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Chapter 16

Reign of Ahaz of Judah.[a] In the seventeenth year of Pekah, son of Remaliah, Ahaz, son of Jotham, king of Judah, became king. Ahaz was twenty years old when he became king, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem.

He did not do what was right in the sight of the Lord his God, as David his father had done. He walked in the way of the kings of Israel; he even immolated his child by fire, in accordance with the abominable practices of the nations whom the Lord had dispossessed before the Israelites.(A) Further, he sacrificed and burned incense on the high places, on hills, and under every green tree.(B)

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Footnotes

  1. 16:1–20 Firmly dated events bearing on chaps. 16–20 are: the fall of Damascus (16:9) in 732 B.C., the fall of Samaria (18:9–11) in 722/721 B.C., and Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah (18:13) in 701 B.C., which both in Kings and in Is 36:1 occurs in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah. These data make it possible to connect the chronology of Israel and Judah to the larger chronology of ancient Near Eastern history, but they also complicate further the already vexed problem of inconsistencies in the biblical data about accession years and lengths of reign.