Was Asa’s heart perfect all his days, when he later relied on Syria and the physicians?

‘Perfect’ here translates the Hebrew shalem (Strong’s H8003), ‘whole’ or ‘complete’. Said of the heart, it means undivided loyalty: a heart given wholly to the Lord and shared with no other god. The books of Kings use it in just this sense. Solomon’s wives turned his heart “after other gods”, so that “his heart was not perfect with the Lord his God” (1 Kings 11:4). Asa’s father Abijam walked in his own father’s sins, and his heart was not perfect either (1 Kings 15:3). Asa is set against them. He removed the idols his fathers had made, and even deposed his grandmother for her image of Asherah (1 Kings 15:12–13). He never turned to another god. That is what the verdict on his heart affirms. It is not a claim that he never sinned, as Barnes’ Notes observes.

The Chronicler gives both the verdict (15:17) and the failures (16:7–12), only a few verses apart, so he plainly did not think they clashed. Asa’s later sins are failures of trust, not of allegiance. In a crisis he leaned on Syria rather than the Lord, and he answered the prophet with anger. Hanani’s rebuke uses the same word: the Lord shows himself strong for “them whose heart is perfect toward him” (16:9). In that act Asa fell short of the loyalty that marked his life. A man can be wholly committed to the one God and still sin against him; David, the pattern for a ‘perfect heart’ in these books (1 Kings 11:4; 15:3), is the clearest case.

A summary of the reign as a whole

The Pulpit Commentary takes ‘all his days’ as a sweeping Eastern way of summing up a life by its main course, the whole standing for the greater part. On this view the phrase gives the verdict on Asa’s reign as a whole, and the Chronicler’s own record of his last years shows that he did not mean it to cover every act.