2Ki 23:15-20 Extermination of idolatry in Bethel and the cities of Samaria. - In order to suppress idolatry as far as possible, Josiah did not rest satisfied with the extermination of it in his own kingdom Judah, but also destroyed the temples of the high places and altars and idols in the land of the former kingdom of the ten tribes, slew all the priests of the high places that were there, and burned their bones upon the high places destroyed, in order to defile the ground. The warrant for this is not to be found, as Hess supposes, in the fact that Josiah, as vassal of the king of Assyria, had a certain limited power over these districts, and may have looked upon them as being in a certain sense his own territory, a power which the Assyrians may have allowed him the more readily, because they were sure of his fidelity in relation to Egypt. For we cannot infer that Josiah was a vassal of the Assyrians from the imprisonment and release of Manasseh by the king of Assyria, nor is there any historical evidence whatever to prove it. The only reason that can have induced Josiah to do this, must have been that after the dissolution of the kingdom of the ten tribes he regarded himself as the king of the whole of the covenant-nation, and availed himself of the approaching or existing dissolution of the Assyrian empire to secure the friendship of the Israelites who were left behind in the kingdom of the ten tribes, to reconcile them to his government, and to win them over to his attempt to reform; and there is no necessity whatever to assume, as Thenius does, that he asked permission to do so of the newly arisen ruler Nabopolassar. For against this assumption may be adduced not only the improbability that Nabopolassar would give him any such permission, but still more the circumstance that at a still earlier period, even before Nabopolassar became king of Babylon, Josiah had had taxes collected of the inhabitants of the kingdom of Israel for the repairing of the temple (2Ch 34:9), from which we may see that the Israelites who were left behind in the land were favourably disposed towards his reforms, and were inclined to attach themselves in religious matters to Judah (just as, indeed, even the Samaritans were willing after the captivity to take part in the building of the temple, Ezr 4:2.), which the Assyrians at that time were no longer in a condition to prevent. 2Ki 23:15 “Also the altar at Bethel, the high place which Jeroboam had made-this altar also and the high place he destroyed.” It is grammatically impossible to take הבּמה as an accusative of place (Thenius); it is in apposition to המּזבּח, serving to define it more precisely: the altar at Bethel, namely the high place; for which we have afterwards the altar and the high place. By the appositional הבּמה the altar at Bethel is described as an illegal place of worship. “He burned the בּמה,” i.e., the buildings of this sanctuary, ground to powder everything that was made of stone or metal, i.e., both the altar and the idol there. This is implied in what follows: “and burned Asherah,” i.e., a wooden idol of Astarte found there, according to which there would no doubt be also an idol of Baal, a מצּבה of stone. The golden calf, which had formerly been set up at Bethel, may, as Hos 10:5-6 seems to imply, have been removed by the Assyrians, and, after the settlement of heathen colonists in the land, have been supplanted by idols of Baal and Astarte (cf. 2Ki 17:29).