town in time of siege. It is roughly 550 yards in length, not at all in a straight line, and showing evidence that two teams of workers hewed the tunnel out of the underground rock from opposite directions, somehow managing to meet each other in the middle.
1Twelve years old was Manasseh when he became king, and fifty-five years he was king in Jerusalem, and his mother’s name was Hephzibah. 2And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD, like the abominations of the nations that the LORDhad dispossessed before the Israelites. 3And he rebuilt the high places that Hezekiah his father had destroyed, and he made a sacred pole as Ahab king of Israel had made, and he bowed down to all the array of the heavens and worshipped them. 4And he built altars in the house of the LORD, of which the LORD had said, “In Jerusalem I will set My name. 5And he built altars to all the array of the heavens in both courts of the house of the LORD. 6And he passed his son through the fire and performed sorcery and divined and conjured ghosts and familiar spirits. He did abundantly what was evil in the eyes of the LORD, to vex Him. 7And he placed the statue of Asherah that he had made in the house of which the LORD had said to David and to Solomon his son, “In this house and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen from all the tribes of Israel, will I set My name forever. 8And I will no longer make Israel’s foot go wandering from this land that I gave to their fathers—but only if they keep to do all that I have charged them and as all the teaching that My servant Moses charged them.” 9But they did not heed, and Manasseh led them astray to do what was evil more than the nations that the LORD had destroyed before the Israelites. 10And the LORD spoke through His servants the prophets, saying, 11“Inasmuch as Manasseh king of Judah has done these abominations, he has done more evil than all that the Amorites did before him, and he has led Judah, too, to offend with his foul idols. 12Therefore, thus said the LORD God of Israel, I am about to bring an evil upon Jerusalem and Judah, about which any who hears of it, both his ears will ring. 13And I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria and the weight of the house of Ahab, and I will wipe out Jerusalem as one wipes a bowl clean, wiping and turning it on its face. 14And I will abandon the remnant of My estate and give them into the hand of their enemies, and they will become plunder and spoils for all their enemies. 15Inasmuch as they have done what is evil in My eyes and have been vexing Me from the day their fathers came out of Egypt to this day.” 16And Manasseh also had shed innocent blood in great abundance until he filled Jerusalem with it from one end to the other, besides his offense with which he led Judah to offend, to do what was evil in the eyes of the LORD. 17And the rest of the acts of Manasseh and all that he did and his offense that he committed, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Judah? 18And Manasseh lay with his fathers, and he was buried in the garden of his house, in the Garden of Uzza, and his son Amon became king in his stead.
19Twenty-two years old was Amon when he became king, and two years he was king in Jerusalem, and his mother’s name was Meshullemeth daughter of Haraz from Jotbah. 20And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD as Manasseh his father had done. 21And he went in all the way in which his father had gone, and he worshipped the foul idols that his father had worshipped, and he bowed down to them. 22And he forsook the LORD God of his fathers and did not go in the way of the LORD. 23And Amon’s servants hatched a plot against him and put the king to death in his house. 24And the people of the land struck down the plotters against King Amon, and the people of the land made Josiah his son king in his stead. 25And the rest of the acts of Amon that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Judah? 26And they buried him in his grave in the Garden of Uzza, and Josiah his son became king in his stead.
CHAPTER 21 NOTES
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2. like the abominations of the nations. The formulaic language for reporting the cultic divagations of an Israelite king is stepped up here, and it will continue to be intensified in the verses to follow. Manasseh, the son of one of the two most virtuous kings of Judah, is cast as the most egregious of evil kings. It is historically plausible that he would have encouraged pagan cults—he was a vassal to Assyria, a fact not mentioned in our text but registered in Assyrian inscriptions—but it appears that his religious and moral turpitude is stressed in order to explain how the kingdom of Judah was destroyed four generations later, despite Hezekiah and his virtuous grandson Josiah. This impending destruction is the burden of the dire prophecy in verses 11–15.
3. he made a sacred pole. The Hebrew ʾasherah can refer either to a special pole used in the pagan cult or to the goddess Asherah, depending on the context. In verse 7, the reference is clearly to Asherah because there could not be a statue of a sacred pole.
and he bowed down to all the array of the heavens. The worship of astral deities, not especially prominent in Canaanite religion, was widespread in Assyria, and the biblical literature produced in the last century of the First Temple period abounds in objections to it.
4. And he built altars in the house of the LORD. Introducing pagan worship into the Jerusalem temple was an especially heinous act, far worse than reestablishing the cult of the high places.
5. both courts of the house of the LORD. These are the inner and outer courts of the Temple.
6. And he passed his son through the fire. The ambiguity of the Hebrew wording, as noted earlier, allows one to construe this either as child sacrifice or as a nonlethal magical/cultic rite.
to vex Him. The object of the verb is merely implied in the Hebrew.
7. Jerusalem, which I have chosen from all the tribes of Israel. The language of the election of Jerusalem is emphatically Deuteronomistic.
