2 Kings 11:16

11:16 They seized her and took her into the precincts of the royal palace through the horses’ entrance. ¹  There she was executed.

2 Kings 11:2

11:2 So Jehosheba, the daughter of King Joram and sister of Ahaziah, took Ahaziah’s son Joash and sneaked ²  him away from the rest of the royal descendants who were to be executed. She hid him and his nurse in the room where the bed covers were stored. ³  So he was hidden from Athaliah and escaped execution. ⁴ 

2 Kings 23:15

23:15 He also tore down the altar in Bethel ⁵  at the high place made by Jeroboam son of Nebat, who encouraged Israel to sin. ⁶  He burned all the combustible items at that high place and crushed them to dust; including the Asherah pole. ⁷ 

Jeremiah 31:40

31:40 The whole valley where dead bodies and sacrificial ashes are thrown ⁸  and all the terraced fields ⁹  out to the Kidron Valley ¹⁰  on the east as far north ¹¹  as the Horse Gate ¹²  will be included within this city that is sacred to the Lord. ¹³  The city will never again be torn down or destroyed.”

¹ tn Heb “and they placed hands on her, and she went the way of the entrance of the horses [into] the house of the king.”

² tn Heb “stole.”

³ tn Heb “him and his nurse in an inner room of beds.” The verb is missing in the Hebrew text. The parallel passage in 2 Chr 22:11 has “and she put” at the beginning of the clause. M. Cogan and H. Tadmor (II Kings [AB], 126) regard the Chronicles passage as an editorial attempt to clarify the difficulty of the original text. They prefer to take “him and his nurse” as objects of the verb “stole” and understand “in the bedroom” as the place where the royal descendants were executed. The phrase בַּחֲדַר הַמִּטּוֹת (bakhadar hammittot), “an inner room of beds,” is sometimes understood as referring to a bedroom (HALOT 293 s.v. חֶדֶר), though some prefer to see here a “room where the covers and cloths were kept for the beds (HALOT 573 s.v. מִטָּת). In either case, it may have been a temporary hideout, for v. 3 indicates that the child hid in the temple for six years.

⁴ tn Heb “and they hid him from Athaliah and he was not put to death.” The subject of the plural verb (“they hid”) is probably indefinite.

⁵ map For location see Map4-G4; Map5-C1; Map6-E3; Map7-D1; Map8-G3.

⁶ tn Heb “And also the altar that is in Bethel, the high place that Jeroboam son of Nebat who encouraged Israel to sin, also that altar and the high place he tore down.” The more repetitive Hebrew text is emphatic.

⁷ tn Heb “he burned the high place, crushing to dust, and he burned the Asherah pole.” High places per se are never referred to as being burned elsewhere. בָּמָה (bamah) here stands by metonymy for the combustible items located on the high place. See M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings (AB), 289.

⁸ sn It is generally agreed that this refers to the Hinnom Valley which was on the southwestern and southern side of the city. It was here where the people of Jerusalem had burned their children as sacrifices and where the Lord had said that there would be so many dead bodies when he punished them that they would be unable to bury all of them (cf. Jer 7:31-32). Reference here may be to those dead bodies and to the ashes of the cremated victims. This defiled place would be included within the holy city.

⁹ tc The translation here follows the Qere and a number of Hebrew mss in reading שְׁדֵמוֹת (shÿdemot) for the otherwise unknown word שְׁרֵמוֹת (shÿremot) exhibiting the common confusion of ר (resh) and ד (dalet). The fields of Kidron are mentioned also in 2 Kgs 23:4 as the place where Josiah burned the cult objects of Baal.

¹⁰ sn The Kidron Valley is the valley that joins the Hinnom Valley in the southeastern corner of the city and runs northward on the east side of the city.

¹¹ tn The words “on the east” and “north” are not in the text but are supplied in the translation to give orientation.

¹² sn The Horse Gate is mentioned in Neh 3:28 and is generally considered to have been located midway along the eastern wall just south of the temple area.

¹³ tn The words “will be included within this city that is” are not in the text. The text merely says that “The whole valley…will be sacred to the Lord.” These words have been supplied in the translation because they are really implicit in the description of the whole area as being included within the new city plan, not just the Hinnom and terraced fields as far as the Kidron Valley.