Introduction to 2 Kings

Title and authorship

Second Kings is the back half of one scroll. The Greek translation cut it at the death of Ahaziah, which is a place where nothing in particular ends — Elijah is still alive, Elisha has not yet been given the mantle, and the sentence on Ahab's house is still outstanding. Everything the first half set running is collected here.

No author is named, and the sources are cited openly throughout: the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel and its counterpart for Judah 2 Kings 1:18 2 Kings 8:23, referred to for the details this book has chosen to leave out. The choosing is the composition. Sixteen kings of Israel and sixteen of Judah are summarized in a paragraph each, while a foreign general's skin disease gets a chapter and a widow's cooking oil gets seven verses.

The hand behind it is prophetic rather than royal. Its heroes are men with no office and no army — Elisha, Isaiah, the unnamed sons of the prophets — and its verdict on a king never mentions his building program except to refer the reader elsewhere. It was assembled by people who believed the decisive events of their nation's history were words spoken by prophets, and it is arranged to prove it.

Date

The narrative runs from about 850 before Christ, in the reign of Ahab's son, to 561, where it stops — with a captive king of Judah released from a Babylonian prison and given a seat at the emperor's table 2 Kings 25:27–30.

That last scene fixes the earliest possible date of composition, and its content fixes the latest with reasonable confidence: the book was finished during the exile, after 561 and before the return under Cyrus in 538, since a work that knew about the return could hardly have declined to mention it. The whole history, in other words, was assembled by people living in the disaster it describes, for readers who needed to know why it had happened.

That vantage explains the book's priorities. It spends its longest theological passage explaining the fall of Samaria 2 Kings 17:7–23, because the same explanation applies to its readers. It records Solomon's temple being stripped, refurnished, stripped again, and finally broken up for scrap 2 Kings 25:13–17. And it ends without a conclusion — no promise, no return, just a king eating at a foreign table for the rest of his life, which is exactly where its first readers were.

The two-kingdom synchronisms are dense through chapter seventeen, and they are difficult to reconcile in places. Co-regencies and differing conventions for counting a king's first year account for most of the tension, and none of the book's argument depends on resolving it.

Backgrounds

Assyria, and a new kind of empire. From the middle of the eighth century Assyria is the fact that governs everything. Its method was not raiding but administration: vassal treaties with sworn oaths, annual tribute, and — for rebels — mass deportation, moving conquered populations across the empire to break their identity and settling foreigners in their place. That policy is why the northern kingdom disappears in 722 and Judah does not, and why the resettled population of Samaria  ends up with the mixed religion the book describes 2 Kings 17:24–33.

Then Babylon. Assyria falls late in the seventh century, Egypt and Babylon contest the corridor Judah sits in, and Judah's last kings gamble repeatedly on Egypt. Three deportations follow — 605, then 597 with the young Jehoiachin and the craftsmen, then 586 with the destruction of the city and the temple 2 Kings 24:14 2 Kings 25:8–11.

A small state between great powers. Judah's whole foreign policy consists of choosing which empire to serve and when to stop. Ahaz buys Assyrian protection with the temple treasury and copies an Assyrian altar 2 Kings 16:8–11; Hezekiah rebels and is besieged; Zedekiah rebels and loses everything. The prophets' consistent counsel — trust God rather than the alliance — reads in that light as political advice nobody could afford to take, which is why it was not taken.

The sons of the prophets. Elisha works among organized companies of prophets living in community at Bethel, Jericho  and Gilgal  2 Kings 2:3 2 Kings 4:38 — poor, dependent on gifts, sometimes hungry. They are the institutional memory of Yahweh's worship in a kingdom whose official religion was the calves, and much of Elisha's recorded ministry is spent on their ordinary problems: a debt, a poisoned stew, a borrowed ax head.

Elisha's ministry is unlike Elijah's, deliberately. Elijah confronts kings on mountains; Elisha lives in towns and is consulted by widows, farmers, foreign generals and army commanders. Elijah's miracles are mostly judgments; Elisha's are mostly provisions. He asks for a double portion 2 Kings 2:9 — the firstborn's share of an inheritance Deuteronomy 21:17, not twice the power — and the book records roughly twice as many of his miracles as of his master's.

The high places, again. Every good king of Judah is assessed with the same qualification until Hezekiah, who finally removes them 2 Kings 18:4, and Josiah, who destroys them systematically 2 Kings 23:8. Their persistence across three centuries is the book's measure of how deep the problem ran.

Theology and purpose

The book exists to answer one question: why did this happen? It was written for people who had watched the temple burn and wanted to know whether their God had been defeated. Its answer is that he had not been defeated — he had done it, for stated reasons, exactly as he said he would.

Chapter seventeen is the thesis, and it is stated at length. After Samaria falls, the narrative stops and explains for seventeen verses: the people feared other gods, walked in the statutes of the nations, built high places in every town, served idols after being warned, and Yahweh testified to Israel and to Judah by every prophet and every seer, saying, "Turn from your evil ways" 2 Kings 17:13, and they would not hear. Judah is named in the same paragraph 2 Kings 17:19, which tells the reader what is coming and why.

