2 Raja-raja 1:9-10

1:9 The king ¹  sent a captain and his fifty soldiers ²  to retrieve Elijah. ³  The captain ⁴  went up to him, while he was sitting on the top of a hill. ⁵  He told him, “Prophet, ⁶  the king says, ‘Come down!’” 1:10 Elijah replied to the captain, ⁷  “If I am indeed a prophet, may fire come down from the sky and consume you and your fifty soldiers!” Fire then came down ⁸  from the sky and consumed him and his fifty soldiers.

2 Raja-raja 3:13

3:13 Elisha said to the king of Israel, “Why are you here? ⁹  Go to your father’s prophets or your mother’s prophets!” The king of Israel replied to him, “No, for the Lord is the one who summoned these three kings so that he can hand them over to Moab.”

2 Raja-raja 4:1

Elisha Helps a Widow and Her Sons

4:1 Now a wife of one of the prophets ¹⁰  appealed ¹¹  to Elisha for help, saying, “Your servant, my husband is dead. You know that your servant was a loyal follower of the Lord. ¹²  Now the creditor is coming to take away my two boys to be his servants.”

2 Raja-raja 5:15

5:15 He and his entire entourage returned to the prophet. Naaman ¹³  came and stood before him. He said, “For sure ¹⁴  I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel! Now, please accept a gift from your servant.”

2 Raja-raja 5:23

5:23 Naaman said, “Please accept two talents of silver. ¹⁵  He insisted, and tied up two talents of silver in two bags, along with two suits of clothes. He gave them to two of his servants and they carried them for Gehazi. ¹⁶ 

2 Raja-raja 9:6

9:6 So Jehu ¹⁷  got up and went inside. Then the prophet ¹⁸  poured the olive oil on his head and said to him, “This is what the Lord God of Israel says, ‘I have designated you as king over the Lord’s people Israel.

2 Raja-raja 11:2

11:2 So Jehosheba, the daughter of King Joram and sister of Ahaziah, took Ahaziah’s son Joash and sneaked ¹⁹  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. ²⁰  So he was hidden from Athaliah and escaped execution. ²¹ 

2 Raja-raja 11:15

11:15 Jehoiada the priest ordered the officers of the units of hundreds, who were in charge of the army, ²²  “Bring her outside the temple to the guards. ²³  Put the sword to anyone who follows her.” The priest gave this order because he had decided she should not be executed in the Lord’s temple. ²⁴ 

2 Raja-raja 12:4

12:4 Jehoash said to the priests, “I place at your disposal ²⁵  all the consecrated silver that has been brought to the Lord’s temple, including the silver collected from the census tax, ²⁶  the silver received from those who have made vows, ²⁷  and all the silver that people have voluntarily contributed to the Lord’s temple. ²⁸ 

2 Raja-raja 13:19

13:19 The prophet ²⁹  got angry at him and said, “If you had struck the ground five or six times, you would have annihilated Syria! ³⁰  But now, you will defeat Syria only three times.”

2 Raja-raja 18:4

18:4 He eliminated the high places, smashed the sacred pillars to bits, and cut down the Asherah pole. ³¹  He also demolished the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for up to that time ³²  the Israelites had been offering incense to it; it was called Nehushtan. ³³ 

2 Raja-raja 22:3

22:3 In the eighteenth year of King Josiah’s reign, the king sent the scribe Shaphan son of Azaliah, son of Meshullam, to the Lord’s temple with these orders: ³⁴ 

2 Raja-raja 23:27

23:27 The Lord announced, “I will also spurn Judah, ³⁵  just as I spurned Israel. I will reject this city that I chose – both Jerusalem and the temple, about which I said, “I will live there.” ³⁶ 

2 Raja-raja 23:35

23:35 Jehoiakim paid Pharaoh the required amount of silver and gold, but to meet Pharaoh’s demands Jehoiakim had to tax the land. He collected an assessed amount from each man among the people of the land in order to pay Pharaoh Necho. ³⁷ 

2 Raja-raja 24:13

24:13 Nebuchadnezzar ³⁸  took from there all the riches in the treasuries of the Lord’s temple and of the royal palace. He removed all the gold items which King Solomon of Israel had made for the Lord’s temple, just as the Lord had warned.

2 Raja-raja 25:1

25:1 So King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came against Jerusalem with his whole army and set up camp outside ³⁹  it. They built siege ramps all around it. He arrived on the tenth day of the tenth month in the ninth year of Zedekiah’s reign. ⁴⁰ 

[1:9]  ¹ tn Heb “he”; the referent (the king) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[1:9]  ² tn Heb “officer of fifty and his fifty.”

