2 Raja-raja 10:1

Jehu Wipes Out Ahab’s Family

10:1 Ahab had seventy sons living in Samaria. ¹  So Jehu wrote letters and sent them to Samaria to the leading officials of Jezreel and to the guardians of Ahab’s dynasty. This is what the letters said, ² 

2 Raja-raja 10:7

10:7 When they received the letter, they seized the king’s sons and executed all seventy of them. ³  They put their heads in baskets and sent them to him in Jezreel.

2 Raja-raja 12:10

12:10 When they saw the chest was full of silver, the royal secretary ⁴  and the high priest counted the silver that had been brought to the Lord’s temple and bagged it up. ⁵ 

2 Raja-raja 22:8

22:8 Hilkiah the high priest informed Shaphan the scribe, “I found the law scroll in the Lord’s temple.” Hilkiah gave the scroll to Shaphan and he read it.

2 Raja-raja 23:33

23:33 Pharaoh Necho imprisoned him in Riblah in the land of Hamath and prevented him from ruling in Jerusalem. ⁶  He imposed on the land a special tax ⁷  of one hundred talents ⁸  of silver and a talent of gold.

¹ map For location see Map2 B1; Map4 D3; Map5 E2; Map6 A4; Map7 C1.

² tn Heb “to the officers of Jezreel, the elders, and to the guardians of Ahab, saying.” It is not certain why the officials of Jezreel would be in Samaria. They may have fled there after they heard what happened to Joram and before Jehu entered the city. They would have had time to flee while Jehu was pursuing Ahaziah.

³ tn Heb “and when the letter came to them, they took the sons of the king and slaughtered seventy men.”

⁴ tn Heb “the king’s scribe.”

⁵ tn Heb “went up and tied [it] and counted the silver that was found in the house of the Lord.” The order of the clauses has been rearranged in the translation to make better sense in English, since it seems more logical to count the money before bagging it (cf. NIV, NCV, NRSV, NLT).

⁶ tc The consonantal text (Kethib) has “when [he was] ruling in Jerusalem,” but the marginal reading (Qere), which has support from Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin witnesses, has “[preventing him] from ruling in Jerusalem.”

⁷ tn Or “fine.”

⁸ tn The Hebrew term כִּכָּר (kikkar, “circle”) refers generally to something that is round. When used of metals it can refer to a disk-shaped weight made of the metal or to a standard unit of weight, generally regarded as a talent. Since the accepted weight for a talent of metal is about 75 pounds, this would have amounted to about 7,500 pounds of silver and 75 pounds of gold (cf. NCV, NLT); CEV “almost four tons of silver and about seventy-five pounds of gold.”