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Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of 2 Kings 16:20

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And Ahaz slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers in the city of David: and Hezekiah his son reigned in his stead.

20. was buried with his fathers ] The last three words are not represented in the LXX., and the Chronicler says ‘they buried him in the city, even in Jerusalem, but they brought him not into the sepulchres of the kings of Israel.’ For bodily leprosy Uzziah had been treated in the same way after death and the moral and spiritual leprosy of the idol-loving Ahaz was worthy of a like deprivation. ‘Of all the kings of Judah hitherto, there is no one so dreadful an example, either of sin or judgment, as this son of good Jotham. I abhor to think that such a monster should descend from the loins of David. Where should be the period of this wickedness? He began with the high places from thence he falls to a Syrian altar, to the Syrian god: then from a partnership, he falls to an utter exclusion of the true God, and blocking up of His temple, and then to the sacrifice of his own son; and at last as if hell were broken loose upon God’s inheritance, every several city, every high place of Judah hath a new god. No marvel if he be branded (2Ch 28:22) by the spirit of God with “This is that king Ahaz” ’ (Bp. Hall).

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

Verse 20. Was buried with his fathers in the city of David] But it is expressly declared, 2Ch 28:27, that he was not buried in the sepulchres of the kings of Israel; and this was undoubtedly intended as a mark of degradation.

His reign was disastrous and impious; and it was disastrous because it was impious. He had been a scourge, not a blessing, to his people. He had not only made illegal alterations in the temple, and in the mode of worship prescribed by the true God, but he had polluted all the cities of Judah with idolatry, and brought ruin upon the nation. On the whole, a worse king than himself had not as yet sat on the Jewish throne; and yet he had many advantages: he had for counsellor one of the greatest men ever produced in the Jewish nation, ISAIAH the prophet; and God condescended to interpose especially for him when grievously straitened by the kings of Israel and Syria, both of whom were cut off according to the prediction of this prophet. But he would not lay it to heart, and therefore the wrath of God fell heavily upon him, and upon the stiff-necked and rebellious people whom he governed. He had sufficient warning and was without excuse. He would sin, and therefore he must suffer.

Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible

And Ahaz slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers in the city of David,…. But not in the sepulchres of the kings of Israel, as David and Solomon, he being such a wicked prince, 2Ch 28:27

and Hezekiah his son reigned in his stead; of whom much is said in the following part of this history.

Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible

REFLECTIONS

How painful a thought is it to behold in this history of Israel and Judah the sad proofs of a fallen state! whether we read of one king or another, the general features of all are the same; All have sinned and come short of God’s glory! But with what increased distress do we behold in the priests of God, as in this awful character of Urijah, the dreadful apostacy of mankind! and in the end, what must be the awful consequence. Begin at my sanctuary, saith God in his judgments. And if judgment begin at the house of God, what must the end be of them that obey not the gospel of Jesus? For if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear? Ye ministers of Jesus, think of these things. And dare be zealous for God’s honour and glory, though it expose you to the hatred and anger of men.

But how is my soul relieved from contemplating such a king as Ahaz, and such an High Priest as Urijah, in calling to mind the prophet’s commission when sent to Ahaz to proclaim to him the approach of that hour, when the Lord would fulfil that promise of raising up to himself a faithful priest, who should do according to what was in the heart of the Lord. Precious Jesus! thou art indeed a priest upon thy throne. And all the impiety of Ahaz, and the worthlessness of Urijah, I would lose sight of in thy faithfulness and truth. Thou art the very one which the Lord gave as a sign to Ahaz: thou art Immanuel, God with us, God in our nature, the hope of glory! Blessed assurance! for, as God the work of redemption is neither too great, nor too heavy, for thee; and as man, God dwelling with us, and being one in our nature, thou wilt be on our side, and both accomplish and render effectual the salvation thou hast undertaken. So that we may cry out, If God be for us who shall be against us? It is God that justifieth, who – is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died; yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God. Nothing therefore shalt be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

XVI

THE REIGNS OF HOSHEA (OF ISRAEL) AND HEZEKIAH (OF JUDAH)

