Getting Biblical in Daily Life
Religious Tolerance
In America today, people frequently argue about what role religion should play in government—whether courthouses or town halls should be allowed to have monuments of the Ten Commandments on their lawns, for example. But in the ancient Near East, these issues were obviously pretty different. No one argued that religion and government should be separate, because the power of the king and the power of the God or gods who supported him were closely related. Government was a part of religion.
The authors of 2 Kings consistently argue that there should really only be one religion involved in Israel and Judah's government administration and daily life: the monotheistic religion of the Israelites. They constantly fault kings for tolerating other religious practices—worshipping Baal or the Asherah or building sacred poles or whatever.
A Religious Cocktail
Yet, there are strange incidents of mingled religious practice, too. When the King of Assyria exiles Israel, and moves in settlers from other countries, they're attacked by lions. They realize that they need to worship Israel's God, as well, in order to stop the lion attacks. This seems to work, even though they keep worshipping other gods as well.
The idea that different religions should be tolerated in one place is called "pluralism." It would be hard to argue that rulers like Ahab and Jezebel are pluralistic, given their predilection for slaughtering the God of Israel's prophets. But the narrators aren't exactly pluralistic either. Josiah is one of the book's main heroes, and his heroism largely involves slaughtering the priests and destroying the altars of other faiths and forms of worship.
It's probably too much to demand that the Hebrew Bible reflect the pluralism of modern America today, but it casts an interesting light on these debates. People who believe in the Bible continue to take different sides and opinions on the debate about pluralism and religious tolerance. So it's instructive to learn about how certain books of the Bible (like 2 Kings) happen to look at these questions.
War and Peace
When is it okay to go to war? That's a tough question, and one that people in the United States have been debating in the recent past and earlier. As with the debate about religious tolerance, the Hebrew Bible isn't concerned about these questions in the same way contemporary people frequently are—but it is concerned with them.
It seems to be okay to go to war simply to win glory and show how much stronger the God of Israel is than other gods, according to the Hebrew Bible and 2 Kings. Also, it's definitely okay for a king like Josiah to wage a holy war against foreign religious practices. But at the same time, 2 Kings does condemn certain rulers for waging unjust wars and being excessively brutal and violent. Manasseh and Hazael are called out for being particularly nasty kings, committing war crimes against women and children, for instance.
So, 2 Kings takes a pretty favorable of warfare on the one hand, while also acknowledging the disastrous consequences of certain wars. It's not a book without a certain code or idea of how things should be done—and it definitely condemns the murder of innocents. Also, it doesn't celebrate unbridled butchery or injustice in war. When Elisha captures the Aramean army (by making them temporarily blind), he doesn't order the King of Israel to slaughter them. He gives them their sight back, treats them to a feast, and lets them go.