For Teaching

2 Kings 17: What the Passage Says

149 claims across 41 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What 2 Kings 17 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter tells how Israel, the northern kingdom, came to an end. Hoshea, its last king, stops paying Assyria and is imprisoned; Assyria then captures Samaria after a three-year siege and carries the people away into exile. The writer lists the reasons: Israel worshiped other gods, would not listen to the prophets, and kept up the sins begun under Jeroboam, and the writer adds that Judah did the same. The chapter ends with the foreign peoples Assyria settled in Samaria, who worshiped the LORD and served their own gods at the same time.

Claim by Claim

17:1
- In the twelfth year of Ahaz king of Judah, Hoshea son of Elah became king over Israel.
- Ahaz was king of Judah.
- Hoshea was the son of Elah.
- Hoshea reigned in Samaria.
- Hoshea reigned nine years.
17:2
- Hoshea did what was evil in the sight of the LORD.
- Hoshea did not do evil as the kings of Israel who were before him had done.
17:3
- Shalmaneser king of Assyria came up against Hoshea.
- Hoshea became a servant of Shalmaneser.
- Hoshea paid tribute to Shalmaneser.
17:4
- The king of Assyria found conspiracy in Hoshea.
- Hoshea had sent messengers to So king of Egypt.
- Hoshea did not bring the tribute to the king of Assyria as he had year by year.
- The king of Assyria detained Hoshea.
- The king of Assyria bound Hoshea in a prison house.
17:5
- The king of Assyria came up throughout all the land.
- The king of Assyria went up against Samaria.
- The king of Assyria besieged Samaria three years.
17:6
- In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria captured Samaria.
- The king of Assyria carried Israel away into exile in Assyria.
- He settled them in Halah.
- He settled them at Habor, the river of Gozan; the text leaves unclear whether Habor is the river itself or a place by the river of Gozan.
- He settled them in the cities of the Medes.
17:7
- This happened because the children of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God.
- The LORD their God had brought them up out of the land of Egypt.
- The LORD had brought them out from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
- The children of Israel had feared other gods.
17:8
- They walked in the statutes of the nations whom the LORD had driven out from before the children of Israel.
- They walked in the statutes which the kings of Israel had made.
17:9
- The children of Israel did secretly things that were not right against the LORD their God.
- They built for themselves high places in all their cities.
- They built them from watchtower to fortified city.
17:10
- They set up for themselves standing pillars.
- They set up for themselves sacred poles of Asherah.
- They set them up on every high hill.
- They set them up under every green tree.
17:11
- They burned incense there in all the high places.
- They burned incense as the nations did whom the LORD had carried away before them.
- They did wicked things.
- Their wicked deeds provoked the LORD to anger.
17:12
- They served idols.
- The LORD had said to them, You shall not do this thing.
17:13
- The LORD warned Israel and Judah.
- The LORD warned them by every prophet and every seer.
- The LORD said, Turn from your evil ways.
- The LORD said, Keep my commandments and my statutes.
- The LORD said this was according to all the law he commanded their fathers.
- The LORD said he sent that law to them by his servants the prophets.
17:14
- They would not listen.
- They hardened their necks.
- They hardened their necks like the neck of their fathers.
- Their fathers did not believe in the LORD their God.
17:15
- They rejected the LORD's statutes.
- They rejected his covenant that he made with their fathers.
- They rejected his testimonies which he testified against them.
- They went after worthlessness.
- They became worthless.
- They went after the nations round about them.
- The LORD had charged them not to do as those nations did.
17:16
- They forsook all the commandments of the LORD their God.
- They made for themselves molten images, two calves.
- They made a sacred pole of Asherah.
- They bowed down to all the host of heaven.
- They served Baal.
17:17
- They made their sons and their daughters pass through the fire.
- They practiced divination.
- They practiced enchantments.
- They sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the LORD.
- They did this to provoke the LORD to anger.
17:18
- The LORD was very angry with Israel.
