Kings II
Introduction
2.1 The end of Elijah is one final testimony to the living God who gives life to humans.
Elijah, the solitary prophet, seems to live on high, far from human corruption. That is why God does not let him die as others do. Like Moses, whose tomb was totally unknown (Dt 34:6), Elijah, too, will seem in a certain way, to evade death. These two pillars of the Old Testament, Moses and Elijah, will be with Jesus during his transfiguration. Nothing, not even death can overcome the one who burned with jealous love for the Lord, his God, and who fought for him alone.
Elijah was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind (v. 11). When Scripture says that Elijah was taken up to heaven, we must not insist on the image of “going up” (as in the Ascension of Jesus). In those days, people believed that God lived on high, and God, who speaks to people of every age according to their own concepts, wanted Elijah to disappear visibly, as if taken up to heaven.
My father, chariots of Israel and its horsemen (v. 12)! The meaning of Elisha’s exclamation is made clear by Israel’s past. Before their Canaanite enemies who had war chariots and horses, the Israelites, poorly equipped, placed their trust in the Lord, who was their only strength and who became for them the chariots and the horses at the same time. Here Elijah is taken up to heaven by the divine carriage.
Elijah’s strange disappearance will encourage the Jews who hope for the Lord’s triumphant coming to begin the definitive kingdom. The conviction arises among the Jews that Elijah will return at that time and prepare for the coming of the Lord (see Sir 48:1 and Mal 3:32). See what Jesus says to that effect (Mk 9:12).
Scripture leaves us in the dark as to what happened to Elijah. Thus, it prepares us for the announcement of Jesus’ resurrection and the faith of the church in the assumption of Mary, his mother.
19. Of all the people in the Scriptures, Elisha appears as the man most gifted in working miracles, but he is not considered greater than any others because of that. He lives among the sons of prophets, meaning fellow prophets. These are poor men, with a touch of fanaticism in their faith; living in religious communities with their wives and children. They will help Elisha in his mission (see 1 S 19:18).
Elisha receives Elijah’s spirit and continues his mission. Many of his miracles are related in the following chapters. Some may have been expanded or distorted by tradition for teaching purposes (for example with the forty-two children).
4.1 Of all the prophets of Israel, Elisha is the one nearest to the poor and marginalized of his time. It is in their midst and in their favor that he works most of his miracles. Because of this, the accounts handed down to us still keep the flavor and the colorful way these first witnesses have related them. Even if they belong more to legend than to history, these texts nevertheless tell us how these simple people recognized the power given by God to his prophet to help and console them.
8. All the elements of human tragedy are joined here: hope, happy life, death, the anguished heart of a mother who does not resign herself to the death of the son of her womb, her call of despair to the man of God.
We must meditate on the very moving resurrection at the hands of Elisha: mouth to mouth, eyes on eyes, hand in hand to communicate his warmth and restore life. It is an unusually concrete image of what Christ achieves in us when he “resurrects” us and fills us with life by his intimate touch. As St. Patrick, filled with enthusiasm in his missionary journeys, used to say: “Christ ahead of me, Christ behind me; Christ at my left; Christ at my right; Christ in me, Christ over me.”
42. We should compare this multiplication of loaves with the two multiplications at the hand of Jesus; they are related in very similar ways and, yet, each has a different meaning (see especially Jn 6).
5.1 Naaman’s healing holds a special place among Elisha’s miracles. Here, we can easily discover a prefigurement of a baptism which cleanses us from sin.
Even though Naaman is a famous general, he can do nothing about his leprosy. He wants to be renewed, to leave his contaminated skin behind and hope is offered to him: such miracles take place in Israel.
The girl said to her mistress (v. 2). It all begins with the word of a girl, Naaman’s servant. Similarly, any believer today has many opportunities to say something or to do something which will bring about good to those who seek to be cured. The Good News is not only communicated and spread through the work of the great apostles. In the Gospel (Lk 4:27) Jesus points to the healing of this foreigner in preference to all the lepers in Israel, as a proof that God cares for everyone and not only for those who are officially the faithful.