9. to do what was evil more than the nations that the LORD had destroyed. Manasseh’s offenses are so great that they even outdo those of the surrounding nations. A grim a fortiori notion is intimated here: if the Canaanite nations were dispossessed because of their evil acts, how much more so will this be the fate of Judah, which under their king surpassed the Canaanites in culpable behavior.
11. foul idols. As before, the writer uses an invented invective term, gilulim, coined from gelalim, “turds.”
13. the line … and the weight. In the construction of buildings, in order to ensure that the walls would be vertical, walls were measured against a plumb line—a line with a weight attached to its bottom end. The line and the weight are thus a metaphor for the rigorous measuring of the integrity of Jerusalem. Ironically, it is not a correction in building that will ensue but destruction, as Samaria was measured and destroyed.
as one wipes a bowl clean, wiping and turning it on its face. This is a homey and vivid image of total destruction: when the last remnant of food is wiped from the bowl, leaving no drop or crumb, the bowl can be turned upside down.
15. and have been vexing Me from the day their fathers came out of Egypt to this day. In the explanation put forth here for the imminent national catastrophe, the evil Manasseh is not unique but rather the culmination of all the backsliding and rebellion of the Israelites from the generation of the wilderness wanderings onward.
16. Manasseh also had shed innocent blood in great abundance. Moral offense compounds the cultic offenses. The victims of these many murders are in all likelihood loyalists to YHWH, perhaps the prophets of the LORD just mentioned, who were slaughtered as Jezebel slaughtered the prophets of the LORD. It may have been this that led the Israeli biblical scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann to describe Manasseh as “the Jezebel of the South.”
23. And Amon’s servants hatched a plot against him. Whenever the connection is with a king, “servants” means “courtiers.” The reason for the court conspiracy is not stated. Some have interpreted the regicide as a response to Amon’s paganizing ways, and the fact that “the people of the land” (whether the phrase indicates the general populace or a particular political group within it) kill the conspirators and promote Josiah to the throne argues for this understanding. Josiah was only eight years old at the time, and given his later record of unflagging loyalty to YHWH and his devotion to the centrality of the Jerusalem cult, those who instated him and looked after his education must surely have themselves been loyalists to YHWH.
1Eight years old was Josiah when he became king, and thirty-one years he was king in Jerusalem, and his mother’s name was Jedidah daughter of Adaiah from Bozkath. 2And he did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, and he went in all the way of David his forefather and did not swerve to the right or to the left. 3And it happened in the eighteenth year of King Josiah that the king sent Shaphan son of Azaliah son of Meshullam the scribe to the house of the LORD, saying, 4“Go up to Hilkiah the high priest, that he melt down the silver brought to the house of the LORD, which the guards of the threshold had gathered from the people. 5And let them give it to those doing the tasks appointed over the house of the LORD, that they give it to those doing the tasks in the house of the LORD, to repair the breaches of the house, 6to the carpenters and to the builders and to the masons, to buy wood and quarried stone to repair the house. 7But the silver given them need not be accounted for, for they deal honestly.” 8And Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the scribe, “I have found a book of teaching in the house of the LORD.” And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan and he read it. 9And Shaphan came to the king and brought back word to the king and said, “Your servants melted down the silver that was in the house and gave it to those doing the tasks appointed over the house of the LORD.” 10And Shaphan told the king, saying, “Hilkiah the priest gave me a book,” and Shaphan read it to the king. 11And it happened when the king heard the words of the book of teaching, that he rent his garments. 12And the king charged Hilkiah the priest and Ahikam son of Shaphan and Achbor son of Michaiah and Shaphan the scribe and Asaiah the king’s servant, saying, 13“Go, inquire of the LORD on my behalf and on behalf of the people and on behalf of all Judah concerning the words of this book that has been found, for great is the LORD’s wrath that is kindled against us because our fathers have not heeded the words of this book to do as all that is written in it.” 14And Hilkiah the priest went, and Ahikam and Achbor and Shaphan, and Asaiah with him, to Huldah the prophetess, wife of Shallum son of Tikvah son of Harhas, keeper of the wardrobe, and she was living in the Mishneh, and they spoke to her. 15And she said to them, “Thus said the LORD God of Israel: ‘Say to the man who sent you to me, 16Thus said the LORD: I am about to bring evil on this place and on its inhabitants, by all the words of the book that the king of Judah read, 17in return for their forsaking Me and burning incense to other gods so as to vex Me with all their handiwork, and My wrath shall kindle against this place and will not be extinguished.’ 18And to the king of Judah who sends you to inquire of the LORD, thus shall you say to him: ‘Thus said the LORD God of Israel: the words that you heard, 19inasmuch as your heart quailed and you humbled yourself before the LORD when you heard what I said about this place and about its inhabitants, that they will become a desolation and a curse, and you rent your garments and wept before Me, I, too, have heard, said the LORD. 20Therefore I am about to gather you to your fathers, and you shall be gathered to your grave in peace, and your eyes shall not see all the evil that I am about to bring on this place.’” And they brought back word to the king.
CHAPTER 22 NOTES
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2. And he did what was right in the eyes of the LORD. Since Josiah was a child when he became king, one must assume that his virtuous behavior at first must have been through the dictates of the regents who would have had to manage the affairs of state for the first eight to ten years of his reign.
