2 Kings 10 Study Notes

10:1-7 Having many wives and children was seen as one of the prerogatives of power, even for righteous men (Gideon in Jdg 8:30-31). Ahab’s sons and grandsons were apparently distributed among the noble families to relieve the royal treasury and to provide loyal sets of eyes and ears in the homes where they lived. Jehu shrewdly offered the great families of Samaria a difficult choice—choose a king and fight for him or deliver evidence that they had killed Ahab’s sons. By ordinary standards of the day, these male heirs of Ahab were legitimate targets. The surprise was that their ruling brothers had permitted them to live that long.

10:8-10 Jehu used the cooperation of the leaders of Samaria to justify his revolution and to associate his slaughters—to that point, correctly—with God’s will.

10:11 But Jehu went beyond killing the house of Ahab and killed Ahab’s great men (perhaps the great men loyal to Ahab) and all of Ahab’s friends. In these killings he clearly went beyond God’s commands into excessive slaughter. By the standards of that day, the false priests were fair targets.

10:12-14 These verses report even more unnecessary slaughter of the southern royal family.

10:15-17 Jehu aligned himself with one of the major religiously conservative leaders of the kingdom—Jehonadab son of Rechab (see note at Jr 35:2).

10:18-19 Since these verses describe Ahab’s family and there was one great temple of Baal, the record deals with Baal-melkart, not some local Palestinian Baal (see note at 1Kg 16:25). Jehu used deception to lure the priests of Baal-melkart to their deaths. Straightforward honesty, perhaps even brutal honesty, might have been better than dealing with the Baal priesthood by deception.

10:20-22 Then Jehu went through all the hypocritical motions that would make his deception successful, even bringing out the special consecrated garments for the priests of Baal. For the sincere pagan these garments could have been as sacred as the priestly sacred garments were to the Levitical priests.

10:23 If this part of the ruse had any meaning to the priests of Baal, they likely would have seen it as an attempt to keep their sacred festival from being polluted by the presence of worshipers of the Lord.

10:24-27 Jehu killed the priests of Baal and polluted their holy site with the corpses of its priests. This is similar to Josiah’s later pollution of the site at Bethel by burning human bones on that altar (23:16). Then the temple of Baal was torn down. They entered the inner room—the most holy place of the Baal temple—and brought out its furnishings for destruction. In almost all the temple architectures known to us, the innermost room, the most holy place, was the private dwelling place of the deity or of the most sacred symbols of the deity. The final and deepest insult to the Baalist holy place was to turn it into a latrine.

10:28-31 The major point in the evaluation of Jehu was that he eliminated the worship of Baal-melkart (see note at 1Kg 16:25). For this he was promised four generations of heirs on the throne of Israel. However, like every other king of Israel, he did not reverse the illegal worship at the calf shrines.

10:32-33 Because of sin in both kingdoms, God used Hazael, king of Aram, not only to take away imperial holdings, but also to seize all Hebrew territories east of the Jordan River.

10:34-36 Jehu’s formal closer has no noteworthy features.