Elisha then sent a message (v. 8). To the prophet, the great general is no more than any other person. He receives no privileges, nor special attention through a private consultation. Since he did not even get down from his chariot, Elisha does not go out to greet him.
Go to the river Jordan and wash (v. 10). Naaman expected something like “magic,” a gesture or words filled with divine power. Yet, his healing will come through simple contact with the waters flowing through the land of God. Israel is a very small country, yet the riches of the Lord are hidden there.
If the prophet had ordered you to do something difficult, would you not have done it (v. 13)? People expect wonders: he only asks the simple following of a command. Jesus will proceed the same way (Jn 4:46). It is not important to achieve extraordinary things, but rather what God asks. We often miss his kingdom because we want to make great efforts instead of doing the simple things that God asks.
Healing is a gift. The fabulous treasure Naaman brought with him is useless. The Lord is the one who gives, he does not charge nor does he want us to pay him. All he asks is that if we discover his merciful love, we love him in return for his love.
When my king goes to the temple of his god Rimmon,… I bow down with him (v. 18). Now Naaman knows there is no other God than the God of Israel. But he cannot desert the world in which he lives and where other gods are honored. Elisha’s answer shows that God understands the situation.
The same understanding toward people of good will who follow other religions is expressed in some texts of Genesis and Exodus which were precisely written by prophets of the same groups around Elisha (see Gen 20:1-7 and Ex 18:1-20).
Naaman represents a man of goodwill afflicted with an incurable disease, which is sin, who comes to the Church from far away because he discovers that there is a hidden source of life in it. The water of baptism does not work by itself; its effectiveness comes from the fact that it is through baptism that we join the people of Christ, the Church.
6.8 We single out this narrative adorned by legends, which shows Elisha’s intervention in the life of the nation. Elisha received the mission to change the king of Israel who was responsible for the religious infidelity of his people, as well as the king of Aram. Joram and Ben-hadad mentioned here will shortly be murdered.
The prophets of Israel are messengers entrusted by God with the salvation of Israel, and this salvation does not only mean that our souls go to heaven as many people believe, but rather that the entire life of a people must bring them to greater awareness and responsibility. The people of Israel could not mature (and neither can people now) without a long experience of violence, injustice, and lies as well as a way of covering these things.
Give them bread and water (v. 22)—a prophetic gesture: overcome evil through good.
Open his eyes… Blind them (vv. 17, 18, 20). These words show the contrast between those who see the situation as God does and those who get lost in their own wisdom. How much time we waste, how often we are paralyzed by our own fears, instead of taking risks and proceed, in the trust that God cannot fail!
May God punish me, if the head of Elisha, the son of Shaphat, remains on his shoulders today (v. 31). The king’s words tell us that Elisha had encouraged resistance to the Arameans while the leaders did not dare do so. If the prophets who in their time witnessed the justice of God were not afraid of assuming responsibility in national problems, why should Christians, God’s prophets today, be absent from the political life of their time?
9.1 While the descendants of David continue to rule in Judah, there is one “coup” after another in Israel. Elisha is the one who had Jehu anointed, namely, consecrated with oil.
30. Jehu will only be a good soldier. It seems that he was not even successful in his wars and lost the province to the east of the Jordan, the land of Gilead.
However, he was dedicated to the faith (see 10:22) and to the service of the Lord and the prophets expected that he would suppress all the influence of the foreign religions introduced by Jezebel, which he did.
Jezebel dies: she will be considered in the Scriptures as an example of a godless woman and a murderess of the servants of the Lord (see Rev 2:20).
11.1 Athaliah was the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel. When her son Ahaziah, the king of Judah dies, she thinks of taking over the kingdom by killing all her grandchildren. This would mean the end of David’s descendants, or the failure of the Lord’s promises. Joash escapes death under miraculous circumstances. Six years later, the head of the priests succeeds in a plot with the help of the “people of the land,” that is to say, the free men who enjoy full rights as citizens (vv. 14, 18, 19…). These remain faithful to David’s family.
