Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Kings · About this commentary
The Thistle and the Cedar
2 Kings 14:1-29
1 In the second year of Joash, son of Joahaz, king of Israel, Amaziah the son of Joash king of Judah began to reign. · WEB
A king who obeys the law about executions picks a fight he was warned off, loses a wall — and a wicked northern king is given a golden age anyway.
The children of the murderers he didn't put to death, according to that which is written in the book of the law of Moses 2 Kings 14:6.
Amaziah executes his father's assassins and stops there, and the narrator stops the narrative to say why: the law forbids putting children to death for their fathers, but every man shall die for his own sin Deuteronomy 24:16. It is a small restraint in a world where a new king routinely erased a rival's whole family — Jehu had done exactly that a generation earlier — and the book thinks it worth quoting the statute in full.
"The thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was in Lebanon, saying, 'Give your daughter to my son as wife.' Then a wild animal that was in Lebanon passed by, and trampled down the thistle" 2 Kings 14:9.
Amaziah beats Edom and immediately challenges Israel, and the northern king's reply is a fable with a sting: you are a weed proposing marriage to a cedar, and something will step on you. The counsel underneath it is sound and even generous — enjoy the glory of it, and stay at home; for why should you meddle to your harm 2 Kings 14:10 — and Amaziah cannot hear it, because a victory over Edom has told him what he is.
Judah was defeated by Israel; and each man fled to his tent 2 Kings 14:12.
The defeat at Beth Shemesh is total. Jerusalem's wall is broken open for six hundred feet, the temple and palace treasuries are emptied, and hostages are taken north 2 Kings 14:13–14. A king's need to be taken seriously has cost his capital its defenses.
They made a conspiracy against him in Jerusalem, and he fled to Lachish; but they sent after him to Lachish and killed him there 2 Kings 14:19.
He survives the humiliation by fifteen years and is murdered by his own people, hunted down in Lachish , a fortress city. Like his father before him 2 Kings 12:20, a king of Judah dies at the hands of his own officials.
He restored the border of Israel from the entrance of Hamath to the sea of the Arabah, according to Yahweh, the God of Israel's word, which he spoke by his servant Jonah the son of Amittai 2 Kings 14:25.
And then the passage that most complicates the book's arithmetic. Jeroboam the Second gets the standard condemnation — he did evil, he kept the calves 2 Kings 14:24 — and reigns forty-one years, restores Israel's borders to their greatest extent since Solomon, and does it according to Yahweh's word through a prophet. The northern kingdom's golden age is granted to a king the book condemns, and it is announced in advance by the prophet whose own book is about God's mercy to people who do not deserve it.
For Yahweh saw the affliction of Israel, that it was very bitter for all, slave and free; and there was no helper for Israel 2 Kings 14:26.
The reason is stated and it has nothing to do with the king. God saw suffering and there was nobody to help, so he helped — through a man who never asked him to. Yahweh didn't say that he would blot out the name of Israel from under the sky 2 Kings 14:27: not yet, not this generation.
And the prosperity is exactly the moment Amos and Hosea are sent to preach against it. Recovered borders and a full treasury turned out to be the last mercy before the end, and the north spent it on itself.
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