GEBible — Godless Engineer's Bible App
2 Chronicles 17:5-6 says Jehoshaphat took away the high places. 1 Kings 22:42-43 and 2 Chronicles 20:31-33 say the high places were not taken away during his reign. The same king's same religious policy gets opposite verdicts, with the contradiction sitting inside Chronicles itself just like the Asa case in entry 275.
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
Cited passages
Therefore Yahweh established the kingdom in his hand. All Judah brought tribute to Jehoshaphat, and he had riches and honor in abundance. His heart was lifted up in the ways of Yahweh. Furthermore, he took away the high places and the Asherah poles out of Judah.
Cited passages
Jehoshaphat was thirty-five years old when he began to reign; and he reigned twenty-five years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Azubah the daughter of Shilhi. He walked in all the way of Asa his father. He didn’t turn away from it, doing that which was right in Yahweh’s eyes. However the high places were not taken away. The people still sacrificed and burned incense on the high places.
Jehoshaphat reigned over Judah. He was thirty-five years old when he began to reign; and he reigned twenty-five years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Azubah the daughter of Shilhi. He walked in the way of Asa his father, and didn’t turn away from it, doing that which was right in Yahweh’s eyes. However the high places were not taken away, and the people had still not set their hearts on the God of their fathers.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The discrepancy reproduces, one generation on, the pattern already seen with Asa (entry 275), and again the sharpest form of it lies inside Chronicles. 2 Chronicles 17:6 reports of Jehoshaphat: "his heart was lifted up in the ways of the LORD: moreover he took away the high places (Heb. *bamoth*) and groves out of Judah." Yet 1 Kings 22:43 states plainly: "the high places were not taken away; for the people offered and burnt incense yet in the high places." And the Chronicler's own later summary, 2 Chronicles 20:33, concedes the same: "Howbeit the high places were not taken away; for as yet the people had not prepared their hearts unto the God of their fathers."
The customary harmonization, given by Dillard (WBC 15, pp. 130-135) and Selman (TOTC, pp. 402-407), is the one applied to Asa: 17:6 refers to high places consecrated to foreign gods or to the *asherah*-poles ("groves"), which Jehoshaphat genuinely abolished, whereas 22:43 and 20:33 refer to the irregular shrines where Israelites worshiped Yahweh outside Jerusalem, which he tolerated. Some add a chronological gloss: the king removed them early but they crept back, so both verdicts are true at different points in the reign.
Neither rescue survives scrutiny. The cultic-object reading must be imported, for 17:6 makes a comprehensive claim — "he took away the *bamoth* and groves out of Judah" — and draws no foreign/Yahwistic distinction; the qualifier exists only in the harmonizer's gloss. The chronological reading fares worse, because 2 Chronicles 20:33 is not narrating a relapse but rendering the Chronicler's own concluding verdict on the reign, in the same evaluative breath in which Kings rendered its verdict. The two assessments are not sequenced events but competing summary judgments on the identical religious policy.
What makes this item stronger than the Asa case is precisely that both verdicts stand inside Chronicles: the same author-tradition affirms in chapter 17 that the *bamoth* were removed and concedes in chapter 20 that they were not. Japhet (OTL, pp. 749-754, 796-800) diagnoses this as the Chronicler's structural problem rather than an accident. His theology of immediate retribution requires that demonstrably blessed kings be credited with the cultic faithfulness that earns the blessing, so the Chronicler supplies Jehoshaphat (like Asa) with a reform notice in the period of prosperity; but he also inherits and largely preserves the Deuteronomistic Kings evaluation that the high places persisted, and he reproduces it in his summary. The two impulses — theological idealization and source-fidelity — are welded together without reconciliation. Klein (Hermeneia, pp. 250-254, 296-300) makes the same observation: the Chronicler's habit of crediting righteous kings with reforms repeatedly collides with the Kings material he is editing. The same fault line runs through his portrait of Asa (2 Chr 14:3-5 vs. 15:17) and is only smoothed for Hezekiah, where the Chronicler simply omits the Kings concession.
The "groves"/asherah point deserves one fair concession: the Hebrew of 17:6 does pair *bamoth* with *asherim*, and an apologist can argue the verse has illicit-cult installations chiefly in view. But that does not reconcile it with 20:33, which uses the same *bamoth* terminology to say flatly they remained; the Chronicler is not distinguishing two classes of shrine across the two verses, he is delivering opposite global verdicts.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction, and an internal one. The discrepancy stands within Chronicles itself, the foreign/Yahweh distinction is read into 17:6 rather than out of it, and the chronological-relapse reading misreads 20:33's evaluative summary as a narrative event. The clash is best explained as the unresolved residue of the Chronicler's retribution theology working against his Kings source.
Sources for this reading