The Reign of Ahaz

281 Ahaz was twenty years old when he became king and reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem. He didn't live right in the eyes of God; he wasn't at all like his ancestor David. 2 Instead he followed in the track of Israel in the north, even casting metal figurines for worshiping the pagan Baal gods. 3 He participated in the outlawed burning of incense in the Valley of Ben Hinnom and - incredibly! - indulged in the outrageous practice of "passing his sons through the fire," a truly abominable thing he picked up from the pagans God had earlier thrown out of the country. 4 He also joined in the activities of the neighborhood sex-and-religion shrines that flourished all over the place. 5 God, fed up, handed him over to the king of Aram, who beat him badly and took many prisoners to Damascus. God also let the king of Israel loose on him and that resulted in a terrible slaughter:

6 Pekah son of Remaliah killed 120,000 in one day, all of them first-class soldiers, and all because they had deserted God, the God of their ancestors. 7 Furthermore, Zicri, an Ephraimite hero, killed the king's son Maaseiah, Azrikam the palace steward, and Elkanah, second in command to the king. 8 And that wasn't the end of it - the Israelites captured 200,000 men, women, and children, besides huge cartloads of plunder that they took to Samaria. 9 God's prophet Oded was in the neighborhood. He met the army when it entered Samaria and said, "Stop right where you are and listen! God, the God of your ancestors, was angry with Judah and used you to punish them; but you took things into your own hands and used your anger, uncalled for and irrational, 10 to turn your brothers and sisters from Judah and Jerusalem into slaves. Don't you see that this is a terrible sin against your God? 11 Careful now; do exactly what I say - return these captives, every last one of them. If you don't, you'll find out how real anger, God's anger, works." 12 Some of their Ephraimite leaders - Azariah son of Jehohanan, Berekiah son of Meshillemoth, Jehizkiah son of Shallum, and Amasa son of Hadlai - stood up against the returning army 13 and said, "Don't bring the captives here! We've already sinned against God; and now you are about to compound our sin and guilt. We're guilty enough as it is, enough to set off an explosion of divine anger." 14 So the soldiers turned over both the captives and the plunder to the leaders and the people. 15 Personally designated men gathered the captives together, dressed the ones who were naked using clothing from the stores of plunder, put shoes on their feet, gave them all a square meal, provided first aid to the injured, put the weak ones on donkeys, and then escorted them to Jericho, the City of Palms, restoring them to their families. Then they went back to Samaria.

16 At about that time King Ahaz sent to the king of Assyria asking for personal help. 17 The Edomites had come back and given Judah a bad beating, taking off a bunch of captives. 18 Adding insult to injury the Philistines raided the cities in the foothills to the west and the southern desert and captured Beth Shemesh, Aijalon, and Gederoth, along with Soco, Timnah, and Gimzo, with their surrounding villages, and moved in, making themselves at home. 19 Arrogant King Ahaz, acting as if he could do without God's help, had unleashed an epidemic of depravity. Judah, brought to its knees by God, was now reduced to begging for a handout. 20 But the king of Assyria, Tiglath-Pileser, wouldn't help - he came instead and humiliated Ahaz even more by attacking and bullying him. 21 Desperate, Ahaz ransacked The Temple of God, the royal palace, and every other place he could think of, scraping together everything he could, and gave it to the king of Assyria - and got nothing in return, not a bit of help. 22 But King Ahaz didn't learn his lesson - at the very time that everyone was turning against him, he continued to be against God! 23 He offered sacrifices to the gods of Damascus. He had just been defeated by Damascus; he thought, "If I worship the gods who helped Damascus, those gods just might help me too." But things only went from bad to worse: first Ahaz in ruins and then the country. 24 He cleaned out The Temple of God of everything useful and valuable, boarded up the doors of The Temple, and then went out and set up pagan shrines for his own use all over Jerusalem. 25 And not only in Jerusalem, but all over Judah - neighborhood shrines for worshiping any and every god on sale. And was God ever angry! 26 The rest of Ahaz's infamous life, all that he did from start to finish, is written in the Royal Annals of the Kings of Judah and Israel. 27 When Ahaz died, they buried him in Jerusalem, but he was not honored with a burial in the cemetery of the kings. His son Hezekiah was the next king.

