2 Kings: How It All Fell Down

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. It completes the long history from Joshua to Kings. In my day it was the second half of the one scroll of Kings.

When: It covers about 850 to 561 BC, from Elijah to the fall of Jerusalem and after. Its last event happened in exile, so it was finished there.

Where it fits: It picks up where 1 Kings ends, about 850 BC, and tells the fall of the north to Assyria in 722 BC and of Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 BC. Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah and Jeremiah preached in these years.

Where I quote it: Naaman the Syrian (Luke 4:27). Elijah taken up and expected back (Mark 9:11–13).

If you only read three chapters: 2 Kings 5, 2 Kings 22 and 2 Kings 25.

Words to Know

Elisha — Elijah’s successor, who asked for a double share of his spirit.

Assyria — the great empire that destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC.

Babylon — the empire that destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple in 586 BC.

Exile — the deportation of Judah’s leaders and skilled people to Babylon.

Samaritans — the people of the old northern territory around Samaria. In my day, Jews and Samaritans despised each other.

The Book in Brief

Second Kings follows both kingdoms to their end.

Chapters 1 to 8 belong mostly to the prophets. In chapter 2, Elijah is carried up to heaven in a whirlwind, and his follower Elisha takes up his cloak. Elisha raises a woman’s son from the dead, feeds a hundred men with twenty loaves, and heals Naaman, an enemy general from Aram, of his skin disease.

In chapters 9 and 10, at Elisha’s word, an army commander named Jehu is anointed king of Israel. He kills the kings of Israel and Judah, has Queen Jezebel thrown from a window, and wipes out Ahab’s family and the worshipers of Baal. In chapter 11, the queen mother Athaliah seizes Judah’s throne and kills the royal family, but one baby prince, Joash, is hidden in the Temple, and six years later a priest crowns him.

Chapters 12 to 16 hurry through many kings. Elisha dies. Assyria, the great empire to the east, begins swallowing the land. In chapter 17, Assyria captures Samaria and carries the people of the north away. The writer stops to explain why: they worshiped other gods and would not listen to the prophets.

Only Judah is left. In chapters 18 to 20, King Hezekiah trusts the LORD when the Assyrian king Sennacherib threatens Jerusalem. Isaiah promises that the city will be saved, and in the night the angel of the LORD strikes the Assyrian camp. Hezekiah’s son Manasseh, in chapter 21, brings back other gods and fills Jerusalem with innocent blood. In chapters 22 and 23, under his grandson Josiah, a scroll of the Law is found in the Temple, and Josiah tears down the shrines.

After Josiah dies fighting Egypt, Judah falls under Babylon. In chapters 24 and 25 the Babylonians take Jerusalem twice. First they carry King Jehoiachin and thousands of his people away. Later they burn the Temple and the city. The governor they leave behind is murdered, and the people left flee to Egypt. The book ends in Babylon, where Jehoiachin is let out of prison and given a seat at the king’s table.

Second Kings ends with the Temple burned, Jerusalem in ruins and Judah’s king a captive in Babylon. The whole long history from Joshua to Kings was written to explain how it came to that. Its answer is the kings. They worshiped other gods, and they would not listen to the prophets.

The prophets, whom you will meet later in this book, gave another answer as well. The kings and the rich crushed the poor. Both answers are in my scriptures.

Elijah goes up

The book opens with Elijah’s last days, and in chapter 2 he is taken away. As he walks with Elisha, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separate them, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven (2 Kings 2:11).

He did not die. So my people expected him to come back. The prophet Malachi said he would return before the great day of the LORD (Malachi 4:5).

Read how Elijah is described: a hairy man, and wearing a leather belt around his waist (2 Kings 1:8). Then read how Mark describes my kinsman John: clothed with camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist (Mark 1:6).¹ John dressed like Elijah on purpose.

When my friends asked me about Elijah coming first, I told them, Elijah has come, and they have also done to him whatever they wanted to (Mark 9:13). I meant John, whom Herod had beheaded. On the mountain, Moses and Elijah appeared with me (Mark 9:4). And on the cross, when I cried out, some of the bystanders thought I was calling for Elijah (Mark 15:35).

Fire on the soldiers

In chapter 1, the king sends a captain and fifty soldiers to arrest Elijah. Elijah calls down fire from heaven and burns them all. The king sends fifty more, and he does it again (2 Kings 1:9–12).

Once, when a Samaritan village would not welcome me, James and John asked, Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from the sky, and destroy them? (Luke 9:54). They knew this story.

I turned and rebuked them.² We went on to another village.

Elisha’s bread

Elisha does many of the same kinds of things I did.

A man brings him twenty loaves of barley bread, and Elisha says to give it to a hundred people. His servant says that is not nearly enough. Elisha says, They will eat, and will have some left over, and they do (2 Kings 4:42–44). When John tells of me feeding the crowd, the bread is five barley loaves (John 6:9).

