8:25 In the twelfth year of the reign of Israel’s King Joram, son of Ahab, Jehoram’s son Ahaziah became king over Judah. 8:26 Ahaziah was twenty-two years old when he became king and he reigned for one year in Jerusalem. 8 His mother was Athaliah, the granddaughter 9 of King Omri of Israel.
11:1 When Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she was determined to destroy the entire royal line. 10 11:2 So Jehosheba, the daughter of King Joram and sister of Ahaziah, took Ahaziah’s son Joash and sneaked 11 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. 12 So he was hidden from Athaliah and escaped execution. 13
13:1 In the twenty-third year of the reign of Judah’s King Joash son of Ahaziah, Jehu’s son Jehoahaz became king over Israel. He reigned in Samaria 14 for seventeen years.
1 tn Heb “and Jehoram turned his hands and fled.” The phrase “turned his hands” refers to how he would have pulled on the reins in order to make his horses turn around.
2 tn Heb “Deceit, Ahaziah.”
3 tn Heb “found.”
4 tn Or “brothers.”
5 tn Heb “for the peace of.”
5 tn Heb “As for the rest of the acts of Ahaziah which he did, are they not recorded in the scroll of the events of the days of the kings of Israel?”
7 tn Heb “lay down with his fathers.”
9 map For location see Map5-B1; Map6-F3; Map7-E2; Map8-F2; Map10-B3; JP1-F4; JP2-F4; JP3-F4; JP4-F4.
10 tn Hebrew בַּת (bat), “daughter,” can refer, as here to a granddaughter. See HALOT 166 s.v. בַּת.
11 tn Heb “she arose and she destroyed all the royal offspring.” The verb קוּם (qum) “arise,” is here used in an auxiliary sense to indicate that she embarked on a campaign to destroy the royal offspring. See M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings (AB), 125.
13 tn Heb “stole.”
14 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.
15 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.
15 map For location see Map2-B1; Map4-D3; Map5-E2; Map6-A4; Map7-C1.
17 tc The MT has the plural form of the verb, but the final vav (ו) is virtually dittographic. The word that immediately follows in the Hebrew text begins with a yod (י). The form should be emended to the singular, which is consistent in number with the verb (“he broke down”) that follows.
18 tn Heb “came to.”
19 tn Heb “four hundred cubits.” The standard cubit in the OT is assumed by most authorities to be about eighteen inches (45 cm) long.