The Reign of Ahaz

161 In the seventeenth year of Pekah son of Remaliah, Ahaz son of Jotham became king of Judah. 2 Ahaz was twenty years old when he became king and he ruled for sixteen years in Jerusalem. He didn't behave in the eyes of his God; he wasn't at all like his ancestor David. 3 Instead he followed in the track of the kings of Israel. He even indulged in the outrageous practice of "passing his son through the fire" - a truly abominable act he picked up from the pagans God had earlier thrown out of the country. 4 He also participated in the activities of the neighborhood sex-and-religion shrines that flourished all over the place.

5 Then Rezin king of Aram and Pekah son of Remaliah king of Israel ganged up against Jerusalem, throwing a siege around the city, but they couldn't make further headway against Ahaz. 6 At about this same time and on another front, the king of Edom recovered the port of Elath and expelled the men of Judah. The Edomites occupied Elath and have been there ever since. 7 Ahaz sent envoys to Tiglath-Pileser king of Assyria with this message: "I'm your servant and your son. Come and save me from the heavy-handed invasion of the king of Aram and the king of Israel. They're attacking me right now." 8 Then Ahaz robbed the treasuries of the palace and The Temple of God of their gold and silver and sent them to the king of Assyria as a bribe. 9 The king of Assyria responded to him. He attacked and captured Damascus. He deported the people to Nineveh as exiles. Rezin he killed.

10 King Ahaz went to meet Tiglath-Pileser king of Assyria in Damascus. The altar in Damascus made a great impression on him. He sent back to Uriah the priest a drawing and set of blueprints of the altar. 11 Uriah the priest built the altar to the specifications that King Ahaz had sent from Damascus. By the time the king returned from Damascus, Uriah had completed the altar. 12 The minute the king saw the altar he approached it with reverence and arranged a service of worship with a full course of offerings: 13 Whole-Burnt-Offerings with billows of smoke, Grain-Offerings, libations of Drink-Offerings, the sprinkling of blood from the Peace-Offerings - the works. 14 But the old bronze Altar that signaled the presence of God he displaced from its central place and pushed it off to the side of his new altar. 15 Then King Ahaz ordered Uriah the priest: "From now on offer all the sacrifices on the new altar, the great altar: morning Whole-Burnt-Offerings, evening Grain-Offerings, the king's Whole-Burnt-Offerings and Grain-Offerings, the people's Whole-Burnt-Offerings and Grain-Offerings, and also their Drink-Offerings. Splash all the blood from the burnt offerings and sacrifices against this altar. The old bronze Altar will be for my personal use. 16 The priest Uriah followed King Ahaz's orders to the letter.

17 Then King Ahaz proceeded to plunder The Temple furniture of all its bronze. He stripped the bronze from The Temple furnishings, even salvaged the four bronze oxen that supported the huge basin, The Sea, and set The Sea unceremoniously on the stone pavement. 18 Finally, he removed any distinctive features from within The Temple that were offensive to the king of Assyria. 19 The rest of the life and times of Ahaz is written in The Chronicles of the Kings of Judah. 20 Ahaz died and was buried with his ancestors in the City of David. His son Hezekiah became the next king.

The Fall of Samaria and the Captivity of Israel

171 In the twelfth year of Ahaz king of Judah, Hoshea son of Elah became king of Israel. He ruled in Samaria for nine years. 2 As far as God was concerned, he lived a bad life, but not nearly as bad as the kings who had preceded him. 3 Then Shalmaneser king of Assyria attacked. Hoshea was already a puppet of the Assyrian king and regularly sent him tribute, 4 but Shalmaneser discovered that Hoshea had been operating traitorously behind his back - having worked out a deal with King So of Egypt. And, adding insult to injury, Hoshea was way behind on his annual payments of tribute to Assyria. So the king of Assyria arrested him and threw him in prison, 5 then proceeded to invade the entire country. He attacked Samaria and threw up a siege against it. The siege lasted three years. 6 In the ninth year of Hoshea's reign the king of Assyria captured Samaria and took the people into exile in Assyria. He relocated them in Halah, in Gozan along the Habor River, and in the towns of the Medes.