In the village of Shunem, Elisha raises a woman’s only son from the dead (2 Kings 4:8–37). Luke tells of me raising a widow’s only son at the gate of Nain (Luke 7:11–17). Nain and Shunem stand on the same hill in Galilee, a short walk apart.³ After I raised the boy, the crowd said, A great prophet has arisen among us! They knew whose village was over the hill.

The book also tells you that when some boys mocked Elisha’s bald head, he cursed them, and two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of them (2 Kings 2:23–24). The prophets in this book are not saints in stained glass.

Naaman

2 Kings 5 is one of the finest stories in the scriptures.

Naaman is the commander of the army of Aram, Israel’s enemy. He has a skin disease. A little Israelite girl, captured in a raid and made a slave in his house, tells his wife that the prophet in Samaria could heal him.

So the enemy general comes, with horses and chariots, to Elisha’s door. Elisha does not even come out. He sends a message: go wash in the Jordan seven times. Naaman is insulted. He expected a show. His own servants talk him into it. He washes, and his skin becomes like the flesh of a little child (2 Kings 5:14).

Then Naaman asks one more thing. When he goes home, his master will lean on his arm in the temple of his god, and he will have to bow there. Will God pardon him for that? Elisha says, Go in peace (2 Kings 5:18–19).

In Nazareth I reminded my neighbors: There were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed, except Naaman, the Syrian (Luke 4:27). A foreigner, an enemy officer, healed because a slave girl from Israel cared enough to tell him.

The fall of the north

In 722 BC, Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and carried its people away. Then the Assyrians brought in people from other lands to settle in Samaria (2 Kings 17:6, 24).

The writer of Kings says those settlers worshiped the LORD and their own gods together (2 Kings 17:33). That is the Judean version of where the Samaritans came from. The Samaritans told it differently. They said they were descendants of the northern tribes who had never left, and that their temple on Mount Gerizim was the true one.⁴

By my day, Jews and Samaritans would not share a cup (John 4:9). So when I told a story about a good man on the Jericho road, I made him a Samaritan. And when I sat at a well in Samaria, I asked a Samaritan woman for a drink.

Go deeperWhat Assyria’s records say about Israel’s last kings

The last hundred years of the northern kingdom can be read from both sides. Assyrian kings carved their victories in stone, and several of Israel’s kings appear in them.

The first is Jehu, the army commander who seized the throne by killing Ahab’s whole family. On a black stone pillar from Nimrud, the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III shows a man bowing to the ground before him, and the caption speaks of “the tribute of Jehu, son of Omri.” The scribes called him Omri’s son though he had wiped out Omri’s line, because to Assyria, Israel was simply the house of Omri. The tribute was paid in 841 BC. The man on his knees may be Jehu himself or his envoy. Kings never mentions it.⁵

A century later, Kings says that Pul the king of Assyria came against the land, and Menahem gave Pul one thousand talents of silver (2 Kings 15:19). Pul was the name Tiglath-pileser III went by as king of Babylon, and his own records list “Menahem of Samaria” among the kings who paid him. He also claims that when the people of Israel overthrew their king Pekah, he himself put Hoshea on the throne. Kings says only that Hoshea killed Pekah and reigned in his place (2 Kings 15:30).⁶

Then the end. Kings says the king of Assyria besieged Samaria for three years and took it (2 Kings 17:5–6). A Babylonian chronicle says that Shalmaneser V “ravaged Samaria.” His successor, Sargon II, boasts that he conquered Samaria, carried away 27,290 of its people, and brought in people from other lands to live there. Historians still argue over which of the two kings deserves the credit. Many think Shalmaneser took the city in 722 BC and Sargon crushed a revolt there two years later. Either way, the Assyrian records tell the same story as Kings, from the other side.⁷

The bird in a cage

In 701 BC, the Assyrian king Sennacherib invaded Judah and besieged Jerusalem. Kings says King Hezekiah paid him a huge tribute, and then an angel struck the Assyrian camp and he went home (2 Kings 18:13–19:36).

Sennacherib wrote his own account, on clay prisms that still exist. He boasts that he captured forty-six walled towns and shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem like a bird in a cage. He lists the tribute. He never claims to have taken the city.⁸

His palace walls showed his siege of the Judean city of Lachish, with prisoners being impaled. Those carvings are in a museum in London. This is where my people’s history and the empire’s history meet, and they agree on more than you might expect.

Go deeperHezekiah’s tunnel

Kings ends its account of Hezekiah by noting how he made the pool, and the conduit, and brought water into the city (2 Kings 20:20). Chronicles adds that he stopped the upper spring of the waters of Gihon, and brought them straight down on the west side of David’s city (2 Chronicles 32:30). A city under siege dies of thirst before it dies of hunger, and Jerusalem’s spring, the Gihon, lay outside the walls.

