Chap. 21
Verse 1
Reign of Manasseh (cf. 2 Chron 33:1-20). - 2Ki 21:1. Manasseh was twelve years old when he began to reign, so that he was not born till after Hezekiah’s dangerous illness (2Ki 20:1.).
Verse 2
Having begun to reign at this early age, he did not choose his father’s ways, but set up the idolatry of his father Ahab again, since the godless party in the nation, at whose head chiefs, priests, and (false) prophets stood, and who would not hearken to the law of the Lord, and in the time of Hezekiah had sought help against Assyria not from Jehovah, but from the Egyptians (Isa 28:7, Isa 28:14., Isa 30:9.), had obtained control of the young an inexperienced king, and had persuaded him to introduce idolatry again. On 2Ki 21:2 cf. 2Ki 8:18 and 2Ki 16:3.
Verses 3-5
2Ki 21:3-5 ויּבן ויּשׁב, “he built again” the high places, which Hezekiah had destroyed (2Ki 18:4), erected altars for Baal and an Asherah, like Ahab of Israel (1Ki 16:32-33). האשׁרה is the image of Asherah mentioned in 2Ki 21:7, whereas in the Chronicles the thought is generalized by the plurals לבּעלים and האשׁרות. To these two kinds of idolatry, the idolatrous bamoth and the (true) Baal-and Asherah-worship, Manasseh added as a third kind the worship of all the host of heaven, which had not occurred among the Israelites before the Assyrian era, and was probably of Assyrian or Chaldaean origin. This worship differed from the Syrophoenician star-worship, in which sun and moon were worshipped under the names of Baal and Astarte as the bearers of the male and female powers of nature, and was pure star-worship, based upon the idea of the unchangeableness of the stars in contradistinction to the perishableness of everything earthly, according to which the stars were worshipped not merely as the originators of all rise and decay in nature, but also as the leaders and regulators of sublunary things (see Movers, Phöniz. i. pp. 65 and 161). This star-worship was a later development of the primary star-worship of Ssabism, in which the stars were worshipped without any image, in the open air or upon the housetops, by simple contemplation, the oldest and comparatively the purest form of deification of nature, to which the earlier Arabians and the worshippers of the sun among the Ssabians (Zabians) were addicted (cf. Delitzsch on Job 31:26-27), and which is mentioned and forbidden in Deu 4:19 and Deu 17:3. In this later form the sun had sacred chariots and horses as among the Persians (2Ki 23:11), and incense was offered to the stars, with the face turned towards the east, upon altars which were built either upon housetops, as in the case of the Nabataeans (Strabo, xvi. 784), or within the limits of the temple in the two courts (cf. Eze 8:16, also 2Ki 21:5; 2Ki 23:12, and 2Ch 33:5; Jer 19:13; Zep 1:5). This burning of incense took place not merely to the sun and moon, but also to the signs of the zodiac and to all the