2Ki 16:20-17:41 ; 2Ch 28:27-31:21

The reign of Hoshea is another new dynasty since Pekah was murdered; his dynasty has ended and Hoshea comes to the throne. Tiglath-Pileser says in his inscriptions that it was at his instigation that Hoshea rose up against Pekah and murdered him, and that it was upon his word that Hoshea was placed upon the throne and established there. So say the monumental inscriptions. This is the last dynasty and the last king in this awful history of the downfall of Israel. We come now to look at the first six years of the reign of Hezekiah. From this part of his reign we gather the following points:

First of all, let us look at his character as described thus: “He did that which was right in the eyes of the Lord according to all that David his father had done. He removed the high places and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made, for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it; and he called it Nehushtan. He trusted in the Lord God of Israel, so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him. For he clave to the Lord, and departed not from following him, but kept his commandments which the Lord commanded Moses. And the Lord was with him and he prospered whithersoever he went forth.” On Sunday night when I was a young pastor in Waco, I announced that as my text, “Nehushtan,” meaning, “It is only a piece of brass.” Moses made the serpent and it served admirably for -the healing of the people, and it was right to wish to keep a memorial of such a marvelous thing as the deliverance from the snakes in the desert, but there is a spirit in the world to worship the antique, to gather relics and to worship them, and so in later days that happened. The serpent that Moses had made became an object of worship. It became one of their gods. Now Hezekiah says, “It is just a piece of brass,” and he brake it in pieces. In the sermon I applied that to the misuses that are made of baptism and the Lord’s Supper; that when a priest stands over a wafer and mumbles a few words and says to the bread, “Thou art my God,” then it is time to say, “It is just a piece of bread”; time to say, “Nehushtan,” and when a man magnifies baptism until he finds the remission of his sins in a pool of water, and when it becomes such a sacrament that just to touch a wet finger to the brow of an unconscious babe will make it a member of Christ, then it is time to say, “Nehushtan.” That was the direction of my sermon.

Now let us see the great things done by Hezekiah. In his reformation he destroyed those high places throughout the whole country, so that Jehovah only was worshiped. Second, he destroyed not only the brazen serpent but he brought about a widespread spirit of iconoclasm. “Icon” means an image, and “Iconoclast,” an image breaker. One of the most notable features of the revolts against the Spaniards and against Rome in the lower countries was that the Iconoclasts came to the front. Crosses, images, anything in the world that men bow down to and worship violates the command, “Thou shall not make unto thee any graven image and bow down before it to worship it”; all these the Iconoclasts broke to pieces. It intensified the bitterness between the Protestants in the Low Country and the Spaniards, and there were periods of Iconoclastic outbreakings in many other countries, but Hezekiah determined so far as he was concerned in the sense of his responsibility to God that no image however sacred in its memory, even as sacred as that of the brazen serpent, should be the object of worship, and to prevent it he would destroy the image. Image worship is exceedingly convenient. History tells us about an ancient people whose god was a piece of dough, flour dough, molded into form. There was this virtue about that god: that in a time of famine they could eat him. Isaiah uses sarcasm where he describes the image worship and how those gods were made; that having eyes they see not, and having ears they hear not. Bob Ingersoll was fond of quoting rather than originating the saying, “A god is the noblest work of man.” In other words, he was saying that gods are made by men, and not men by gods. Well, anyhow, the gods that men make are not deities and we should break them as fast as we come to them.