History shows that on several occasions the people have been the ones who preserve the faith when the authorities failed to do so. Thus, in the fourth century A.D., the errors of Arius—who denied the divinity of Christ—were accepted by many bishops who were influenced by the Roman emperor. In a church where authority came from above but where, in fact, the emperor named the bishops, the situation seemed desperate in spite of the courage of a few great bishops such as St. Hilary and St. Athanasius. It was the resistance of Christian people that assured the victory of the faith.
The chief priest restores the child king and he also tries to give him directions. An agreement is signed according to which the people and the king commit themselves to be faithful to the Covenant of the Lord.
12.1 The following six chapters relate the history of the kingdom of Israel and Judah from Joash to the destruction of the kingdom of Israel (the northern kingdom) in the year 721 B.C., a period of over a hundred years.
In Jerusalem, the capital of Judah, there are only four kings, the first two rule for forty years each.
In Israel, at first the sons of Jehu suffer many setbacks. Their third descendant, Jeroboam II, will achieve a period of prosperity thanks to his victories.
Meanwhile, the powerful kings of Assyria conquer everywhere and soon threaten Israel with their armies and their power.
14.23 Scripture dedicates only this paragraph to Jeroboam II, king of Israel (the years 783-743 B.C.), in spite of his having restored greatness and prosperity to the kingdom.
In Jeroboam’s victories, the author only sees God’s last favor for his humiliated people.
This prosperity, however, brings about the exploitation of the people. This is the time when the prophets Hosea and Amos announce—to everyone’s disbelief—that this prosperity will be brief because it is not based on justice. At the death of Jeroboam, the kingdom of Samaria comes to an end.
Religious division continues and the Israelites of the north, isolated from the religious center of Jerusalem, do not succeed in preserving their faith when confronted with pagan influence.
17.1 Here we have the description of the fall of the northern kingdom. Samaria is captured in the year 721 B.C. The people are deported to an extreme place of the Assyrian empire, and residents from those remote provinces are brought to Samaria to mix with the people in the countryside. Such was the practice of the Assyrian conquerors: displacing and intermingling the people to prevent rebellion.
From that time on, the Samaritans, or the Israelites of the north, are racially and religiously mixed, and the Israelites of Judah never consider them as their equals. Seven centuries later, in Jesus’ time, the Samaritans were still neighbors to be avoided, because the suspicions and the conflicts had overcome the common memories.
Thus, the most important of the kingdoms from David and Solomon disappears two centuries after Solomon’s death. Among the Jews, the hope remains that when the Messiah comes he will reunite Judah and Israel and call all those scattered among the nations (see Ezk 37:15).
7. The kingdom of Israel disappeared when Samaria was conquered by the Assyrians. It was too small and isolated to resist its powerful neighbor. Scripture, however, makes us discover the deeper cause of this disaster: they had sinned against the Lord their God.
They served their filthy idols (v. 12). Though the first meaning of idol was image, images of Christ and his servants the saints are not idols, as shortsighted believers think. An idol is everything that takes the place of the one God in our heart and our lives. He is the living God and gives life to those who serve him. The filthy idols bring sickness and confusion to the society which serves them. Whether they be gadgets, elements of a luxurious life, idols of flesh and blood, when we choose them we are always left sad and unclean.
Yet the idols had another significance for Israel, a small kingdom less advanced than the neighboring nations. The idols were the symbol and the instrument of a foreign and alienating culture. The Canaanite and Assyrian idols included the worship of sex, greed, and violence. The Israelites who were enticed by them forgot the problems of their own society and lost a thirst for justice which was their inheritance.
It is the same now when people of a developing nation are enslaved by the idols of a consumerist society… When families are submissive to the T.V., religiously watching the advertising of greed, the erotic shows and whatever has been planned for them, they become unable to improve their own life in the context of their own reality. Then the building of a nation in justice becomes no more than a beautiful but unrealistic dream.
They went after worthless idols and they themselves became worthless (v. 15). Jeremiah will also say: “They served foreign gods and so I will send them to foreign lands as slaves” (Jer 16:11-13). See also Judges 3:7 and Romans 1:24.
