4:1 Now a wife of one of the prophets 5 appealed 6 to Elisha for help, saying, “Your servant, my husband is dead. You know that your servant was a loyal follower of the Lord. 7 Now the creditor is coming to take away my two boys to be his servants.”
(
17:7 This happened because the Israelites sinned against the Lord their God, who brought them up from the land of Egypt and freed them from the power of 21 Pharaoh king of Egypt. They worshiped 22 other gods;
17:24 The king of Assyria brought foreigners 25 from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim and settled them in the cities of Samaria 26 in place of the Israelites. They took possession of Samaria and lived in its cities.
17:34 To this very day they observe their earlier practices. They do not worship 27 the Lord; they do not obey the rules, regulations, law, and commandments that the Lord gave 28 the descendants of Jacob, whom he renamed Israel.
1 tn Heb “the sons of the prophets.”
2 tn Heb “from your head.” The same expression occurs in v. 5.
3 tn Or “the spirit of the
4 tn Heb “he”; the referent (Elisha) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
5 tn Heb “a wife from among the wives of the sons of the prophets.”
6 tn Or “cried out.”
7 tn Heb “your servant feared the
7 tn Heb “found.”
8 tn Or “brothers.”
9 tn Heb “for the peace of.”
9 tn Heb “Because you have done well by doing what is proper in my eyes – according to all which was in my heart you have done to the house of Ahab – sons of four generations will sit for you on the throne of Israel.” In the Hebrew text the Lord’s statement is one long sentence (with a parenthesis). The translation above divides it into shorter sentences for stylistic reasons.
11 tn Heb “stole.”
12 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.
13 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.
13 tn Heb “as it is written in the scroll of the law of Moses which the
14 tn Heb “on account of sons.”
15 tn Heb “on account of fathers.”
16 sn This law is recorded in Deut 24:16.
15 tn Heb “the sons of the pledges.”
16 map For location see Map2-B1; Map4-D3; Map5-E2; Map6-A4; Map7-C1.
17 tn Heb “and from under the hand of.” The words “freed them” are added in the translation for stylistic reasons.
18 tn Heb “feared.”
19 tn The meaning of the verb וַיְחַפְּאוּ (vayÿkhappÿ’u), translated here “said,” is uncertain. Some relate it to the verbal root חָפַה (khafah), “to cover,” and translate “they did it in secret” (see BDB 341 s.v. חָפָא). However, the pagan practices specified in the following sentences were hardly done in secret. Others propose a meaning “ascribe, impute,” which makes good contextual sense but has little etymological support (see HALOT 339 s.v. חפא). In this case Israel claimed that the
20 sn That is, from the city’s perimeter to the central citadel.
21 tn The object is supplied in the translation.
22 sn In vv. 24-29 Samaria stands for the entire northern kingdom of Israel.
23 tn Heb “fear.”
24 tn Heb “commanded.”
25 tn The term is singular in the MT but plural in the LXX and other ancient versions. It is also possible to regard the singular as a collective singular, especially in the context of other plural items.
26 tn Heb “until those days.”
27 tn In Hebrew the name sounds like the phrase נְחַשׁ הַנְּחֹשֶׁת (nÿkhash hannÿkhoshet), “bronze serpent.”
27 tn Heb “and he burned it in the Kidron Valley.”
28 tc Heb “on the grave of the sons of the people.” Some Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Aramaic, and Latin witnesses read the plural “graves.”
29 sn This is a derogatory name for the Mount of Olives, involving a wordplay between מָשְׁחָה (mashÿkhah), “anointing,” and מַשְׁחִית (mashÿkhit), “destruction.” See HALOT 644 s.v. מַשְׁחִית and M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings (AB), 289.
31 tn Heb “he sent them against Judah to destroy it, according to the word of the