2 Kings16chapter 16

2 Kings 16:1-2

In the seventeenth year of Pekah: The formula that has measured every king of Judah since the split returns here in its bluntest form yet: Ahaz did not that which was right in the sight of the Lord his God, like David his father. He is twenty at his accession and reigns sixteen years, a short reign Kings will call evil rather than merely brief. Earlier kings of Judah are commended with some reservation; no such word softens Ahaz anywhere in this chapter.

2 Kings 16:3-4

Ahaz makes his own son pass through the fire, the Molech rite forbidden at Lev 18:21 and 20:2-5, and the practice now stands on David's own throne. Barnes reads it as the Ammonite and Moabite worship named at 2 Ki 3:27, the same fire the king of Moab used on his son under siege. Verse 4 widens the picture to ordinary high-place worship, on the hills and under every green tree, the standing formula for the local shrines Judah never fully cleared.

2 Kings 16:5-6

Rezin of Syria and Pekah of Israel besiege Jerusalem and fail to take it, the crisis Isaiah addresses directly to this king in Isaiah 7, where the sign of Immanuel is given against this very siege. In the same campaign Rezin recovers Elath and drives out the people there, and the verse gives the word Jews its first occurrence anywhere in Scripture, naming the losing side of a border skirmish rather than a moment of triumph. Some commentators, following the Septuagint's reading of a word close to Aram in the Hebrew, take the verse as the Edomites recovering Elath rather than the Syrians, a textual question Barnes and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown both note without settling it.

2 Kings 16:7-9

Ahaz answers the siege by making himself a vassal in words lifted from covenant language, I am thy servant and thy son, offered to Tiglath-pileser rather than to the Lord who had just proved willing to save Jerusalem without him. He funds the appeal by stripping the silver and gold from the house of the Lord and his own treasury, the same expedient Asa used against Baasha at 1 Ki 15:18. Assyria answers by taking Damascus and killing Rezin, and Judah's short-term rescue becomes the debt that shapes the rest of the chapter.

2 Kings 16:10-11

At Damascus, paying his respects to the king he now serves, Ahaz admires a pagan altar and sends its exact pattern home, and Urijah the priest builds it before the king even returns, with no recorded word of protest. Henry sets this eagerly copied foreign design against the pattern God himself gave Moses for the tabernacle, a pattern no king before Ahaz thought to improve on. The priesthood meant to guard the house instead executes a layman's design on schedule.

2 Kings 16:12-13

Ahaz does not merely install the altar; he offers on it in person, burnt offering, meat offering, drink offering and the blood of peace offerings, the full round of Levitical sacrifice performed on a Syrian design. Gill notes the irony in the forms themselves, offering and libation and sprinkled blood, patterns the nations had long borrowed from Israel's worship and that the king now borrows back. The king who could not overcome Rezin outside Jerusalem's walls conforms his own worship to Damascus once the war is over.

2 Kings 16:14

The Lord's own brasen altar, standing before the house since Solomon's day, is physically moved off center and set to the north side to make room for the new one. Clarke reads the relocation as deliberate, an attempt to conform the whole pattern of worship at Jerusalem to what Ahaz had seen at Damascus rather than a single act of vandalism. The true altar is not destroyed, only displaced, and the displacement is its own statement about where the king now looks.

2 Kings 16:15-16

Ahaz assigns the new altar every function the law gave the old one, the morning and evening offerings and the sacrifices of the whole people, and reduces the Lord's own altar to a private use he calls to enquire by. Commentators read that closing phrase two ways, some as Ahaz keeping the old altar for a private oracle of his own, others, following Barnes, as the king simply setting aside the question of what to do with it for later, the Hebrew allowing either sense. Urijah executes every instruction, his compliance stated as plainly as the king's command.

2 Kings 16:17-18

Ahaz cuts down the bases, removes the laver, and takes the great sea off the twelve brasen oxen Solomon set under it at 1 Ki 7:23-25, the same twelve-tribe signature standing behind Elijah's twelve stones at Carmel. Barnes reads the stripping as conversion to other uses rather than outright destruction, since the bases, oxen and sea are still standing to be inventoried when Jerusalem finally falls at 2 Ki 25:13-16. The covert built for the sabbath and the king's own entry are likewise altered, and the chapter states the reason plainly, for the king of Assyria, the price of a rescue bought partly with the temple's own furnishings.

2 Kings 16:19-20

the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah: The chapter closes with the standard formula pointing to the lost chronicles of the kings of Judah, and Ahaz sleeps with his fathers and is buried in the city of David. The parallel account adds what Kings leaves unsaid here, that he was not buried in the sepulchres of the kings, a mark of the disgrace 2 Chr 28:27 states outright. His son Hezekiah succeeds him and spends much of the following chapters undoing what this one records, the bronze Ahaz stripped restored to its proper use at 2 Chr 29.