2 Kings 11:1-4

Athaliah is Eliminated

11:1 When Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she was determined to destroy the entire royal line. ¹  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  11:3 He hid out with his nurse in the Lord’s temple ⁵  for six years, while Athaliah was ruling over the land.

11:4 In the seventh year Jehoiada summoned ⁶  the officers of the units of hundreds of the Carians ⁷  and the royal bodyguard. ⁸  He met with them ⁹  in the Lord’s temple. He made an agreement ¹⁰  with them and made them swear an oath of allegiance in the Lord’s temple. Then he showed them the king’s son.

[11:1]  ¹ 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.

[11:2]  ² tn Heb “stole.”

[11:2]  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.

[11:2]  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.

[11:3]  ⁵ tn Heb “and he was with her [in] the house of the Lord hiding.”

[11:4]  ⁶ tn Heb “Jehoiada sent and took.”

[11:4]  ⁷ sn The Carians were apparently a bodyguard, probably comprised of foreigners. See HALOT 497 s.v. כָּרִי and M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings (AB), 126.

[11:4]  ⁸ tn Heb “the runners.”

[11:4]  ⁹ tn Heb “he brought them to himself.”

[11:4]  ¹⁰ tn Or “covenant.”