The Alt Ar of Ahaz: a Revisionist View

Peter Ackroyd has suggested (l 968) that knowing too much background may prevent us from reading some texts as they were meant to be read. Certainly it is hard to read 2 Kings 16 without "static" from what we know from other sources. For example, because we enjoy a reasonably full knowledge of the Syro-Ephraimite War, we may assume connections in this text that are simply not present. Again, we may automatically take the opinion of Ahaz's foreign policy held by the author of Kings to be identical with that of the prophet Isaiah. This paper takes up the problem of Ahaz's altar. Having inherited a negative view of Ahaz's character and religious loyalty from the book of Isaiah, we may unconsciously read this into the story of his new altar in Kings. Our evaluation of Ahaz's altar could also be contaminated by the Chronicler's opinion that it was an act of blatant syncretism. There is a second problem. Because we read Kings so often as a source book for history, we tend to overlook its character as a theologically oriented literary creation. Miracles and wonders (for example the stories about Elijah and Elisha or 2 Kgs 19:35) are set along with theological discourse (I Kgs 11:31-39, 14:7-9, and the like) into a temporal and spatial framework. Kings is a piece of theological literature written to effect a transformation of belief, a reevaluation of identity. Certainly Kings is historiography and as such provides information about past events and a framework by which those events can be grasped as meaningful. Yet at a more fundamental level, Kings focuses not on the past but on the present, on the reader's inner orientation to the God who is said to have turned against Judah and undone the exodus by sending them back into exile (2 Kgs 21:10-15, 24:3-4). Historical questions about Ahaz certainly have their place, but this paper will focus on the literary effect of the report on Ahaz's new altar and its role in the theological plot of Kings.