Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Kings · About this commentary
Asa's Heart Was Perfect
1 Kings 15:1-24
1 Now in the eighteenth year of King Jeroboam the son of Nebat, Abijam began to reign over Judah. · WEB
A lamp kept burning for a dead man's sake, then a genuinely good king who deposes his own grandmother — and pays Syria with the temple silver.
Nevertheless for David's sake, Yahweh his God gave him a lamp in Jerusalem 1 Kings 15:4.
Abijam gets three years and a bad verdict — his heart was not perfect with Yahweh his God 1 Kings 15:3 — and the dynasty continues anyway, on account of somebody who has been dead for two generations. The lamp image 1 Kings 11:36 is the book's way of saying that Judah's survival is not being earned in real time.
The assessment of David that follows is startlingly frank: he did right and didn't turn away from anything that he commanded him all the days of his life, except only in the matter of Uriah the Hittite 1 Kings 15:5. The exception is stated, by name, centuries later, in a book that has otherwise been holding David up as the standard. Nothing is buried.
Asa did that which was right in Yahweh's eyes, as David his father did 1 Kings 15:11.
The first thoroughly good king since the division, and his reforms are concrete: the cult prostitutes removed, the idols cleared out, and he also removed Maacah his mother from being queen, because she had made an abominable image for an Asherah 1 Kings 15:13. The queen mother held real institutional power, and Asa deposes his own grandmother and burns her image at the Kidron. Reform that stops at the family door is not reform, and this one does not stop.
But the high places were not taken away. Nevertheless the heart of Asa was perfect with Yahweh all his days 1 Kings 15:14.
The two halves of the verse are the book's characteristic verdict on Judah's good kings. The local hilltop shrines survive every reform until Hezekiah, and the writer records both the failure and the wholehearted loyalty without treating them as contradictory. A perfect heart, in this book's vocabulary, is undivided rather than flawless.
Then Asa took all the silver and the gold that was left in the treasures of Yahweh's house... and sent them to Ben Hadad 1 Kings 15:18.
And then the compromise. Baasha fortifies Ramah to blockade Jerusalem, and Asa's answer is to empty the temple treasury to hire Syria into breaking its treaty with Israel. It works — Damascus invades the north and the blockade lifts 1 Kings 15:20–21 — and it is the same move that failed under Rehoboam and will keep failing: buying a great power's protection with the house of God's furniture. The book reports the success and lets the reader notice the price. Chronicles adds a prophet's rebuke for exactly this 2 Chronicles 16:7–9.
Asa carts away the stones of Ramah to fortify Geba and Mizpah 1 Kings 15:22, reigns forty-one years, and ends diseased in his feet. A good king, plainly told, with his best act and his worst in the same chapter.
settled What this mark means