Biblion Bible Commentary
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Ahaz and the Altar From Damascus
2 Kings 16:1-20
1 In the seventeenth year of Pekah the son of Remaliah, Ahaz the son of Jotham king of Judah began to reign. · WEB
A king who burns his son, buys Assyria with the temple gold, admires an altar in Damascus and has one built at home — and moves God's out of the way.
He walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and even made his son to pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom Yahweh cast out 2 Kings 16:3.
Ahaz is the first king of Judah to be described in the terms reserved for the north, and the charge escalates past anything yet recorded in the south. Child sacrifice is the practice named in the law as the reason the previous inhabitants were driven out Leviticus 18:21 Deuteronomy 12:31, and a son of David is doing it in Jerusalem.
"I am your servant and your son. Come up and save me out of the hand of the king of Syria and out of the hand of the king of Israel" 2 Kings 16:7.
Under attack from Syria and Israel, Ahaz appeals to Assyria in the language of vassalage — your servant and your son — and pays with the silver and gold of the temple and the palace 2 Kings 16:8. This is the moment Isaiah had been sent to prevent, offering him any sign he liked to confirm that the two kings threatening him were spent torches Isaiah 7:4–14. He refused the sign and bought an empire instead, and the empire he bought is the one that will besiege his son.
The policy works immediately and catastrophically. Damascus falls, Rezin is killed 2 Kings 16:9, and Judah is now a client state of the greatest military power in the world with its treasury emptied.
King Ahaz went to Damascus to meet Tiglath Pileser king of Assyria, and saw the altar that was at Damascus; and King Ahaz sent to Urijah the priest a drawing of the altar and plans to build it 2 Kings 16:10.
At the victory ceremony he sees an altar he admires and mails home the blueprints. The detail is small and it is the whole reign: a king whose sense of what worship should look like is set by whatever the imperial capital is doing. And the high priest builds it, on schedule, before the king gets home 2 Kings 16:11. Urijah's compliance is reported without a word of protest anywhere in the account.
The bronze altar, which was before Yahweh, he brought from the front of the house... and put it on the north side of his altar 2 Kings 16:14.
Solomon's altar is not destroyed. It is moved aside — shifted off center to make room for the new one, and reassigned to the king's private use: the bronze altar will be for me to inquire by 2 Kings 16:15. Nothing is denied and nothing is renounced. The God of Israel keeps his altar and loses the central position, which is a more accurate picture of how worship actually goes wrong than any outright apostasy in the book.
He removed the covered way for the Sabbath that they had built in the house, and the king's outer entrance to Yahweh's house, because of the king of Assyria 2 Kings 16:18.
The last act is stripping the temple's fittings — the bronze basins off their stands, the great sea off its twelve oxen — and dismantling the Sabbath structure and the royal entrance, because of the king of Assyria. Either the metal went as tribute or the arrangements were altered to suit an imperial inspection. Both amount to the same thing: the house Solomon built is being remodeled to the taste and budget of a foreign court.
His son Hezekiah inherits that temple, and the first thing chapter eighteen records him doing is a purge.
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