2 Kings 17:1

REIGN OF HOSEA AND FALL OF THE KINGDOM OF ISRAEL, 2 Kings 17:1-23.

1. In the twelfth year of Ahaz In our note on 2 Kings 15:30, following Usher we understand that Hoshea slew Pekah in the fourth year of Ahaz. Accordingly there must have been an interregnum of about eight years after Pekah’s death before Hoshea succeeded in seating himself on the throne. This opinion is adopted by Keil, who says, “His possession of the throne must have been contested for eight years. The earlier commentators, and almost all the chronologists, have justly assumed that there was an eight years’ anarchy between the death of Pekah and the commencement of Hoshea’s reign. This assumption merits the preference, above all the attempts made to remove the discrepancy by alterations of the text, since there is nothing at all surprising in the existence of anarchy at a time when the kingdom was in a state of the greatest inward disturbance and decay.” This seems to us more satisfactory than Bahr’s proposal to alter the text in 2 Kings 15:27 by reading thirty instead of twenty years for Pekah’s reign, and to regard the latter part of 2 Kings 15:30 as an interpolation.