3. the scribe. As elsewhere, this title, in court circles, designates not someone who copies manuscripts but a high royal official with administrative responsibilities.
4. that he melt down the silver. The verb as it appears here in the received text, yatem, is of uncertain meaning. When this same activity is reported in verse 9, a different verb is used, meaning “to melt down,” suggesting that the original text here read yatekh. (The differing last consonants resemble each other in appearance in paleo-Hebrew script.) Several ancient versions show “melt down” at this point. People would have brought contributions to the Temple in the form of silver ornaments, and these then had to be melted down and broken into small weights of silver that could be used for payment of labor and materials.
5. those doing the tasks appointed over the house of the LORD … those doing the tasks. The first group, distinguished by the term “appointed,” are administrators and foremen, probably part of the permanent staff of the Temple, and the second group are the sundry skilled workmen, in all likelihood brought into the Temple to perform these specific jobs.
8. I have found a book of teaching. The identical designation sefer hatorah occurs in Deuteronomy 30:10. The term sefer can mean “scroll” or “book” or indeed any written document, even a letter, but its force as “book” seems especially relevant here. For two centuries, the scholarly consensus, despite some dissent, has been that the found book is Deuteronomy. Although attributed to Moses, it would have been written in the reign of Josiah, perhaps drawing on some earlier materials. The book “found” in 621 B.C.E. was also not altogether identical with Deuteronomy as we have it, which almost certainly included some later elements, and was not edited in the form that has come down to us until the Babylonian exile. The major new emphases of the book brought to Josiah were the repeated stress on the exclusivity of the cult in Jerusalem (“the place that I shall choose”) and the dire warnings of imminent disaster and exile if the people fail to fulfill its covenant with God.
11. he rent his garments. The most likely reason would be his hearing the grim warnings of impending catastrophe if Judah did not mend its ways. This reaction would then provide the impetus for Josiah’s rigorous reforms.
13. Go, inquire of the LORD. This is the usual idiom for inquiring of an oracle.
for great is the LORD’s wrath. This sounds very much like a direct response to the great catalogue of hair-raising curses (see Deuteronomy 28:15–68) in the book read out to Josiah.
14. Huldah the prophetess. She is the only female prophet mentioned in the Book of Kings. She performs in every respect like the male prophets, quoting God’s words directly with the introductory messenger-formula, “Thus said the LORD,” and the large royal delegation that comes to her clearly accepts her authority as fully as they would that of a male prophet.
Mishneh. The term means “repetition” or “addition” and was a western addition in Jerusalem.
15. Say to the man who sent you to me. Pointedly avoiding in her initial speech reference to Josiah by name or title, she reduces him to a mere sender of messages. In verse 18, she refers to him as “the king of Judah” but continues to suppress his name.
16. by all the words of the book that the king of Judah read. Since the contents of the book at this point would be known only to Josiah and Shaphan and perhaps some courtiers who heard the reading of the text, Huldah must be presumed to know the book through her prophetic gifts.
17. all their handiwork. The reference is to idols, fashioned by human hands.
20. you shall be gathered to your grave in peace. In fact, Josiah will be killed in battle at Megiddo at the age of thirty-nine. Some scholars cite the discrepancy between Huldah’s prophecy and what is reported in 23:29 as evidence that the terms of the prophecy are authentic, with Huldah’s actual reassurance at the time to Josiah then contradicted by historical events.
1And the king sent out, and all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem gathered round him. 2And the king went up to the house of the LORD, and every man of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem were with him, and the priests and the prophets and all the people from the least to the greatest. And he read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant that was found in the house of the LORD. 3And the king stood on a platform and sealed a covenant before the LORD to walk after the LORD and to keep His commands and His precepts and His statutes with a whole heart and with all their being, to fulfill the words of this covenant written in this book. And all the people entered into the covenant. 4And the king charged Hilkiah the high priest and the assistant priests and the guards of the threshold to bring out from the LORD’s temple the vessels made for Baal and Asherah and for all the array of the heavens, and he burned them outside Jerusalem in the Kidron fields and bore off their ashes to Bethel. 5And he put down the pagan priests that the kings of Judah had set up to burn incense on the high places in the towns of Judah and in the environs of Jerusalem, and those burning incense to Baal and to the sun and to the moon and to the constellations and to all the array of the heavens. 6And he took out the sacred pole from the house of the LORD outside of Jerusalem to the Kidron Wadi and burned it in the Kidron Wadi and ground it to dust and flung its ashes on the graves of the common people. 7And he smashed the houses of the male cult-harlots that were within the house of the LORD where women would weave fabrics for Asherah.8And he brought all the priests from the towns of Judah and defiled the high places where the priests from Geba to Beersheba had been burning incense. And he smashed the high places of the gates that were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua commander of the town, which were to a man’s left at the town gate. 9Only, the priests of the high places would not go up to the LORD’s altar in Jerusalem, but they ate flatbread in the midst of their kinsmen. 10And he defiled the Topheth that was in the Valley of Hinnom, so that no man would pass his son or his daughter through the fire to Molech. 