The Importance of the Wives of the King's Wives

The kings of Judah and Israel would marry foreign women as a way of forming treaties with the surrounding nations. The negative influence of the wives of the kings can be seen in the fact that they often come from surrounding nations. In this chapter it is particularly the women who seemed to be instigating the worship, and the men who were supporting them. And yet, even after all of their recent history, the people here have a very different understanding of how things came about. They look back to the good old days under Manasseh, before the reforms of Josiah.