[1:9]  ³ tn Heb “to him.”

[1:9]  ⁴ tn Heb “he”; the referent (the captain) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[1:9]  ⁵ sn The prophet Elijah’s position on the top of the hill symbolizes his superiority to the king and his messengers.

[1:9]  ⁶ tn Heb “man of God” (also in vv. 10, 11, 12, 13).

[1:10]  ⁷ tn Heb “answered and said to the officer of fifty.”

[1:10]  ⁸ tn Wordplay contributes to the irony here. The king tells Elijah to “come down” (Hebrew יָרַד, yarad), but Elijah calls fire down (יָרַד) on the arrogant king’s officer.

[3:13]  ⁹ tn Or “What do we have in common?” The text reads literally, “What to me and to you?”

[4:1]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “a wife from among the wives of the sons of the prophets.”

[4:1]  ¹¹ tn Or “cried out.”

[4:1]  ¹² tn Heb “your servant feared the Lord.” “Fear” refers here to obedience and allegiance, the products of healthy respect for the Lord’s authority.

[5:15]  ¹³ tn Heb “he”; the referent (Naaman) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[5:15]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “look.”

[5:23]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “Be resolved and accept two talents.”

[5:23]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “before him.”

[9:6]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “he”; the referent (Jehu) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[9:6]  ¹⁸ tn Heb “he”; the referent (the prophet) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[11:2]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “stole.”

[11:2]  ²⁰ 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.

[11:2]  ²¹ 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.

[11:15]  ²² tn The Hebrew text also has, “and said to them.” This is redundant in English and has not been translated.

[11:15]  ²³ tn Heb “ranks.”

[11:15]  ²⁴ tn Heb “for the priest had said, ‘Let her not be put to death in the house of the Lord.’”

[12:4]  ²⁵ tn The words “I place at your disposal” are added in the translation for clarification.

[12:4]  ²⁶ tn Heb “the silver of passing over a man.” The precise meaning of the phrase is debated, but עָבַר (’avar), “pass over,” probably refers here to counting, suggesting the reference is to a census conducted for taxation purposes. See M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings (AB), 137.

[12:4]  ²⁷ tn Heb “the silver of persons, his valuation.” The precise meaning of the phrase is uncertain, but parallels in Lev 27 suggest that personal vows are referred to here. See M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings (AB), 137.

[12:4]  ²⁸ tn Heb “all the silver which goes up on the heart of a man to bring to the house of the Lord.”

[13:19]  ²⁹ tn Heb “man of God.”

[13:19]  ³⁰ tn Heb “[It was necessary] to strike five or six times, then you would strike down Syria until destruction.” On the syntax of the infinitive construct, see GKC 349 §114.k.

[18:4]  ³¹ tn The term is singular in the MT but plural in the LXX and other ancient versions. It is also possible to regard the singular as a collective singular, especially in the context of other plural items.

[18:4]  sn Asherah was a leading deity of the Canaanite pantheon, wife/sister of El and goddess of fertility. She was commonly worshiped at shrines in or near groves of evergreen trees, or, failing that, at places marked by wooden poles. These were to be burned or cut down (Deut 12:3; 16:21; Judg 6:25, 28, 30; 2 Kgs 18:4).

[18:4]  ³² tn Heb “until those days.”

[18:4]  ³³ tn In Hebrew the name sounds like the phrase נְחַשׁ הַנְּחֹשֶׁת (nÿkhash hannÿkhoshet), “bronze serpent.”

[22:3]  ³⁴ tn Heb “with these orders, saying.”

[23:27]  ³⁵ tn Heb “Also Judah I will turn away from my face.”

[23:27]  ³⁶ tn Heb “My name will be there.”

[23:35]  ³⁷ tn Heb “And the silver and the gold Jehoiakim gave to Pharaoh, but he taxed the land to give the silver at the command of Pharaoh, [from] each according to his tax he collected the silver and the gold, from the people of the land, to give to Pharaoh Necho.”

[24:13]  ³⁸ tn Heb “he”; the referent (Nebuchadnezzar) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[25:1]  ³⁹ tn Or “against.”

[25:1]  ⁴⁰ sn This would have been Jan 15, 588 b.c. The reckoning is based on the calendar that begins the year in the spring (Nisan = March/April).