11And he put down the horses that the kings of Judah would dedicate to the sun, from the entrance of the house of the LORD to the chamber of Nathan-Melech the eunuch, which is in the precincts. And the chariots of the sun he burned in fire. 12And the altars that were on the roof of the Upper Chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars that Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of the LORD, the king smashed, and he hurried off their dust from there and flung it into the Kidron Wadi. 13And the high places facing Jerusalem that were to the right of the Mount of the Destroyer, which Solomon king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth foulness of the Sidonians and Chemosh foulness of Moab and Milcom abomination of the Ammonites—the king defiled. 14And he shattered the steles and cut down the sacred poles and filled their place with human bones. 15And also the altar that was in Bethel, the high place that Jeroboam son of Nebat had made, who had led Israel to offend, that altar, too, and the high places he smashed and burned the high place, grinding it to dust, and he burned the sacred pole. 16And Josiah turned and saw the graves that were there on the mountain, and he sent and fetched the bones from the graves and burned them on the altar and defiled it, according to the word of the LORD that the man of God called out, who had called out these words. 17And he said, “What is that marker which I see?” And the townspeople said to him, “It is the grave of the man of God who came from Judah, and who called out these things that you did on the Bethel altar.” 18And he said, “Let him be. Let no man touch his bones.” And they rescued his bones, with the bones of the prophet who had come from Samaria. 19And the structures, too, of the high places that were in the mountains of Samaria which the kings of Israel had made to vex, did Josiah remove, like all the acts that he had done in Bethel. 20And he slaughtered all the priests of the high places who were there on the altars, and he burned human bones on them. And he went back to Jerusalem. 21And the king charged all the people, saying, “Make a Passover to the LORD your God, as it is written in this book of the covenant. 22For it has not been done like this Passover from the days of the judges who judged Israel and all the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah.” 23But in the eighteenth year of King Josiah this Passover to the LORD was done in Jerusalem. 24And the ghosts, too, and the familiar spirits and the household gods and the foul idols and all the vile things that were seen in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem, Josiah rooted out, in order to fulfill the words of the teaching written in the book that Hilkiah the priest had found in the house of the LORD. 25And like him there was no king before him who turned back to the LORD with all his heart and with all his being and with all his might according to all the teaching of Moses, and after him none arose like him. 26Yet the LORD did not turn back from His great smoldering wrath, His wrath that had kindled against Judah, for all the vexations with which Manasseh had vexed Him. 27And the LORD said, “Judah, too, will I remove from My presence, as I removed Israel, and I will spurn this city Jerusalem that I chose, and the house of which I said, Let My name be there.” 28And the rest of the acts of Josiah and all that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Judah? 29In his days Pharaoh Neco king of Egypt had come up against the king of Assyria by the Euphrates River, and King Josiah sallied forth to meet him, and he put him to death at Megiddo when he saw him. 30And his servants took him off dead on a chariot from Megiddo and brought him to Jerusalem and buried him in his grave. And the people of the land took Jehoahaz son of Josiah and anointed him and made him king in his father’s stead. 31Twenty-three years old was Jehoahaz when he became king, and three months he was king in Jerusalem, and his mother’s name was Hamutal daughter of Jeremiah from Libnah. 32And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD as all that his fathers had done. 33And Pharaoh Neco put him in bonds at Riblah in the land of Hamath, removing him as king in Jerusalem, and he imposed a levy on the land of a hundred talents of silver and talents of gold. 34And Pharaoh Neco made Eliakim, son of Josiah, king in Josiah his father’s stead, and changed his name to Jehoiakim. And he took Jehoahaz and brought him to Egypt, and he died there. 35And Jehoiakim gave the silver and the gold to Pharaoh, but he assessed the land so as to give the silver according to Pharaoh’s decree—every man according to his assessment, he wrested the silver and the gold from the people of the land to give to Pharaoh Neco. 36Twenty-five years old was Jehoiakim when he became king, and eleven years he was king in Jerusalem. And his mother’s name was Zebudah daughter of Pedaiah from Rumah. 37And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD as all that his fathers had done.
CHAPTER 23 NOTES
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3. with a whole heart and with all their being. These are signature formulas of the Book of Deuteronomy. They occur again, expanded, in verse 25.
And all the people entered into the covenant. The received text here has the verb wayaʿamed, literally “stood,” but this may be a scribal error for wayaʾavor, literally, “pass through.”
4. he burned them outside Jerusalem. Because these objects of pagan worship are impure, they are taken outside Jerusalem to be destroyed in an open space where purity does not obtain.
and bore off their ashes to Bethel. Bethel was one of the two main sanctuaries of the northern kingdom. Scattering the ashes of the statues of Baal and Asherah on that site would be a way of confirming its illegitimacy or impurity. Josiah’s access to Bethel and, later in this chapter, to other northern sites probably reflects the decline of Assyrian power in the latter part of the seventh century B.C.E. It would appear that the Assyrians at this point had vacated much of the northern kingdom that it conquered in 721 B.C.E. and that Josiah attached these regimes to his own kingdom. Many scholars suspect that his campaign to establish the absolute exclusivity of the Jerusalem cult was at least in part an effort to consolidate his rule over the entire country, in effect reviving the united kingdom that existed in the era of Solomon.
