Ahaz Brings Damascus Into the Temple

Tiglath-pileser's list of tribute payers names this king as Jehoahaz of Judah. The Assyrian scribe kept the full name; the Bible uses only Ahaz, dropping the syllable that carries the name of the LORD.

Twenty at accession and sixteen years on the throne make Ahaz thirty six at death, yet Hezekiah succeeds him at twenty five (18:2). A father of eleven is hard to credit, and most chronologies again assume that reigns overlapped.

Before this only Jehoram and Ahaziah, both married into Ahab's family, were said to walk in the way of Israel's kings (8:18, 27). Making a son pass through the fire is forbidden outright in Deuteronomy 18:10; Chronicles says plainly that he burned his children (2 Chronicles 28:3).

“Under every green tree” is Deuteronomy's phrase for the Canaanite shrines Israel was to tear down (Deuteronomy 12:2). Earlier it described what the people of Judah did (1 Kings 14:23). Now the king himself sacrifices there.

Isaiah 7:1 repeats this verse nearly word for word and then tells what happened inside the besieged city: the prophet met Ahaz at the conduit of the upper pool and offered him the sign of Immanuel. The coalition meant to seat a puppet, “the son of Tabeal” (Isaiah 7:6).

This is the first appearance in the Bible of the word “Jews”, meaning the people of Judah. In Hebrew, Aram and Edom differ by a single similar letter, and the Hebrew margin reads Edomites at the end of the verse, which is why many translations say Edom took Elath.

Isaiah had invited Ahaz to ask the LORD for a sign, and he refused (Isaiah 7:10–12). Here he asks Assyria instead. “Save me” is the verb Israel's psalms address to God, now sent by courier to Nineveh.

The word rendered “present” is shochad, the ordinary Hebrew word for a bribe, the thing Exodus 23:8 says blinds the wise. The Book of 2 Kings chooses the harsher term for what Ahaz sends.

Amos had said Aram would go captive to Kir (Amos 1:5), and elsewhere that the Arameans came from Kir in the first place (Amos 9:7). Damascus fell in 732 BC, and its people were sent back to their ancestral starting point.

The word for “pattern”, tabnit, is the one used for the plan of the tabernacle shown to Moses on the mountain (Exodus 25:9) and the temple plan David gave Solomon (1 Chronicles 28:11). This time the pattern comes from Damascus.

In 1611 “against” could mean by the time of: the altar was ready against the king's return. Urijah is probably the “Uriah the priest” whom Isaiah called as a faithful witness (Isaiah 8:2), which makes his compliance here all the more striking.

“The king” is named three times in one verse: the king came, the king saw, the king approached. Ahaz performs the inauguration himself, stepping into a role the priests held, which is what Chronicles says brought leprosy on his grandfather Uzziah.

Four offerings are named, the full set Solomon used to dedicate the temple (1 Kings 8:64). In 1611 “meat offering” meant a food offering, in fact grain and oil; no flesh was involved. The new altar is consecrated with the old rites.

Solomon's bronze altar had stood in the place of honour directly before the house. The new altar was apparently set further out, leaving the old one sandwiched between it and the temple, so Ahaz moves it aside to the north and gives the front to the import.

The morning burnt offering and evening meat offering are the daily sacrifices of Exodus 29:38–41, the heartbeat of the sanctuary. The verb behind “enquire” can mean to inspect; some scholars take it as inspecting sacrificial entrails for omens, an Assyrian practice, though that remains an inference.

Chronicles records a priest named Azariah who, with eighty others, stood in the temple and told Uzziah no (2 Chronicles 26:17–18). One generation later, Urijah does “according to all that king Ahaz commanded”.

The ten wheeled bronze stands and the sea resting on twelve oxen were Hiram's masterwork for Solomon (1 Kings 7:23–39). The metal was presumably needed for tribute. The oxen were not all melted down; Jeremiah 52:20 still lists twelve bronze bulls in what Babylon took.

“Covert for the sabbath” translates a rare word for some covered structure whose purpose is now uncertain. The king's entry was his private approach from palace to temple (1 Kings 10:5). A vassal may have been required to close a royal privilege his overlord could read as independence, an inference.

Chronicles records more: Ahaz shut the doors of the house of the LORD and built altars in every corner of Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 28:24). Kings leaves the temple open but rearranged.

Kings buries him with his fathers in the city of David; Chronicles says he was not brought into the sepulchres of the kings (2 Chronicles 28:27). Isaiah 14:28 dates an oracle “in the year that king Ahaz died”.