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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - 2 Chronicles 28:22 - 28:22
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Increase of Ahaz' transgressions against the Lord. - 2Ch 28:22. After this proof that Ahaz only brought greater oppression upon himself by seeking help from the king of Assyria (2Ch 28:16-21), there follows (2Ch 28:22.) an account of how he, in his trouble, continued to sin more and more against God the Lord, and hardened himself more and more in idolatry. לֹו הָצֵר וּבְעֵת corresponds to the הַהִיא בָּעֵת 2Ch 28:16. “At the time when they oppressed him, he trespassed yet more against the Lord, he King Ahaz.” In the last words the rhetorical emphasizing of the subject comes clearly out. The sentence contains a general estimation of the attitude of the godless king under the divine chastisement, which is then illustrated by facts (2Ch 28:23-25).
2Ch 28:23
He sacrificed to the gods of Damascus, which smote him, saying, i.e., thinking, The gods of the kings of Aram which helped them, to them will I sacrifice, and they will help me. כִּי serves to introduce the saying, and both הֵם and לָהֶם are rhetorical. Berth. incorrectly translates the participle הַמַּכִּים by the pluperfect: who had smitten him. It was not after the Syrians had smitten him that Ahaz sought to gain by sacrifice the help of their gods, but while the Syrians were inflicting defeats upon him; not after the conclusion of the Syrian war, but during its course. The ungrammatical translation of the participle by the pluperfect arises from the view that the contents of our verse, the statement that Ahaz sacrificed to the Syrian gods, is an unhistorical misinterpretation of the statement in 2Ki 16:10., about the altar which Ahaz saw when he went to meet the Assyrian king in Damascus, and a copy of which he caused to be made in Jerusalem, and set up in the temple court, in the place of the copper altar of burnt-offering. But we have already rejected that view as unfounded, in the exposition of 2Ki 16:10. Since Ahaz had cast and erected statues to the Baals, and even sacrificed his son to Moloch, he naturally would not scruple to sacrifice to the Assyrian gods to secure their help. But they (these gods) brought ruin to him and to all Israel. לְכָל־ישׂ is in the accusative, and co-ordinate with the suffix in הַכְשִׁילֹו.
2Ch 28:24-25
Not content with thus worshipping strange gods, Ahaz laid violent hands upon the temple vessels and suppressed the temple worship. He collected all the vessels of the house of God together, and broke them in pieces. These words also are rhetorical, so that neither the יֶאֱסֹף, which depicts the matter vividly, nor the כֹּל, is to be pressed. The קַצֵּץ of the vessels consisted, according to 2Ki 16:17, in this, that he mutilated the artistically wrought vessels of the court, and cut out the panels from the bases, and took away the lavers from them, and took down the brazen sea from the oxen on which it stood, and set it upon a pavement of stones. “And he closed the doors of the house of Jahve,” in order to put an end to the Jahve-worship in the temple, which he regarded as superfluous, since he had erected altars at the corners of all the streets in Jerusalem, and in all the cities of Judah. The statement as to the closing of the temple doors, to which reference is made in 2Ch 29:3, 2Ch 29:7, is said by Berth. not to reset upon good historical recollection, because the book of Kings not only does not say anything of it, but also clearly gives us to understand that Ahaz allowed the Jahve-worship to continue, 2Ki 16:15. That the book of Kings (2Ch 2:16) makes no mention of this circumstance does not prove much, it being an argumentum e silentio; for the book of Kings is not a complete history, it contains only a short excerpt from the history of the kings; while the intimation given us in 2Ki 16:15. as to the continuation of the worship of Jahve, may without difficulty be reconciled with the closing of the temple doors. The יהוה בֵּית דַּלְתֹות are not the gates of the court of the temple, but, according to the clear explanation of the Chronicle, 2Ch 29:7, the doors of the porch, which in 2Ch 29:3 are also called doors of the house of Jahve; the “house of Jahve” signifying here not the whole group of temple buildings, but, in the narrower sense of the words, denoting only the main body of the temple (the Holy Place and the Most Holy, wherein Jahve was enthroned). By the closing of the doors of the porch the worship of Jahve in the Holy Place and the Most Holy was indeed suspended, but the worship at the altar in the court was not thereby necessarily interfered with: it might still continue. Now it is the worship at the altar of burnt-offering alone of which it is said in 2Ki 16:15 that Ahaz allowed it to continue to this extent, that he ordered the priest Urijah to offer all the burnt-offerings and sacrifices, meat-offerings and drink-offerings, which were offered morning and evening by both king and people, not upon the copper sacrificial altar (Solomon's), but on the altar built after the pattern of that which he had seen at Damascus. The cessation of worship at this altar is also left unmentioned by the Chronicle, and in 2Ch 29:7. Hezekiah, when he again opened the doors of the house of Jahve, only says to the priests and Levites, “Our fathers have forsaken Jahve, and turned their backs on His sanctuary; yea, have shut the doors of the porch, put out the lamps, and have not burnt incense nor offered burnt-offerings in the Holy Place unto the God of Israel.” Sacrificing upon an altar built after a heathen model was not sacrificing to the God of Israel. There is therefore no ground to doubt the historical truth of the statement in our verse. The description of the idolatrous conduct of Ahaz concludes with the remark, 2Ch 28:25, that Ahaz thereby provoked Jahve, the God of his fathers, to anger.