2 Kings 23:14 - Exposition

And he brake in pieces the images —or, pillars (see the comment on 1 Kings 14:23 )— and out down the groves — i.e. the asherim , or "sacred trees"— and filled their places with the bones of men. Whatever spoke of death and dissolution was a special defilement to shrines where the gods worshipped were deities of productivity and generation. Bones of men had also the actual taint of corruption about them. The "uncleanness" of dead bodies arose first out of man's natural shrinking from death, and was then further confirmed by the horrors accompanying decay. The notion was probably coeval with death itself. It received a sanction from the Law, which made it a legal defilement to touch a corpse ( Numbers 19:11 , Numbers 19:16 ), and placed under a sentence of uncleanness all that was in the tent where a man died ( Numbers 19:14 , Numbers 19:15 ).