7 The exile came about because of sin: The children of Israel sinned against God, their God, who had delivered them from Egypt and the brutal oppression of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They took up with other gods, 8 fell in with the ways of life of the pagan nations God had chased off, and went along with whatever their kings did. 9 They did all kinds of things on the sly, things offensive to their God, then openly and shamelessly built local sex-and-religion shrines at every available site. 10 They set up their sex-and-religion symbols at practically every crossroads. 11 Everywhere you looked there was smoke from their pagan offerings to the deities - the identical offerings that had gotten the pagan nations off into exile. They had accumulated a long list of evil actions and God was fed up, 12 fed up with their persistent worship of gods carved out of deadwood or shaped out of clay, even though God had plainly said, "Don't do this - ever!" 13 God had taken a stand against Israel and Judah, speaking clearly through countless holy prophets and seers time and time again, "Turn away from your evil way of life. Do what I tell you and have been telling you in The Revelation I gave your ancestors and of which I've kept reminding you ever since through my servants the prophets." 14 But they wouldn't listen. If anything, they were even more bullheaded than their stubborn ancestors, if that's possible. 15 They were contemptuous of his instructions, the solemn and holy covenant he had made with their ancestors, and of his repeated reminders and warnings. They lived a "nothing" life and became "nothings" - just like the pagan peoples all around them. They were well-warned: God said, "Don't!" but they did it anyway. 16 They threw out everything God, their God, had told them, and replaced him with two statue-gods shaped like bull-calves and then a phallic pole for the whore goddess Asherah. They worshiped cosmic forces - sky gods and goddesses - and frequented the sex-and-religion shrines of Baal. 17 They even sank so low as to offer their own sons and daughters as sacrificial burnt offerings! They indulged in all the black arts of magic and sorcery. In short, they prostituted themselves to every kind of evil available to them. And God had had enough. 18 God was so thoroughly angry that he got rid of them, got them out of the country for good until only one tribe was left - Judah. 19 (Judah, actually, wasn't much better, for Judah also failed to keep God's commands, falling into the same way of life that Israel had adopted.) 20 God rejected everyone connected with Israel, made life hard for them, and permitted anyone with a mind to exploit them to do so. And then this final No as he threw them out of his sight. 21 Back at the time that God ripped Israel out of their place in the family of David, they had made Jeroboam son of Nebat king. Jeroboam debauched Israel - turned them away from serving God and led them into a life of total sin. 22 The children of Israel went along with all the sins that Jeroboam did, never murmured so much as a word of protest. 23 In the end, God spoke a final No to Israel and turned his back on them. He had given them fair warning, and plenty of time, through the preaching of all his servants the prophets. Then he exiled Israel from her land to Assyria. And that's where they are now.

The Repopulation of Samaria

24 The king of Assyria brought in people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and relocated them in the towns of Samaria, replacing the exiled Israelites. They moved in as if they owned the place and made themselves at home. 25 When the Assyrians first moved in, God was just another god to them; they neither honored nor worshiped him. Then God sent lions among them and people were mauled and killed. 26 This message was then sent back to the king of Assyria: "The people you brought in to occupy the towns of Samaria don't know what's expected of them from the god of the land, and now he's sent lions and they're killing people right and left because nobody knows what the god of the land expects of them." 27 The king of Assyria ordered, "Send back some priests who were taken into exile from there. They can go back and live there and instruct the people in what the god of the land expects of them." 28 One of the priests who had been exiled from Samaria came back and moved into Bethel. He taught them how to honor and worship God. 29 But each people that Assyria had settled went ahead anyway making its own gods and setting them up in the neighborhood sex-and-religion shrines that the citizens of Samaria had left behind - a local custom-made god for each people: 30 for Babylon, Succoth Benoth; for Cuthah, Nergal; for Hamath, Ashima; 31 for Avva, Nibhaz and Tartak; for Sepharvaim, Adrammelech and Anammelech (people burned their children in sacrificial offerings to these gods!). 32 They honored and worshiped God, but not exclusively - they also appointed all sorts of priests, regardless of qualification, to conduct a variety of rites at the local fertility shrines. 33 They honored and worshiped God, but they also kept up their devotions to the old gods of the places they had come from. 34 And they're still doing it, still worshiping any old god that has nostalgic appeal to them. They don't really worship God - they don't take seriously what he says regarding how to behave and what to believe, what he revealed to the children of Jacob whom he named Israel. 35 God made a covenant with his people and ordered them, "Don't honor other gods: Don't worship them, don't serve them, don't offer sacrifices to them. 36 Worship God, the God who delivered you from Egypt in great and personal power. Reverence and fear him. Worship him. Sacrifice to him. And only him! 37 All the things he had written down for you, directing you in what to believe and how to behave - well, do them for as long as you live. And whatever you do, don't worship other gods! 38 And the covenant he made with you, don't forget your part in that. And don't worship other gods! 39 Worship God, and God only - he's the one who will save your from enemy oppression." 40 But they didn't pay any attention. They kept doing what they'd always done. 41 As it turned out, all the time these people were putting on a front of worshiping God, they were at the same time involved with their local idols. And they're still doing it. Like father, like son.