- The LORD removed them from his presence.
- No one was left except the tribe of Judah alone.
17:19
- Judah also did not keep the commandments of the LORD their God.
- Judah walked in the statutes which Israel had made.
17:20
- The LORD rejected all the seed of Israel.
- The LORD afflicted them.
- The LORD delivered them into the hand of plunderers.
- The LORD did this until he had cast them out of his presence.
17:21
- Israel was torn away from the house of David; the text leaves unclear whether the LORD tore Israel away or Israel tore itself away.
- They made Jeroboam son of Nebat king.
- Jeroboam drove Israel away from following the LORD.
- Jeroboam made them commit a great sin.
17:22
- The children of Israel walked in all the sins that Jeroboam committed.
- They did not turn away from those sins.
17:23
- This continued until the LORD removed Israel from his presence.
- The LORD had said this by all his servants the prophets.
- Israel was carried away from their own land into Assyria.
- Israel remains in Assyria to this day.
17:24
- The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Ava, Hamath, and Sepharvaim.
- He settled them in the cities of Samaria in place of the children of Israel.
- They took possession of Samaria.
- They dwelt in the cities of Samaria.
17:25
- At the beginning of their dwelling there they did not fear the LORD.
- The LORD sent lions among them.
- The lions killed some of them.
17:26
- They spoke to the king of Assyria.
- They said the nations he had removed and settled in the cities of Samaria do not know the manner of the God of the land.
- They said that therefore he sent lions among them.
- They said the lions are killing them.
- They said the killing is because they do not know the manner of the God of the land.
17:27
- The king of Assyria gave a command.
- He said to bring back there one of the priests they had carried away from there.
- He said they should go and dwell there.
- He said the priest should teach them the manner of the God of the land.
17:28
- One of the priests who had been carried away from Samaria came.
- He dwelt in Bethel.
- He taught them how they should fear the LORD.
17:29
- Every nation made gods of their own.
- They put them in the houses of the high places which the Samaritans had made.
- Each nation did this in the cities where they dwelt.
17:30
- The men of Babylon made Succoth-benoth.
- The men of Cuth made Nergal.
- The men of Hamath made Ashima.
17:31
- The Avites made Nibhaz and Tartak.
- The Sepharvites burned their children in fire to Adrammelech and Anammelech.
- Adrammelech and Anammelech were the gods of Sepharvaim.
17:32
- They feared the LORD.
- They appointed for themselves priests of the high places from among their own number.
- Those priests officiated for them in the houses of the high places.
17:33
- They feared the LORD.
- They served their own gods.
- They served their gods after the manner of the nations from which they had been carried away.
17:34
- To this day they act according to their former manners.
- They do not fear the LORD.
- They do not act according to their statutes or their ordinances.
- They do not act according to the law and the commandment which the LORD commanded the children of Jacob.
- The LORD gave Jacob the name Israel.
17:35
- The LORD made a covenant with them.
- The LORD charged them, saying, You shall not fear other gods.
- The LORD said, You shall not bow down to them.
- The LORD said, You shall not serve them.
- The LORD said, You shall not sacrifice to them.
17:36
- The LORD said they were to fear the LORD instead.
- The LORD brought them up out of the land of Egypt with great power and an outstretched arm.
- The LORD said they were to bow down to him.
- The LORD said they were to sacrifice to him.
17:37
- The LORD said they were to observe and do the statutes, the ordinances, the law, and the commandment which he wrote for them.
- The LORD said they were to do them for all time.
- The LORD said they were not to fear other gods.
17:38
- The LORD said, The covenant I made with you, you shall not forget.
- The LORD said they were not to fear other gods.
17:39
- The LORD said they were to fear the LORD their God.
- The LORD said he would deliver them out of the hand of all their enemies.
17:40
- They did not listen.
- They acted according to their former manner.
17:41
- These nations feared the LORD.
- These nations served their carved images.
- Their children and their children's children did the same.
- They do as their fathers did to this day.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

