2 Kings 10:25

as soon as he had made an end of offering That is, when the priests had completed the offering. We are not to suppose that Jehu himself acted as priest on the occasion, only as he had been the convoker of the solemn assembly, the whole ceremony is referred to him.

Jehu said to the guard The -guard" is that body of -runners" which appears in the history as soon as a king was appointed, and which played a part in all state parade. Thus both Adonijah and Absalom provided them with -fifty men to run before them" when they aspired to the throne (2 Samuel 15:1; 1 Kings 1:5). They are first spoken of in 1 Samuel 22:17, where the text of A.V. gives -footmen" (R.V. guard) with -runners" or -guard" in the margin. Such men must necessarily be of great physical strength, and so well suited to do Jehu's work on this occasion:

cast them out There is no pronoun expressed in the Hebrew. And it is not easy to see why the dead bodies should have been cast out of a place which they wished to be thoroughly defiled. Hence it has been thought that the -casting" here spoken of refers only to the throwing aside the dead to make their way through the courts towards the central portion of the building, where probably the more important sacrificing priests were stationed.

and went to the city of the house of Baal The word rendered -city" is applied to smaller enclosures than we usually understand by it now, and seems here to indicate some principal part of the temple edifice. In illustration of the use of this word for some small place, see Numbers 13:19, -What citiesthey be that they dwell in, whether in tents or in strongholds". So too the desolate daughter of Zion is compared (Isaiah 1:8) to -a cottage in a vineyard, a lodge in a garden of cucumbers", and then, in parallelism with these figures, to -a besieged city". In such passages also as Genesis 4:17 citycan only signify some solid substantial dwelling-place in distinction to the tents of the nomad population.

For a similar change of sense we may compare our English word -town", which in the earliest English tûn(and in Icelandic still) signifies an enclosure, generally a farm-stead with the necessary outbuildings surrounded by one fence.