You can still walk through the answer. A tunnel about 533 meters long, a third of a mile, winds through the rock under the oldest part of Jerusalem, from the Gihon spring to the pool of Siloam. In 1838 an American scholar, Edward Robinson, waded and crawled through it and described it.⁹

In 1880 a schoolboy who slipped into the water near the Siloam end noticed letters cut into the wall. The inscription, in old Hebrew script, tells how two teams of diggers started from opposite ends and cut toward each other. When three cubits were left, each team heard the other calling, and then they broke through, axe against axe, and the water flowed 1,200 cubits to the pool. In 1890 someone hacked the inscription out of the wall, and it broke into pieces. It is now in the archaeology museum in Istanbul, because Jerusalem was then ruled from there.¹⁰

The inscription does not name the king. Most scholars credit Hezekiah, around 700 BC, and in 2003 radiocarbon tests on plant matter in the tunnel’s plaster pointed to that time. A few archaeologists argue that the tunnel is about a century older, the work of a king before Hezekiah.¹¹

When I healed a man born blind, I sent him to wash in that pool: Go, wash in the pool of Siloam (John 9:7). The water in it came through the tunnel.

The valley of Hinnom

King Manasseh is the villain of this book. He sacrificed his own son by fire, and shed innocent blood very much, until he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another (2 Kings 21:6, 16). The writer blames the exile on him.

His grandson Josiah is the hero. When the scroll of the Law is found in the Temple, Josiah tears down the shrines. He also defiles Topheth, the place of child sacrifice in the Valley of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech (2 Kings 23:10).

That valley, in Hebrew Gehinnom, is where my word Gehenna comes from. When I used it, I was pointing at a real valley outside the city, where kings of Judah had burned their children.

Josiah was killed by Pharaoh Neco at Megiddo in 609 BC (2 Kings 23:29). Chronicles says he was shot in battle there (2 Chronicles 35:20–24). He was the last good king.

Go deeperWas Kings written in two stages?

In 1943 a German scholar, Martin Noth, argued that Deuteronomy and the books that follow it, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, were not separate books that happened to sit side by side. He saw them as one long history, written during the exile by one author steeped in Deuteronomy, to explain why the kingdoms fell. Scholars still call it the Deuteronomistic History.¹²

Thirty years later an American scholar, Frank Moore Cross, noticed how the story builds toward Josiah. Nearly three hundred years before Josiah is born, a prophet at Jeroboam’s altar names him: Behold, a son will be born to David’s house, Josiah by name (1 Kings 13:2). And Josiah is praised as no other king: There was no king like him before him, who turned to the LORD with all his heart (2 Kings 23:25). Cross argued that a first edition of the history was written in Josiah’s own time, and ended in triumph.¹³

Then, he argued, came the exile, and someone added the last chapters. Read what follows Josiah’s praise: Notwithstanding, the LORD didn’t turn from the fierceness of his great wrath … because of all the provocation with which Manasseh had provoked him (2 Kings 23:26). After that, the last four kings are dealt with in a few verses each.

Small clues fit the idea. Kings says the poles of the ark can still be seen in the Temple to this day (1 Kings 8:8), a sentence that seems to come from a time when the Temple was still standing.

Not everyone agrees. Other scholars, many of them in Germany, think the history was written in the exile and then revised more than once, and some doubt there was ever one connected history at all. But many still accept Noth’s basic idea, and it is why I call Joshua to Kings one long history.¹⁴

The end

In 586 BC, the Babylonians broke through the walls of Jerusalem. They killed King Zedekiah’s sons in front of him, then put out his eyes, and took him to Babylon in chains (2 Kings 25:7). They burned the Temple, the palace and every great house (2 Kings 25:9).

Then the book tells you who was left behind. The captain of the guard left some of the poorest of the land to work the vineyards and fields (2 Kings 25:12).

The rich were taken. The poor stayed and worked the land. They always do.

A seat at the king’s table

The last scene is small. Thirty-seven years into the exile, the new king of Babylon lets Judah’s old king, Jehoiachin, out of prison, gives him new clothes and a seat at his table, and a daily allowance for the rest of his life (2 Kings 25:27–30).

Archaeologists digging in Babylon found ration lists that record oil given to Ya’ukin, king of the land of Yahud.¹⁵ That is Jehoiachin, drawing rations as a captive in Babylon, some thirty years before he was given a seat at the king’s table.

The whole history ends there. Not with hope exactly. With a king of David’s line still alive, eating at a foreign table, waiting.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 2 Kings 5:1–19, then Luke 4:24–30.

You will find: an enemy general healed by Elisha, and my own town trying to kill me for mentioning it.

Then read 2 Kings 25:8–12. See who was taken to Babylon and who was left behind.

The Short Version

• 2 Kings explains how Israel and Judah were destroyed: the north by Assyria in 722 BC, Jerusalem by Babylon in 586 BC.
• Elijah was taken up alive, and my people expected him back. John the Baptist dressed like him.
• I reminded Nazareth that Elisha healed Naaman, an enemy foreigner. When my friends wanted to call down fire like Elijah, I rebuked them.
• Sennacherib’s own records confirm the siege of Jerusalem.
• Gehenna is the Valley of Hinnom, where kings of Judah burned their children.