5. put down. The Hebrew verb hishbit, literally, “put an end to,” is a little ambiguous (hence the translation choice), but the slaughter of pagan priests reported in verse 20 suggests that the verb in this context may mean “to kill.”
to Baal and to the sun and to the moon and to the constellations. The worship of the old Canaanite god Baal is joined with the later fashionable worship of the astral deities, probably under Assyrian influence.
6. dust … ashes. Two processes of destruction are involved here, grinding down and burning. The Hebrew terms ʿafar and ʾefer exhibit a degree of interchangeability.
the graves of the common people. The context suggests a kind of potters’ field, so that the casting of the ashes of the ʾasherah here would do further dishonor to it.
7. fabrics for Asherah. The Hebrew reads batim, “houses,” probably a scribal error for badim, “fabrics,” influenced by the appearance of “houses” at the beginning of this verse.
8. the high places of the gates that were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua. The Hebrew wording here is a little confusing and may reflect scribal scrambling of the text.
9. Only, the priests of the high places would not go up to the LORD’S altar … but they ate flatbread in the midst of their kinsmen. These priests had officiated in the worship of YHWH on the high places. Their involvement in a cult located in an unauthorized place disqualifies them from serving in the Jerusalem temple, but they are nevertheless entitled to receive sustenance—the flatbread—with other members of the priestly caste in Jerusalem.
11. And he put down the horses that the kings of Judah would dedicate to the sun. Horses were associated with worship of the solar deity, probably because the Hebrews, like the Greeks, imagined the sun riding across the sky in a chariot. The verb translated as “dedicate” is literally “gave,” and probably indicates sacrificing the horses to the sun—an especial abomination in Israelite eyes because the horse is an impure beast, prohibited as food.
13. the Mount of the Destroyer. Many scholars infer that this designation, har hamashḥit, is a polemic distortion of har hamishḥah, the Mount of Anointment.
16. fetched the bones from the graves. Burning human bones on an altar would permanently defile it.
according to the word of the LORD. What follows is the fulfillment of the prophecy of the man of God from Judah reported in 1 Kings 13.
18. with the bones of the prophet who had come from Samaria. In the story in 1 Kings 13, he is a prophet who comes to Bethel from Judah, and the reference to coming from Samaria, evidently triggered by the phrase “who came from Judah,” is not in keeping with the original story (which in fact occurred before the building of Samaria).
21. Make a Passover to the LORD your God, as it is written in this book of the covenant. Passover was the great rite that affirmed national purpose and belonging to the nation (compare Joshua 1). Josiah suggests that the exacting stipulations for observing Passover are made fully clear only in the book found in the Temple.
26. Yet the LORD did not turn back from His great smoldering wrath. The writer struggles with a dilemma: Josiah is in his view the supremely virtuous king, and yet three generations after him Judah is destroyed. The explanation offered is that because of the cumulative offenses of the kings of Judah, with Manasseh the most egregious, Josiah’s virtue cannot save the nation.
29. In his days Pharaoh Neco king of Egypt had come up. This two-verse notice of Josiah’s death on the battlefield seems out of place, coming after the formulaic concluding statement about “the rest of the acts of Josiah.” Perhaps it was tacked on at the end here because it was a historical fact that had to be reported but with which the historian was uncomfortable, contradicting as it does both Huldah’s prophecy and Josiah’s exemplary virtue.
against the king of Assyria. Something is awry here in regard to historical facts. We know from Babylonian annals that it was against Babylonia that Pharaoh Neco led his expeditionary force in 600 B.C.E., and Babylonia was aligned against Assyria, then in serious decline. Some scholars suggest reading “to,” ’el, instead of “against,” ʿal.
and King Josiah sallied forth to meet him. Though the geopolitics of the confrontation at Megiddo may be a little obscure, it appears that Josiah sought to associate himself with Babylonia and block Neco’s passage to the east. In the event, he proved no match for the Egyptians and was immediately killed.
30. And the people of the land took Jehoahaz … and anointed him. The action of ʿam haʾarets, “the people of the land,” in this instance does make it look like a particular political force in the Judahite populace, capable of choosing kings.
33. And Pharaoh Neco put him in bonds. There were political divisions in Judah between a pro-Babylonian party (with which Josiah would have been linked) and a pro-Egyptian group. Neco, with commanding military force, saw to it that a pro-Egyptian king would be set on the throne.
in the land of Hamath. The location is northern Mesopotamia, conquered by the Egyptian forces.
he imposed a levy on the land. Neco has clearly reduced Judah to a vassal state.
34. changed his name to Jehoiakim. Name changing when someone assumed the throne was fairly common in the ancient Near East. The two names in this case are essentially the same name with different theophoric designations—ʾel and yeho (which is the same as yah/Yahweh).
35. he wrested the silver and the gold. The Hebrew verb has the connotation of extracting by main force.