The next thing that he did was to cleanse and renovate the Temple, inasmuch as his father had defiled it by putting in a new altar and closing up the holy place and breaking up all the services. So Hezekiah cleansed the Temple with great formality and publicity, and then reconsecrated it to the service of God. He put all of its furniture back into its proper place. He revised every important part of the worship, even the service of music. He re-established the Levitical choir and the Levitical instruments of praise and the use of the psalter was in existence before Hezekiah’s time. Then as the clouds were darkening around the Northern Kingdom, as their doom was impending, he sent out an invitation to all the true worshipers of God in the Northern Kingdom inviting them to come and join him in the great passover to be celebrated according to the law of Moses, and the record tells us that a multitude of the Northern Kingdom did come and align themselves with him in the observance of the Passover, and in connection with that we have this Scripture: “A multitude of the people even men of Ephraim and Manasseh, Issachar and Zebulun, had not cleansed themselves, yet did they eat the passover otherwise than it was written; but Hezekiah prayed for them saying, The Lord God pardon every one, that prepareth his heart to seek God, the Lord God of his fathers, though he be not cleansed according to the purification of the sanctuary, and the Lord hearkened to Hezekiah, and healed the people.” I call attention to that passage particularly on account of the use made of it by pedobaptists in replying to Baptists on the subject of communion. They say, “You Baptists insist upon the water cleansing before communion; that a man should not partake of the communion unless there has been the previous ablution of baptism. And as the communion was established on a Passover occasion it meant a transition from the Passover of the Old Testament to the Lord’s Supper of the New Testament, and as here in the days of Hezekiah were people who did partake of the Passover not according to the law, and God forgave them, so it ought to be in the communion.” The Baptist reply to it is, “You should not plead in defense of a custom of historical violation of the law, confessed to be a violation of the law, confessed to be a sin, a sin that had to be presented to God and for which pardon had to be obtained. Your Hezekiah case is against you.” So the Baptists have the best of it in this case.

Following that Passover he kept an additional seven days and this is said about it: “So there was great joy in Jerusalem: for since the time of Solomon the son of David king of Israel there was not the like in Jerusalem. Then the priests and the Levites arose and blessed the people; and their voice was heard, and their prayer came up to the holy dwelling place, even unto heaven.” To me this account of the reformation wrought by Hezekiah has always been a most interesting section of the Bible to read and a most profitable one. I never read it without being impressed in my mind profoundly with the good that comes in going back to the first principles, in going back to God’s written word and there on the strength of that word sending up a petition to the throne of grace for mercy and being convinced that mercy and help and the power of God will come down upon us.

The next item in his reformation is that he restores all the original Levitical services and the whole tithe system for the support of those services. Now that is all I have to say here about the reign of Hezekiah.

We learn from the prophets that three mighty natural events occurred in this period. In 1:1 we have the statement that Amos commenced his prophecy in the second year before the great earthquake. There was an earthquake that figured in the memory of the people for a long time. In Zechariah 14 a much later prophecy, we find a reference to that great earthquake that came to pass during this period. Then in Amo 8:9 we have an account of an eclipse of the sun at midday which took place in this period, about 763 B.C. The sun went down at noon. That eclipse is not only mentioned in the Bible, but we find in the inscriptions on the monuments raised by neighboring nations a reference to that eclipse at that very date. Not only that, but modern astronomers by a mathematical calculation prove that just at that date an eclipse became visible to all parts of Palestine, a total eclipse of the sun.

Another great event that occurred during this period was the visit of the locusts set forth in Joel, one of the most vivid descriptions in human literature. There is much literature on the subject of locust plagues, from Moses’ account of them in the plague on Pharaoh to the latest account by travelers in Africa, but Joel’s description is the most remarkable in the world, except the one in Revelation which is a plague of symbolic locusts.

In connection with the reigns of Uzziah, Ahaz, and Hezekiah there comes out on the stage the greatest of the prophets. The most evangelistic of all the prophets, Isaiah. The record tells us that he wrote the latter part of the history of Uzziah. Now it is in Isaiah particularly that we find the best description of the moral condition of the people during this period.

Now let us turn to Hoshea and the Northern Kingdom. In order to maintain the integrity of his kingdom, Hoshea pays tribute to Tiglath-Pileser. On the death of Tiglath-Pileser and the ascendancy of Shalmaneser he continues to pay a heavy tribute: “Against him came up Shalmaneser king of Assyria, and Hoshea became his servant and brought him presents,” which means the paying of heavy tribute. He might have been secure upon his throne for years had he continued to pay this tribute, but he did not. He began to conspire with Egypt to throw off the yoke of Shalmaneser: “And the king of Assyria found conspiracy in Hoshea; for he had sent messengers to the king of Egypt, and offered no presents to the king of Assyria as he had done year by year.” He conspired with the king of Egypt and refused to pay his tribute to Shalmaneser. This is the occasion of the downfall of Hoshea and of the end of the Northern Kingdom. Shalmaneser at once set in motion his armed force. Samaria is encompassed and besieged, and after a terrible siege with all the horrors attendant upon a siege in that country and age, Samaria fell into the hands of Shalmaneser. Shalmaneser dies and is succeeded by Sargon who captures Samaria and deports the inhabitants, and he says in one of his inscriptions that he carried off 27,290 people and placed them in the land of Assyria, leaving only the poorer classes in the country. This occurred in 722 B.C., the date of the fall of Samaria, and the end of the Northern Kingdom. We have the causes which led to it pictured in the prophecies of Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah. Hoshea’s conspiring with Egypt and refusing to pay tribute to Assyria is the occasion for the destruction of the kingdom.

