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 11:7

11:7 The two units who are off duty on the Sabbath will guard the Lord’s temple and protect the king. ¹ 

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 23:8

23:8 He brought all the priests from the cities of Judah and ruined ⁵  the high places where the priests had offered sacrifices, from Geba to Beer Sheba. ⁶  He tore down the high place of the goat idols ⁷  situated at the entrance of the gate of Joshua, the city official, on the left side of the city gate.

¹ tn Verses 5b-7 read literally, “the third of you, the ones entering [on] the Sabbath and the ones guarding the guard of the house of the king, and the third in the gate of Sur, and the third in the gate behind the runners, and you will guard the guard of the house, alternating. And the two units of you, all the ones going out [on] the Sabbath, and they will guard the guard of the house of the Lord for the king.” The precise meaning of this text is impossible to determine. It would appear that the Carians and royal bodyguard were divided into three units. One unit would serve during the Sabbath; the other two would be off duty on the Sabbath. Jehoiada divided the first unit into three groups and assigned them different locations. The two off duty units were assigned the task of guarding 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 tn Heb “defiled; desecrated,” that is, “made ritually unclean and unusable.”

⁶ sn These towns marked Judah’s northern and southern borders, respectively, at the time of Josiah.

⁷ tc The Hebrew text reads “the high places of the gates,” which is problematic in that the rest of the verse speaks of a specific gate. The translation assumes an emendation to בָּמוֹת הַשְּׁעָרִים (bamot hashÿ’arim), “the high place of the goats” (that is, goat idols). Worship of such images is referred to in Lev 17:7 and 2 Chr 11:15. For a discussion of the textual issue, see M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings (AB), 286-87.