2 Kings 3:19

3:19 You will defeat every fortified city and every important ¹  city. You must chop down ²  every productive ³  tree, stop up all the springs, and cover all the cultivated land with stones.” ⁴ 

2 Kings 10:23

10:23 Then Jehu and Jehonadab son of Rekab went to the temple of Baal. Jehu ⁵  said to the servants of Baal, “Make sure there are no servants of the Lord here with you; there must be only servants of Baal.” ⁶ 

2 Kings 17:27

17:27 So the king of Assyria ordered, “Take back one of the priests whom you ⁷  deported from there. He must settle there and teach them the requirements of the God of the land.” ⁸ 

2 Kings 17:35-36

17:35 The Lord made an agreement ⁹  with them ¹⁰  and instructed them, “You must not worship other gods. Do not bow down to them, serve them, or offer sacrifices to them. 17:36 Instead you must worship the Lord, who brought you up from the land of Egypt by his great power and military ability; ¹¹  bow down to him and offer sacrifices to him.

2 Kings 19:25

19:25 ¹² Certainly you must have heard! ¹³ 

Long ago I worked it out,

In ancient times I planned ¹⁴  it;

and now I am bringing it to pass.

The plan is this:

Fortified cities will crash

into heaps of ruins. ¹⁵ 

2 Kings 23:18

23:18 The king ¹⁶  said, “Leave it alone! No one must touch his bones.” So they left his bones undisturbed, as well as the bones of the Israelite prophet buried beside him. ¹⁷ 

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¹ tn Heb “choice” or “select.”

² tn Elisha places the object first and uses an imperfect verb form. The stylistic shift may signal that he is now instructing them what to do, rather than merely predicting what would happen.

³ tn Heb “good.”

⁴ tn Heb “and ruin every good portion with stones.”

⁵ tn Heb “he”; the referent (Jehu) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

⁶ tn Heb “Search carefully and observe so that there are not here with you any servants of the Lord, only the servants of Baal.”

⁷ tc The second plural subject may refer to the leaders of the Assyrian army. However, some prefer to read “whom I deported,” changing the verb to a first person singular form with a third masculine plural pronominal suffix. This reading has some support from Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic witnesses.

⁸ tc Heb “and let them go and let them live there, and let him teach them the requirements of the God of the land.” The two plural verbs seem inconsistent with the preceding and following contexts, where only one priest is sent back to Samaria. The singular has the support of Greek, Syriac, and Latin witnesses.

⁹ tn Or “covenant.”

¹⁰ sn That is, the descendants of Jacob/Israel (see v. 35b).

¹¹ tn Heb “and outstretched arm.”

¹² tn Having quoted the Assyrian king’s arrogant words in vv. 23-24, the Lord now speaks to the king.

¹³ tn Heb “Have you not heard?” The rhetorical question expresses the Lord’s amazement that anyone might be ignorant of what he is about to say.

¹⁴ tn Heb “formed.”

¹⁵ tn Heb “and it is to cause to crash into heaps of ruins fortified cities.” The subject of the third feminine singular verb תְּהִי (tÿhi) is the implied plan, referred to in the preceding lines with third feminine singular pronominal suffixes.

¹⁶ tn Heb “he”; the referent (the king) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

¹⁷ tn Heb “and they left undisturbed his bones, the bones of the prophet who came from Samaria.” If the phrase “the bones of the prophet” were appositional to “his bones,” one would expect the sentence to end “from Judah” (see v. 17). Apparently the “prophet” referred to in the second half of the verse is the old prophet from Bethel who buried the man of God from Judah in his own tomb and instructed his sons to bury his bones there as well (1 Kgs 13:30-31). One expects the text to read “from Bethel,” but “Samaria” (which was not even built at the time of the incident recorded in 1 Kgs 13) is probably an anachronistic reference to the northern kingdom in general. See the note at 1 Kgs 13:32 and the discussion in M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings (AB), 290.