16:17 King Ahaz took off the frames of the movable stands, and removed the basins from them. He took “The Sea” 6 down from the bronze bulls that supported it 7 and put it on the pavement.
23:15 He also tore down the altar in Bethel 8 at the high place made by Jeroboam son of Nebat, who encouraged Israel to sin. 9 He burned all the combustible items at that high place and crushed them to dust; including the Asherah pole. 10
1 tn Heb “stole.”
2 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.
3 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.
4 tn Heb “the Gate of the Runners of the House of the King.”
5 tn Heb “he”; the referent (the king) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
7 sn See the note at 1 Kgs 7:23.
8 tn Heb “that [were] under it.”
10 map For location see Map4-G4; Map5-C1; Map6-E3; Map7-D1; Map8-G3.
11 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.
12 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.
13 tn Heb “Also Judah I will turn away from my face.”
14 tn Heb “My name will be there.”
16 tn Heb “And the silver and the gold Jehoiakim gave to Pharaoh, but he taxed the land to give the silver at the command of Pharaoh, [from] each according to his tax he collected the silver and the gold, from the people of the land, to give to Pharaoh Necho.”
19 tn Heb “and he deported Jehoiachin to Babylon; the mother of the king and the wives of the king and his eunuchs and the mighty of the land he led into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.”