Notice the repeopling of the country: “And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Awa, and from Hamath and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel: and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in the cities thereof.” Now notice that the population is so scattered that the wild animals increase, the lions become so plentiful that they devour them, and the people feel that they haven’t the right god. They do not know the god of these hills, and they want to be taught how to worship him in the right way. So they appeal to the king of Assyria and he sends them a priest to teach them how to worship the good of this land, and the result is that we have a mixture, a conglomeration, a mongrel race, and a mongrel religion, described thus: “Howbeit every nation made gods of their own, and put them in the houses of the high places which the Samaritans had made, every nation in their cities wherein they dwelt. . . . They feared the Lord and served their own gods, after the manner of the nations from among whom they had been carried away.” They feared Jehovah whom they thought to be the god of this hill country, but they served other gods. So we have the strange mixture of these people brought from the various parts of Assyria, Jews who were residents of Israel, and all these other various forms of gods mixed up with Jehovah worship, a strange mixture indeed. These were the forerunners, or ancestors of the Samaritans, whom we find in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and in the New Testament. We know something of their attitude toward Israel. They have remained there from the time they were transported by Sargon unto this day, and today there is a colony of them there, about one hundred and seventy people, the remnant of this old mongrel race. They still have their old customs, their patriarchs, the Pentateuch, the law of Moses, and they keep the sabbath even more strictly than the Pharisees did. This closes the history of northern Israel.

QUESTIONS

1. Who was the last king of Israel and what was his character?

2. Who was king of Judah when Israel was carried into captivity and what was his character?

3. What did he do that no other king had done since the division of the kingdom?

4. What relic of Moses was worshiped by Israel and what did he do with it?

5. In what particulars did his religious reformation consist?

6. What were the essential points in the cleansing of the Temple?

7. Describe the reconsecration service.

8. Describe his keeping of the Passover, (1) as to the preparation, (2) as to celebration, (3) as to “other seven days,” (4) as to the results.

9. What were the essential points in Hezekiah’s further religious

10. What three remarkable events fall within this period and what their significance? .

11. What great prophet comes on the stage here and what was his greatest characteristic? , .

12. What was his relation to Uzziah and to this period of history!

13. What was the condition of Israel at this time, how did Hoshea try to extricate himself and what was the result?

14. Who was the king of Assyria at this time and where did he carry the children of Israel? .

15. What were the sins of Israel for which they were carried away into captivity? . .

16. What were God’s efforts to save them from their sins and what were the results?

17. How was Samaria repeopled?

18. What was their idea of God?

19 How did God rebuke the disregard of him by the new inhabitant?

20. What of the mixed character of the religion of the Samaritans?

Fuente: B.H. Carroll’s An Interpretation of the English Bible

XVI

THE REIGNS OF HOSHEA (OF ISRAEL) AND HEZEKIAH (OF JUDAH)

2Ki 16:20-17:41 ; 2Ch 28:27-31:21

We learn from the prophets that three mighty natural events occurred in this period. In Amo 1:1 we have the statement that Amos commenced his prophecy in the second year before the great earthquake. There was an earthquake that figured in the memory of the people for a long time. In Zechariah 14 a much later prophecy, we find a reference to that great earthquake that came to pass during this period. Then in Amo 8:9 we have an account of an eclipse of the sun at midday which took place in this period, about 763 B.C. The sun went down at noon. That eclipse is not only mentioned in the Bible, but we find in the inscriptions on the monuments raised by neighboring nations a reference to that eclipse at that very date. Not only that, but modern astronomers by a mathematical calculation prove that just at that date an eclipse became visible to all parts of Palestine, a total eclipse of the sun.