2 Kings 11:5

11:5 He ordered them, “This is what you must do. One third of the unit that is on duty during the Sabbath will guard the royal palace.

2 Kings 11:2

11:2 So Jehosheba, the daughter of King Joram and sister of Ahaziah, took Ahaziah’s son Joash and sneaked ¹  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. ²  So he was hidden from Athaliah and escaped execution. ³ 

2 Kings 23:5

23:5 He eliminated ⁴  the pagan priests whom the kings of Judah had appointed to offer sacrifices ⁵  on the high places in the cities of Judah and in the area right around Jerusalem. (They offered sacrifices ⁶  to Baal, the sun god, the moon god, the constellations, and all the stars in the sky.)

2 Kings 23:19

23:19 Josiah also removed all the shrines on the high places in the cities of Samaria. The kings of Israel had made them and angered the Lord. ⁷  He did to them what he had done to the high place in Bethel. ⁸ 

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 Perhaps, “destroyed.”

⁵ tn Or “burn incense.”

⁶ tn Or “burned incense.”

⁷ tc Heb “which the kings of Israel had made, angering.” The object has been accidentally omitted in the MT. It appears in the LXX, Syriac, and Vulgate versions.

⁸ tn Heb “and he did to them according to all the deeds he had done in Bethel.”