2 Kings 1:16

1:16 Elijah 1  said to the king, 2  “This is what the Lord says, ‘You sent messengers to seek an oracle from Baal Zebub, the god of Ekron. You must think there is no God in Israel from whom you can seek an oracle! 3  Therefore you will not leave the bed you lie on, for you will certainly die.’” 4 

2 Kings 4:34

4:34 He got up on the bed and spread his body out over 5  the boy; he put his mouth on the boy’s 6  mouth, his eyes over the boy’s eyes, and the palms of his hands against the boy’s palms. He bent down over him, and the boy’s skin 7  grew warm.

2 Kings 11:2

11:2 So Jehosheba, the daughter of King Joram and sister of Ahaziah, took Ahaziah’s son Joash and sneaked 8  him away from the rest of the royal descendants who were to be executed. She hid him and his nurse in the room where the bed covers were stored. 9  So he was hidden from Athaliah and escaped execution. 10 

1 tn Heb “he”; the referent (Elijah) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

2 tn Heb “him”; the referent (the king) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

3 tn Heb “Because you sent messengers to inquire of Baal Zebub, the god of Ekron, is there no God in Israel to inquire of his word?”

4 sn For the third time in this chapter we read the Lord’s sarcastic question to king and the accompanying announcement of judgment. The repetition emphasizes one of the chapter’s main themes. Israel’s leaders should seek guidance from their own God, not a pagan deity, for Israel’s sovereign God is the one who controls life and death.

5 tn Heb “he went up and lay down over.”

6 tn Heb “his” (also in the next two clauses).

7 tn Or perhaps, “body”; Heb “flesh.”

8 tn Heb “stole.”

9 tn Heb “him and his nurse in an inner room of beds.” The verb is missing in the Hebrew text. The parallel passage in 2 Chr 22:11 has “and she put” at the beginning of the clause. M. Cogan and H. Tadmor (II Kings [AB], 126) regard the Chronicles passage as an editorial attempt to clarify the difficulty of the original text. They prefer to take “him and his nurse” as objects of the verb “stole” and understand “in the bedroom” as the place where the royal descendants were executed. The phrase בַּחֲדַר הַמִּטּוֹת (bakhadar hammittot), “an inner room of beds,” is sometimes understood as referring to a bedroom (HALOT 293 s.v. חֶדֶר), though some prefer to see here a “room where the covers and cloths were kept for the beds (HALOT 573 s.v. מִטָּת). In either case, it may have been a temporary hideout, for v. 3 indicates that the child hid in the temple for six years.

10 tn Heb “and they hid him from Athaliah and he was not put to death.” The subject of the plural verb (“they hid”) is probably indefinite.