There appears to be
some confusion within 1 Kings 13 and 2 Kings 23 between Bethel and Samaria. In
1 Kgs 13:11, the old prophet buried in the tomb with the Judahite Man of God is
said to come from Bethel, but in 2 Kgs 23:18b he is described as ‘the prophet
who came out of Samaria’. In view of the tradition in 1 Kings 13, most
commentators detect a redactional or scribal error here, and assume the prophet
from Bethel is the intended referent. A similar confusion is also evident in 1
Kgs 13:32 and 2 Kgs 23:19-20, in which the focused assault on Bethel slides
into a general attack on Samaria and its sanctuaries. These problems are often
blamed on a clumsy redactor, keen to extend the cult crimes and punishment of
Bethel to a broader northern population, including, perhaps, the foreigners and
‘Samarians’ (שמרנים) said in 2 Kgs
17:24-41 to live in the territories of the former Northern Kingdom. It is
possible that the sliding of designations in these texts is informed in some
way by the tradition in 2 Kgs 17:27-28 that (a) priest(s) from Samaria
relocated to Bethel to offer religious instruction to the local inhabitants.
The apparent confusion of Bethel and Samaria seems likely to occupy redaction
critics for some time yet, but also inhibits a more robust contextualization of
the Bethel polemic in Kings. (Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Land of Our Fathers:
The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims [Library of Hebrew
Bible/Old Testament Studies 473; London: T&T Clark, 2010], 90 n. 35)
