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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - 2 King 11:1 - 11:1
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The Government of Athaliah (cf. 2Ch 22:10-12). After the death of Ahaziah of Judah, his mother Athaliah, a daughter of Ahab and Jezebel (see at 2Ki 8:18 and 2Ki 8:26), seized upon the government, by putting to death all the king's descendants with the exception of Joash, a son of Ahaziah of only a year old, who had been secretly carried off from the midst of the royal children, who were put to death, by Jehosheba, his father's sister, the wife of the high priest Jehoiada, and was first of all hidden with his nurse in the bed-chamber, and afterwards kept concealed from Athaliah for six years in the high priest's house. The ו before רָאֲתָה is no doubt original, the subject, Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah, being placed at the head absolutely, and a circumstantial clause introduced with וְרָאֲתָה: “Athaliah, when she saw that, etc., rose up.” הַמַּמְלָכָה כָּל־זֶרַע, all the royal seed, i.e., all the sons and relations of Ahaziah, who could put in any claim to succeed to the throne. At the same time there were hardly any other direct descendants of the royal family in existence beside the sons of Ahaziah, since the elder brothers of Ahaziah had been carried away by the Arabs and put to death, and the rest of the closer blood-relations of the male sex had been slain by Jehu (see at 2Ki 10:13). - Jehosheba (יְהֹושֶׁבַע, in the Chronicles יְהֹושַׁבְעַת), the wife of the high priest Jehoiada (2Ch 22:11), was a daughter of king Joram and a sister of Ahaziah, but she was most likely not a daughter of Athaliah, as this worshipper of Baal would hardly have allowed her own daughter to marry the high priest, but had been born to Joram by a wife of the second rank. מְמֹותִים (Chethîb), generally a substantive, mortes (Jer 16:4; Eze 28:8), here an adjective: slain or set apart for death. The Keri מוּמָתִים is the participle Hophal, as in 2Ch 22:11. הם בַּחֲדַר is to be taken in connection with תִּגְנֹב: she stole him (took him away secretly) from the rest of the king's sons, who were about to be put to death, into the chamber of the beds, i.e., not the children's bed-room, but a room in the palace where the beds (mattresses and counterpanes) were kept, for which in the East there is a special room that is not used as a dwelling-room (see Chardin in Harm. Beobb. iii. p. 357). This was the place in which at first it was easiest to conceal the child and its nurse. וַיַּסְתִּרוּ, “they (Jehosheba and the nurse) concealed him,” is not to be altered into וַתַּסְתִּירֵהוּ after the Chronicles, as Thenius maintains. The masculine is used in the place of the feminine, as is frequently the case. Afterwards he was concealed with her (with Jehosheba) in the house of Jehovah, i.e., in the home of the high-priest in one of the buildings of the court of the temple.