1In his days Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylonia came up, and Jehoiakim was his vassal for three years, and he turned back and rebelled against him. 2And the LORD sent against him the Chaldean brigades and the Aramean brigades and the Moabite brigades and the Ammonite brigades, and He sent them against Judah to destroy it, according to the word of the LORD which He had spoken through his servants the prophets. 3Only by the LORD’s decree was this in Judah, to remove it from His presence for the offense of Manasseh, according to all that he had done. 4And also for the innocent blood that he had shed and filled Jerusalem with innocent blood. And the LORD did not want to forgive. 5And the rest of the acts of Jehoiakim and all that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Judah? 6And Jehoiakim lay with his fathers, and Jehoiachin his son was king in his stead. 7And the king of Egypt no longer went out from his land, for the king of Babylonia had taken all that was the king of Egypt’s, from the Wadi of Egypt to the Euphrates River. 8Eighteen years old was Jehoiachin when he became king, and three months he was king in Jerusalem, and his mother’s name was Nehushta daughter of Elnathan from Jerusalem. 9And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD, as all that his father had done. 10At that time the servants of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylonia went up against Jerusalem, and the city came under siege. 11And Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylonia came against the city, and his servants were besieging it. 12And Jehoiachin king of Judah went out to the king of Babylonia—he and his mother and his servants and his commanders and his eunuchs—and the king of Babylonia took him in the eighth year of his reign. 13And he took out from there all the treasures of the house of the LORD and the treasures of the house of the king, and he cut up all the golden vessels that Solomon king of Israel had made in the temple of the LORD, as the LORD had spoken. 14And he exiled all Jerusalem and all the commanders and all the valiant warriors, ten thousand exiles, and no artisan nor metalsmith remained, only the poor people of the land. 15And he exiled Jehoiachin to Babylonia, and the king’s mother and the king’s wives and his eunuchs and the nobles of the land he led into exile to Babylonia. 16And all the fighting men, seven thousand, and the artisans and the metalsmiths a thousand, all of them battle-tested warriors. And the king of Babylonia brought them in exile to Babylonia. 17And the king of Babylonia made Mattaniah his uncle king in his stead, and he changed his name to Zedekiah. 18Twenty-one years old was Zedekiah when he became king, and eleven years he was king in Jerusalem, and his mother’s name was Hamutal daughter of Jeremiah from Libnah. 19And he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD as all that Jehoiakim had done. 20For because of the LORD’s wrath, it was against Jerusalem and against Judah, till He flung them from His presence. And Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylonia.
CHAPTER 24 NOTES
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2. And the LORD sent against him. According to the notion of historical causation promoted by the writer, all historical events are directly dictated by God. In point of fact, the sundry peoples of the trans-Jordan region mentioned here, all vassals to Babylonia, would have dispatched their troops against Judah at the behest of Nebuchadnezzar.
3. was this in Judah. The Hebrew preposition could also mean “against.”
7. And the king of Egypt no longer went out from his land. Pharaoh Neco had sent a large expeditionary force against Babylonia in 609 B.C.E. that took up a position along the Euphrates. Now, a decade later, after the defeat at the battle of Carchemish, the Egyptians were compelled to retreat and remain within their own borders.
12. he and his mother and his servants and his commanders and his eunuchs. This retinue of notables, including not only military men but court officials and the queen mother, suggests that the king has come out in order to submit himself and those around him to Nebuchadnezzar.
14. And he exiled all Jerusalem. What this means is not the entire population but a substantial part of its elite and its skilled workers.
16. all of them battle-tested warriors. The syntactical position of this phrase is slightly confusing because it has to refer to the fighting men at the beginning of the sentence but not to the artisans and eunuchs who come afterward.
20. And Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylonia. As usual, the writer provides no political explanation—in this case, for the fact that Zedekiah, having been installed by Nebuchadnezzar as vassal king, now decides to rebel. From the Book of Jeremiah, from Ezekiel, and from extrabiblical sources, we know that there were sharp divisions within the kingdom of Judah between a pro-Egyptian faction and a pro-Babylonian faction. Zedekiah at this moment, counting on Egyptian support, joined an alliance of trans-Jordanian kingdoms plotting to overthrow Babylonian rule. In the event, Egypt did not provide support, and the rebellion failed to materialize. The consequence was Nebuchadnezzar’s assault on Jerusalem and the destruction of the kingdom of Judah.