24. The foreigners who are brought to Samaria meet with hardships which arouse religious restlessness in them: Can the god of this land be angry with us because we do not offer sacrifices to him?
Answering the doubts of these basically religious people, the author highlights the demands of faith:
– it is not enough to honor the Lord along with the other gods, he is the only One and he asks us to destroy all the gods we have made for ourselves;
– it is not enough to offer sacrifices to the Lord: we must do his will.
18.1 Here begins the last part of the Book of Kings: the history of the kingdom of Judah. The fall of Samaria and the disappearance of the northern kingdom bring about a religious renewal in the south.
Hezekiah did what was right in the eyes of the Lord (v. 3). This is the time when the prophet Isaiah is present at the side of King Hezekiah (the years 716–687 B.C.).
He did away with the Sanctuaries on the hills (v. 4). Here we note the effort on the part of the kings of Judah to see to it that the only place of worship would be the Jerusalem temple. In the many rural Sanctuaries, people went to offer their sacrifices to the Lord in ways that were usually mixed with pagan practices. By highlighting the Jerusalem temple’s monopoly with its better educated priests and Levites looking after the purity of the faith, Hezekiah promotes religious reform.
As to the bronze serpent, which Hezekiah destroyed, see Numbers 21:4.
It is also true that many fugitive priests had come from the north during the last days of Samaria. Some of them had succeeded in maintaining faith in the Lord and religious unity. They brought along sacred books and kept many ancient traditions of Moses and Israel’s past. This contribution would be extremely important for the writing of the Scriptures and also for Josiah’s reform a century later (2 K 22).
The reforms of Hezekiah are told more in detail in 2 Chronicles 29–31.
13. In the year 701 B.C., Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem and Hezekiah had to pay a high price to keep him away.
Beginning with verse 7 to the end of Chapter 19, we have the story of the miraculous liberation of Jerusalem. Actually, there are two stories that may correspond to two liberations from two Assyrian invasions.
In the year 701 B.C., the king of Assyria sends his generals from Lachish to demand Hezekiah’s surrender. He is forced to return to his country and cannot carry out his threats. This story is in verses 17-19, and it concludes in 19:36-37.
In the year 690 B.C., there is another intervention related in 19:9-35. This time “the angel of the Lord came out and killed one hundred eighty-five thousand soldiers in the camp” (19:35). The famous pagan historian, Herodotus, relates the sudden destruction of this army by an epidemic. A most natural event! And yet, at the time when the Holy City is about to fall and when God’s promises seem to fail, some rats are spreading the deadly virus. The biblical author makes no mistake in seeing this as a manifestation of God. Jerusalem was liberated as Isaiah had predicted.
These two chapters appear almost word for word in the book of Isaiah, Chapters 36–37. Here we only emphasize the story of the first liberation, and in Isaiah 37, the story of the second one.
Make your peace with me and surrender (v. 31). The Assyrian king proposes peace under the condition that the people be deported. For the Jews, this dispersal would mean the loss of their national and religious life by being dispersed in other lands. It would also mean that David’s descendants are now deprived of power, according to the mentality of that time, and that the Lord had been defeated by the gods of the conqueror. That is why God does something.
All along these two chapters, the prophetic account emphasizes the difference between the worthless gods of the nations and the God of Israel who knows the good time for him to reverse the course of history.
These events invite us to trust in God’s help. When God commits himself to act, he cannot fail if we do not get tired of hoping in him. Against all human hope, Jerusalem remains untouched. This is the image of a ruler whom people want to depose because of his honesty but who remains steadfast. Or a student who stays firm even though his friends mock his faith. Or the young people who remain pure in a culture without morality. Or the church reduced to a few faithful seemingly defeated by political forces and yet remains victorious.
21.1 The miraculous liberation of Jerusalem did not reverse, in fact, the decadence of the kingdom. Even before Hezekiah’s death, Judah is totally submitted to Assyrian rule. This explains partly why Manasseh, Hezekiah’s son, begins refraining, and then persecuting the Lord’s party which was the living spirit of Judah’s nationalism.
