2 Kings 2:3

2:3 Some members of the prophetic guild ¹  in Bethel came out to Elisha and said, “Do you know that today the Lord is going to take your master from you?” ²  He answered, “Yes, I know. Be quiet.”

2 Kings 2:5

2:5 Some members of the prophetic guild in Jericho approached Elisha and said, “Do you know that today the Lord is going to take your master from you?” He answered, “Yes, I know. Be quiet.”

2 Kings 2:16

2:16 They said to him, “Look, there are fifty capable men with your servants. Let them go and look for your master, for the wind sent from the Lord ³  may have carried him away and dropped him on one of the hills or in one of the valleys.” But Elisha ⁴  replied, “Don’t send them out.”

2 Kings 4:1

Elisha Helps a Widow and Her Sons

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.”

2 Kings 6:28

6:28 Then the king asked her, “What’s your problem?” She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Hand over your son; we’ll eat him today and then eat my son tomorrow.’

2 Kings 10:13

10:13 Jehu encountered ⁸  the relatives ⁹  of King Ahaziah of Judah. He asked, “Who are you?” They replied, “We are Ahaziah’s relatives. We have come down to see how ¹⁰  the king’s sons and the queen mother’s sons are doing.”

2 Kings 10:30

10:30 The Lord said to Jehu, “You have done well. You have accomplished my will and carried out my wishes with regard to Ahab’s dynasty. Therefore four generations of your descendants will rule over Israel.” ¹¹ 

2 Kings 11:2

11:2 So Jehosheba, the daughter of King Joram and sister of Ahaziah, took Ahaziah’s son Joash and sneaked ¹²  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. ¹³  So he was hidden from Athaliah and escaped execution. ¹⁴ 

2 Kings 14:6

14:6 But he did not execute the sons of the assassins. He obeyed the Lord’s commandment as recorded in the law scroll of Moses, ¹⁵  “Fathers must not be put to death for what their sons do, ¹⁶  and sons must not be put to death for what their fathers do. ¹⁷  A man must be put to death only for his own sin.” ¹⁸ 

2 Kings 14:14

14:14 He took away all the gold and silver, all the items found in the Lord’s temple and in the treasuries of the royal palace, and some hostages. ¹⁹  Then he went back to Samaria. ²⁰ 

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2 Kings 17:7

A Summary of Israel’s Sinful History

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;

2 Kings 17:9

17:9 The Israelites said things about the Lord their God that were not right. ²³  They built high places in all their cities, from the watchtower to the fortress. ²⁴ 

2 Kings 17:24

The King of Assyria Populates Israel with Foreigners

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.

2 Kings 17:34

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.

2 Kings 18:4

18:4 He eliminated the high places, smashed the sacred pillars to bits, and cut down the Asherah pole. ²⁹  He also demolished the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for up to that time ³⁰  the Israelites had been offering incense to it; it was called Nehushtan. ³¹ 

2 Kings 23:6

23:6 He removed the Asherah pole from the Lord’s temple and took it outside Jerusalem to the Kidron Valley, where he burned it. ³²  He smashed it to dust and then threw the dust in the public graveyard. ³³ 

2 Kings 23:13

23:13 The king ruined the high places east of Jerusalem, south of the Mount of Destruction, ³⁴  that King Solomon of Israel had built for the detestable Sidonian goddess Astarte, the detestable Moabite god Chemosh, and the horrible Ammonite god Milcom.

2 Kings 24:2

24:2 The Lord sent against him Babylonian, Syrian, Moabite, and Ammonite raiding bands; he sent them to destroy Judah, as he had warned he would do through his servants the prophets. ³⁵ 

[2:3]  ¹ tn Heb “the sons of the prophets.”

[2:3]  ² tn Heb “from your head.” The same expression occurs in v. 5.

[2:16]  ³ tn Or “the spirit of the Lord.”

[2:16]  ⁴ tn Heb “he”; the referent (Elisha) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[4:1]  ⁵ tn Heb “a wife from among the wives of the sons of the prophets.”

[4:1]  ⁶ tn Or “cried out.”

[4:1]  ⁷ tn Heb “your servant feared the Lord.” “Fear” refers here to obedience and allegiance, the products of healthy respect for the Lord’s authority.

[10:13]  ⁷ tn Heb “found.”

[10:13]  ⁸ tn Or “brothers.”

[10:13]  ⁹ tn Heb “for the peace of.”

[10:30]  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.

[11:2]  ¹¹ tn Heb “stole.”

[11:2]  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.

[11:2]  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.

[14:6]  ¹³ tn Heb “as it is written in the scroll of the law of Moses which the Lord commanded, saying.”

[14:6]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “on account of sons.”

[14:6]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “on account of fathers.”

[14:6]  ¹⁶ sn This law is recorded in Deut 24:16.

[14:14]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “the sons of the pledges.”

[14:14]  ¹⁶ map For location see Map2 B1; Map4 D3; Map5 E2; Map6 A4; Map7 C1.

[17:7]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “and from under the hand of.” The words “freed them” are added in the translation for stylistic reasons.

[17:7]  ¹⁸ tn Heb “feared.”

[17:9]  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 Lord authorized their pagan practices.

[17:9]  ²⁰ sn That is, from the city’s perimeter to the central citadel.

[17:24]  ²¹ tn The object is supplied in the translation.

[17:24]  ²² sn In vv. 24-29 Samaria stands for the entire northern kingdom of Israel.

[17:34]  ²³ tn Heb “fear.”

[17:34]  ²⁴ tn Heb “commanded.”

[18:4]  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.

[18:4]  ²⁶ tn Heb “until those days.”

[18:4]  ²⁷ tn In Hebrew the name sounds like the phrase נְחַשׁ הַנְּחֹשֶׁת (nÿkhash hannÿkhoshet), “bronze serpent.”

[23:6]  ²⁷ tn Heb “and he burned it in the Kidron Valley.”

[23:6]  ²⁸ tc Heb “on the grave of the sons of the people.” Some Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Aramaic, and Latin witnesses read the plural “graves.”

[23:13]  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.

[24:2]  ³¹ tn Heb “he sent them against Judah to destroy it, according to the word of the Lord which he spoke by the hand of his servants the prophets.”