1And it happened in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, on the tenth of the month, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylonia came—he and all his forces—against Jerusalem and camped against it and built siege-towers all around it. 2And the city came under siege till the twelfth year of King Zedekiah. 3On the ninth of the month the famine was severe in the city and there was no bread for the people of the land. 4In the eleventh year of Zedekiah in the fourth month on the ninth day the city was breached. And all the commanders of the king of Babylonia came and sat in the central gate, Nergal-Sarezer, Samgar-Nebo, Sarsechim, the chief eunuch, Nergal-Sarezer the chief magus, and all the rest of the king of Babylonia’s commanders. And it happened when Zedekiah saw them and all the men of war, that they fled by night through the gate between the double walls which is by the king’s garden, and the Chaldeans were upon the city all around. And they went through the Arabah. 5And the Chaldean force pursued the king and overtook him on the plain of Jericho, and all his force scattered from around him. 6And they seized the king and brought him up to the king of Babylonia at Riblah and pronounced judgment against him. 7And Zedekiah’s sons they slaughtered before his eyes, and Zedekiah’s eyes they blinded, and they bound him in fetters and brought him to Babylonia. 8And in the fifth month on the seventh of the month, which was the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylonia, Nebuzaradan the high chamberlain, servant of the king of Babylonia, came to Jerusalem. 9And he burned the house of the LORD and the house of the king and all the houses of Jerusalem, and every great house he burned in fire. 10And the wall of Jerusalem all around did the Chaldean force that was the high chamberlain’s shatter. 11And the rest of the people remaining in the city and the turncoats who had gone over to the king of Babylonia and the rest of the masses, Nebuzaradan the high chamberlain exiled. 12And of the poorest of the land the high chamberlain left to be vine-dressers and field workers. 13And the bronze pillars that were in the house of the LORD and the stands and the bronze sea that was in the house of the LORD the Chaldeans smashed and bore off their bronze to Babylonia. 14And the pails and the scrapers and the snuffers and the ladles and all the bronze vessels with which one ministered they took. 15And the fire-pans and the sprinkling bowls, whatever was of gold and whatever was of silver, the high chamberlain took. 16The two pillars, the one sea, the stands that Solomon had for the house of the LORD—all these vessels were beyond measure. 17Eighteen cubits was the height of one pillar with a bronze capital on its top, and the height of the capital was three cubits, and there were pomegranates on the capital all around of bronze, and like these was the second pillar with the meshwork. 18And the high chamberlain took Seraiah the head priest and Zephaniah the assistant priest and the three guards of the threshold. 19And from the city he took one eunuch who was the official over the men of war and five men of those who attended in the king’s presence and the scribe of the army commander who mustered the people of the land, and sixty men from the people of the land who were in the town. 20And Nebuzaradan the high chamberlain took them and led them to the king of Babylonia at Riblah. 21And the king of Babylonia struck them down and put them to death in Riblah in the land of Hamath. And he exiled Judah from its land. 22And as to the people remaining in the land of Judah whom Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylonia had left, he appointed over them Gedaliah son of Ahikam son of Shaphan. 23And all the commanders of the forces, they and the men, heard that the king of Babylonia had appointed Gedaliah, and they came to Gedaliah at Mizpah—Ishmael son of Nethaniah and Johanan son of Kareah and Seraiah son of Tanhumeth the Netophahthite, and Jaazaniah son of the Maachite, they and their men. 24And Gedaliah swore to them and to their men and said to them, “Do not be afraid to serve the Chaldeans. Stay in the land and serve the king of Babylonia, that it may go well with you.” 25And it happened in the seventh month that Ishmael son of Nethaniah son of Elishama of the royal seed, and ten men with him, came and struck down Gedaliah, and he died, as well as the Judahites and the Chaldeans who were with him in Mizpah. 26And all the people arose, from the least to the greatest, and the commanders of the forces, and they went to Egypt, for they feared the Chaldeans.
27And it happened in the twenty-seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah in the twelfth month, on the twenty-seventh of the month, that Evil-Merodach king of Babylonia, in the year he became king, lifted up the head of Jehoiachin king of Judah from the prison-house. 28And he spoke kindly to him and gave him a throne above the thrones of the kings who were with him in Babylonia. 29And he changed his prison garments, and Jehoiachin ate bread perpetually in his presence all the days of his life. 30And his provision was a perpetual provision given him by the king day after day, all the days of his life.
CHAPTER 25 NOTES
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1. Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylonia came. It appears that Nebuchadnezzar was so incensed by the betrayal on the part of his vassal king Zedekiah that he personally led the siege against Jerusalem. At some point, however, before the actual conquest of the city, he withdrew to a Mesopotamian outpost in Riblah (verse 5), leaving the completion of the siege to his military deputy, Nebuzaradan (verse 9ff.).
3. bread. As elsewhere, this word is probably a synecdoche for food in general.
4. In the eleventh year of Zedekiah. The text at this point is clearly defective, exhibiting a subject (“all the men of war”) with no predicate and lacking some narrative information. The entire passage is replicated in Jeremiah 39, and so the translation incorporates, italicized, elements from the text in Jeremiah.
Nergal-Sarezer. This name occurs twice here (as well as in the corresponding list in Jeremiah), which must be a scribal duplication.
6. pronounced judgment against him. This would scarcely have been a proper trial but summary judgment of a vassal king who had proved himself a traitor.
7. And Zedekiah’s sons they slaughtered before his eyes. In a pointed device of ancient Near Eastern barbarity, the last thing he is made to see before they blind him is the slaughter of his sons. The act is political as well as sadistic: no one is left in the line of Zedekiah to claim the throne after him.