The word of Yahweh comes to pass — the engine of both halves. What was spoken in the first book is collected in this one: Ahab's house exterminated by Jehu 2 Kings 10:17, Jezebel eaten by dogs at the wall of Jezreel 2 Kings 9:36, the altar at Bethel torn down by a king named Josiah three centuries before his birth 2 Kings 23:16–18 1 Kings 13:2. Prophecy and fulfillment are matched openly, and the reader is expected to notice.

Prophets outrank kings. The book's structure says so: kings are processed in formulas while prophets are given scenes. Elisha anoints and unmakes dynasties in Israel and Syria alike 2 Kings 8:13 2 Kings 9:6, and a foreign commander is healed on a prophet's terms rather than a king's 2 Kings 5:8. When the last kings of Judah stop listening to Jeremiah's generation, the book treats it as the end of the argument rather than a difference of opinion.

Mercy runs underneath the judgment and does not stop. Between the two falls stand a jar of oil that fills every vessel in a house, a dead boy raised, a poisoned pot made safe, an ax head recovered, a starving city fed overnight, and a Syrian general washed clean. None of it is required by the argument. It is what God is recorded doing while the verdict is being prepared.

And the lamp does not go out. Athaliah kills the royal family and one baby survives in a bedroom for six years 2 Kings 11:2–3; the line runs on to the last verse, where Jehoiachin is lifted from prison and eats at the king's table for the rest of his life 2 Kings 25:29–30. The book ends in exile with the throne empty and a son of David alive and fed — which is not a promise, and is not nothing.

Additional notes

Note — Elijah taken without dying. Elijah goes up by a whirlwind into heaven 2 Kings 2:11, and the account is careful that this is not the ordinary path: fifty men search for three days on the assumption that a body has been set down somewhere 2 Kings 2:16–17. Scripture records two men who did not die — Enoch, who was not, for God took him Genesis 5:24 Hebrews 11:5, and Elijah — and presents both as exceptions, remarked on precisely because they are unlike everyone else. They say nothing about the state of the dead generally, which Scripture describes elsewhere as sleep Ecclesiastes 9:5 Psalms 146:4 John 11:11–14; a man taken alive was never dead. The word rendered heaven covers the sky as well as God's dwelling, and the narrative's interest is not in the destination but in the succession: the mantle falls, and Elisha picks it up.

Note — the youths at Bethel. Elisha is jeered by a crowd of young men outside Bethel, curses them, and two bears maul forty-two of them 2 Kings 2:23–24. Several things belong in the account and are usually left out. The town is Jeroboam's shrine city; the taunt — go up, you baldhead — mocks the ascent that had just happened, so the jeer is aimed at God's act rather than at a man's hairline; and the word covers young men rather than small children. Elisha does not send the bears, and the text does not say the crowd was killed. It remains a hard passage, and it stands at the front of his ministry as notice that the prophetic office was not to be treated as a joke by the town that had made worship one.

Note — the shadow on the steps. Hezekiah is given a sign in which the shadow goes back ten steps 2 Kings 20:9–11. The account reports what was observed from the palace stairs and does not describe a mechanism; the parallel record adds that envoys came to ask about the wonder that was done in the land 2 Chronicles 32:31. Attempts to specify what happened astronomically go beyond what is written, and the sign's stated purpose is to confirm a promise to one dying man.

Note — Sennacherib and the outside record. The Assyrian account of the campaign of 701 boasts of shutting Hezekiah in Jerusalem and taking many Judean towns, and does not claim to have taken the city — a silence worth noting from a king who recorded his victories in detail. This book reports the siege lifted after a single night's catastrophe in the camp and the emperor's later assassination by his own sons in the temple of his god 2 Kings 19:35–37.

Note — the book found in the temple. The scroll discovered during Josiah's repairs 2 Kings 22:8 produces immediate terror because its curses match the nation's condition, and the reforms that follow — one central sanctuary, the high places destroyed, a Passover unlike any since the judges 2 Kings 23:21–22 — correspond closely to Deuteronomy's requirements. That a copy of the law could be lost inside the temple for a generation is the sharpest thing the book says about the state of Judah's religion.

Outline

How the book is built

Two capitals fall, and the reasons stand between them chiasm 17:1-25:21

• A 17:1-6 Samaria besieged three years, taken, and Israel carried away to Assyria — the northern kingdom ends in six verses.
• B 17:7-23 The long explanation: other gods feared, high places built everywhere, every prophet and seer ignored — and Judah named in the same breath.
• B′ 24:1-4 The explanation given before the event this time: it came on Judah at Yahweh's command, for sins the Lord would not pardon.
• A′ 25:1-21 Jerusalem besieged, breached, burned, and Judah carried away to Babylon — the temple broken up and weighed as scrap.

The book narrates two national catastrophes and, in both cases, stops to say why. The arrangement puts the explanations inside the disasters. Samaria's fall is reported briefly and then accounted for at length — the longest sustained theological passage in the work — and Judah's fall is accounted for before it is narrated, so that the reader reaches the burning of Jerusalem already knowing the verdict. The mirror is exact in substance as well as in shape: both outer members are a siege, a breach, and a deportation with the population carried to the imperial heartland; both inner members name the same causes, in the same order, and both single out the rejection of prophets God sent repeatedly. The structure is how the book answers the question its first readers were actually asking. The disasters frame the argument, and the argument is that this was neither an accident nor a defeat.

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