Manasseh openly promotes idolatry and persecutes the Lord’s people as Jezebel had done in Israel a century before. With his godless, crime-filled reign, Manasseh succeeds in destroying the hope placed in David’s descendant by Hezekiah’s reforms.
His reign lasted fifty-five years, during which both the faithful and the prophets had to remain silent or hide. The betrayal of the Lord’s Covenant was such that after Manasseh’s death, the prophets considered him responsible for the fall of Jerusalem.
22.1 Josiah followed in the footsteps of David, his father (v. 2). In the last days of the kingdom of Judah, a king “like David” dedicates himself to the renewal of the faith and the Lord’s Covenant, to the reconquest of his ancestors’ territories.
Following the death of the kings who persecuted them, the faithful slowly awaken. In the year 622 B.C., the accidental discovery of the “law” shakes the kingdom.
I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord (v. 8). During the previous kingdoms, the sacred books had been forgotten or hidden. What was discovered was certainly most of Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy. This last book had been brought by the Levites and the priests who had come from the north when Samaria fell. It insisted on fidelity to the Covenant, declaring without hesitation that it was a matter of life or death for the people of God.
We can see the impact of the sacred word. From then on, Josiah (who was then twenty-six years old) focuses on shaping his life, and that of his people, according to the demands of the law. He realizes that Lord’s protection is the only thing that can save his people from the great powers. The description of all that had to be destroyed gives us an idea of the wave of paganism which had invaded every aspect of life in Manasseh’s days.
23.15 Taking advantage of the decadence of the Assyrian empire, Josiah reconquered part of the land of Israel to the north which had become an Assyrian province a hundred years before. There, too, he destroyed all the Sanctuaries, idols and practices that offend the Lord and go against his demands.
For a few years, the prophets believed that the Lord’s threats predicting the total destruction of Israel would not be fulfilled. In the reconquest, they even saw a sign of the happy times when the Messiah would reunite again Judah and Israel as one people with one Covenant (Jer 31:31).
28. Josiah, the reformist king, dies a victim of a political mistake. For centuries, Israel had been squeezed between Egypt and Assyria (or Asshur). Assyria was the most brutal and cruel nation of those days. When Babylon began to destroy Assyrian power, the Pharaoh, worried by the dynamism of this new “great” power, wanted to help the weakened Assyria, forgetting the old rivalry.
Josiah refused to allow it. Jewish consciousness longed for the destruction of “the cruel nation” (see Nahum’s prophecies).
How could God allow the death of Josiah, the holy king of the reforms? It was such a stumbling block for Jewish consciousness that the author of this book prefers to say nothing about it. Much later, they tried to justify Josiah’s tragic end by a mistake he would have made (2 Chr 35:21). His death, in part, inspires the great prophecy of Zechariah 12:10 and, in the Scriptures, the name Megiddo becomes the symbol of a curse (Rev 16:16).
24.8 The destruction of the kingdom of Judah takes place in two stages:
– the year 598 B.C. Jehoiakim has just died. His son, Jehoiachin surrenders in the city under siege. First exile of the elite to Babylon. The Chaldeans (people of Babylon) force Zedekiah to be king.
– the year 587 B.C. Zedekiah rebels against the Chaldeans who come to destroy Jerusalem and its temple. Second exile to Babylon.
Scripture states that this destruction—like that of Samaria—would not have occurred, because God is faithful to his Covenant, if there had not been such an accumulation of sins and rebellions. To the very last moment, everything could have been saved if Zedekiah had listened to the warnings of the prophet Jeremiah (Jer 38).
However, against all hope, the Jewish nation rises from its ashes sixty years after its destruction. History shows that the great empires—the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Chaldeans—disappeared forever. We find their statues in museums and their archives recovered after thirty centuries of complete oblivion. The people of Judah, however, go back to their land. Purified by their trials and encouraged by the prophets, they return seeking a new Covenant, a more sincere and personal one, with their God. They come back from the exile under the guidance of Zerubbabel, a descendant of King Jehoiachin and Jesus’ ancestor.