8. the high chamberlain. This is the same title attached to Potiphar in Genesis 39:1. The Hebrew sar hatabaḥim literally means “commander of the slaughter” (“slaughter” in the culinary sense). The title might have originally designated a head steward or chef, but it clearly came to mean someone exercising high authority in the political and military realm.
9. every great house. These are the houses of the nobility, as the Aramaic translation, batey revavaia, properly registers.
10. And the wall of Jerusalem … did the Chaldean force … shatter. Destroying the wall rendered the city totally indefensible, eradicating any possibility that it could continue to be the capital of an independent state.
11. the turncoats. Literally, “those who fell.” One should recall that there was a strong group among the Judahites (including Jeremiah) who thought that the rebellion against Babylonia was greatly ill advised, and so it is not surprising that some of these should defect to the Babylonians.
the masses. The Hebrew hamon, which in biblical usage generally refers to a loud hubbub, may be doubtful. The parallel passage in Jeremiah 52:15 shows haʾamon, a collective noun for artisans, and that looks like the more likely reading.
12. And of the poorest of the land. The impression given here that only the poor agricultural workers were spared the fate of exile is probably misleading. Although the Babylonians appear to have exiled a large part of the nation’s elite, both Gedaliah, who is appointed regent by the Babylonians, and the conspirators who kill him are from the nobility. The burial center at Katef-Hinnom, in western Jerusalem, which contains epigraphic and other evidence of having been in continuous use through the sixth century B.C.E., was clearly a burial place for Judahite aristocracy.
13. And the bronze pillars. It was common procedure in conquests to cart off the temple treasures of the conquered. At the same time, this catalogue of precious sacred vessels seized by the Babylonians reverses everything reported in 1 Kings 6–7 about the splendid furnishings for the Temple and the palace that Solomon caused to be fashioned. Everything that the grand first king after David built or made is either reduced to rubble or taken off by the enemy,
the bronze sea. This is a large cast-metal pool, mentioned in 1 Kings 7:23 and elsewhere.
16. beyond measure. More literally, “beyond weighing.”
18. And the high chamberlain took Seraiah the head priest and Zephaniah the assistant priest. The obvious intention is to prevent a renewal of the cult in Jerusalem. The usual term for high priest (in the Hebrew, “great priest”) is not used but rather “head priest,” kohen haroʾsh.
21. And the king of Babylonia struck them down and put them to death. No Geneva convention obtains for these ancient prisoners of war, and since they constitute the nation’s military and sacerdotal elite, Nebuchadnezzar wants to eliminate them entirely,
24. Do not be afraid to serve the Chaldeans. Gedaliah is obviously a member of the pro-Babylonian faction among the Judahites who assumed that military resistance was not feasible and that cooperation would lead to kind treatment by the Babylonians. The men who come to see him clearly belong to the opposing faction, and they regard Gedaliah as a quisling and thus proceed to kill him.
25. of the royal seed. He may well have hoped to claim the throne after the death of Gedaliah.
as well as the Judahites and the Chaldeans who were with him in Mizpah. These killings are a mark of their ruthlessness and of their thoroughness as insurgents. They murder all of Gedaliah’s attendants and staff as vile collaborators, and they also kill the Chaldeans stationed with him, perhaps to eliminate them as witnesses and certainly as an act of defiance against the conquerors.
26. And all the people arose, from the least to the greatest. This is again a patent exaggeration: the historical evidence argues strongly against the notion that the entire country was emptied of its Judahite population. The logic of the flight to Egypt is that the Egyptians were the adversaries of Babylonia and the allies of the anti-Babylonian faction.
27. Evil-Merodach. He assumed the throne of Babylonia in 562 B.C.E. Granting pardons when one becomes king was a common ancient Near Eastern practice. Jehoiachin was taken into captivity in 597. His quarter century as prisoner may actually have been a form of house arrest because a Babylonian document from 592 records the provision of food for Jehoiachin king of Judah and his five sons, suggesting that some recognition of his royal status was accorded all along.
lifted up the head. This is the same idiom, intimating pardon, that is used for the imprisoned chief steward in the Joseph story (Genesis 40:13).
28. gave him a throne above the thrones of the kings who were with him. This is probably a nationalistic flourish of the writer’s because it is unlikely that Jehoiachin would have been granted a higher status than other kings held in Babylonian captivity.
29. And he changed his prison garments. This detail is probably a deliberate reminiscence of the Joseph story: when Joseph is freed from prison, he is clothed by Pharaoh in fine garments.
Jehoiachin. The Hebrew says merely “he,” and the proper name has been added in order to avoid confusion of pronominal reference.
30. And his provision was a perpetual provision … day after day. The historical event with which the Book of Kings ends is of course a complete catastrophe—the utter destruction of Jerusalem, including Temple and palace; the massacre of the royal line and the military and priestly elite; and the exile of a large part of the population. This concluding image, however, seeks to intimate a hopeful possibility of future restoration: a Davidic king is recognized as king, even in captivity, and is given a daily provision appropriate to his royal status. As he sits on his throne elevated above the thrones of the other captive kings, the audience of the story is invited to imagine a scion of David again sitting on his throne in Jerusalem.