17:1: Since Solomon's death the land had been two kingdoms: Israel in the north, capital Samaria, and Judah in the south, capital Jerusalem. Each kingdom's records dated a reign by the year of the other kingdom's king, which is why Hoshea's accession is fixed by Ahaz's twelfth year.
17:2: "Did what the LORD said was evil" is the book's standard verdict formula, applied to every king of the north; it is a summary judgment on the reign, not a description of a particular act.
17:3: Assyria was the great military empire of the day, centered on the upper Tigris in what is now northern Iraq. To "become his subject" and pay tribute meant a defeated king kept his throne and his capital but sent a fixed payment every year and gave up an independent foreign policy.
17:4: No Egyptian king called So is otherwise known for certain. The name may be a shortened royal name, the city of Sais in the Nile delta, or a title; scholars disagree.
17:5: A siege meant ringing a walled city with troops and cutting off food and reinforcements until starvation, disease or surrender ended it. Three years is a long time to hold out, and it says something about how strong Samaria's walls were.
17:6: Halah, Gozan and the Habor river lie in northern Mesopotamia, hundreds of miles from Israel; the cities of the Medes are further east still, on the Iranian plateau. Assyria's standard policy was to deport a conquered population and scatter it far from home so it could not organize a revolt. This fall of Samaria is usually dated to 722 BC.
17:7: The story stops here and does not resume until verse 24. Verses 7 to 23 are the writer's own explanation of why the northern kingdom was destroyed, the longest such explanation anywhere in Kings. Note also that "feared" in the King James does not mean being frightened: to fear a god meant to worship him, serve him and treat him with awe. The word runs through the whole chapter in that sense.
17:8: "The heathen" in the King James simply means the other nations, the non Israelite peoples who had lived in Canaan before Israel. It carries no sense of ignorance or savagery; it is just the word for outsiders.
17:9: A "high place" was an open-air shrine, often on raised ground, with an altar and sacred stones or trees. Such shrines were used both for Canaanite gods and for worship of the LORD outside Jerusalem. "From the watchtower to the walled city" is an idiom meaning everywhere, from the smallest lookout post to the largest fortified town.
17:10: The pillars were upright standing stones set up to mark a place as sacred. Asherah was a Canaanite mother goddess; the "pole" was a wooden object, probably a stylised tree or trunk, that stood for her at a shrine.
17:11: Burning incense meant burning fragrant resin on an altar so that the smoke rose as an offering. The act itself was ordinary worship; the writer's complaint is about the places and the gods involved.
17:12: An idol is a physical image of a god, carved from wood or stone or cast in metal, treated as the place where that god was present and could be fed, dressed and served.
17:13: A "seer" was an older word for a prophet, literally one who sees, receiving messages as visions. The Hebrew Bible itself notes elsewhere that the word for prophet replaced it over time.
17:14: "Hardened their necks" is a farming image: an ox that stiffens its neck against the yoke and refuses to be steered.
17:15: The Hebrew word behind "worthless" means a breath or puff of vapor, the word translated "vanity" in Ecclesiastes. The sentence is a deliberate play on words: they chased after emptiness and turned into it.
17:16: The two metal calves are the images Jeroboam set up at Bethel and Dan as alternatives to the temple in Jerusalem. "All the stars and powers of the sky" translates "the host of heaven": the sun, moon, planets and stars regarded as divine beings. Baal, whose name means "lord" or "owner", was the Canaanite storm and fertility god.
17:17: The Hebrew phrase is literally to "make pass over into the fire". Whether it always means burning a child to death or sometimes a dedication rite involving fire is disputed. Divination meant reading omens (animal livers, bird flight, dreams) to learn the future; both practices were forbidden in Israelite law.
17:18: "Removed them from his presence" is an idiom for driving people out of his sight and out of the land. "Judah" here is the whole southern kingdom, named for its dominant tribe.
17:20: "Spoilers" means raiders who strip a beaten people of everything they can carry off. "The seed of Israel" means the descendants of Israel, the whole people.
17:21: This looks back to the division of the kingdom after Solomon's death, when the northern tribes rejected his son Rehoboam and made Jeroboam king instead.
17:23: "To this day" means the day of the writer, generations after the deportation, not the reader's day.
17:24: Deporting one conquered people and importing another was Assyrian standard practice, designed to break local loyalties. Cuthah and Babylon were Mesopotamian cities; Hamath was in Syria; Ava and Sepharvaim are less certainly located. The mixed population of these towns is the ancestry later writers attributed to the Samaritans.
17:25: It was widely assumed in the ancient world that each territory had its own god with its own required rites, and that a newcomer who did not perform them was in danger. The settlers read the lion attacks that way.
17:26: "What the God of that land requires" translates a Hebrew word meaning the customary rule or correct procedure, the proper way of doing things, rather than a body of belief.
17:27: The priest is one of the Israelite priests deported in verse 6. The empire itself orders him sent home, since keeping the local god satisfied was considered part of keeping a province quiet and productive.
17:28: Bethel, about twelve miles north of Jerusalem, was one of the two royal shrines of the northern kingdom and its chief sanctuary.
17:29: "The people of Samaria" here simply means the former inhabitants of the region, the deported Israelites, not the later Samaritan community.
17:30: Nergal was a Mesopotamian god of the underworld and of plague, the patron deity of Cuthah. Succoth-benoth and Ashima cannot now be identified with confidence; the names may be garbled forms of Babylonian and Syrian divine names.
17:31: Nibhaz and Tartak are unknown outside this verse. Adrammelech and Anammelech both end in an element meaning "king", a common part of divine names in the region.
17:32: The Hebrew says the priests were taken "from among all of them": that is, ordinary men chosen at random rather than men from the priestly family line, which is how Israelite law restricted the office. The same phrase is used of Jeroboam's priests.
17:33: Adding the LORD to an existing set of gods, rather than replacing them, was normal practice in the ancient world; the writer treats it as a failure rather than a compromise.
17:34: Jacob was renamed Israel in Genesis; the nation traces its name and descent to him.
17:35: A covenant was a formal binding agreement with stated obligations on both sides, drawn up on the model of treaties between a great king and a subject people.
17:36: "A strong outstretched arm" is a set phrase from the exodus story for power actually in use, the picture is of an arm raised to strike.
17:41: "Graven" means carved, cut from wood or stone, in contrast with the "molten" images of verse 16, which were cast from melted metal. The chapter ends on the same word it has used throughout, "feared," meaning worshiped: these people worship the LORD and their own gods side by side, and have done so for three generations.

Read 2 Kings 17