Did Asa take away the high places or not?

The Chronicler wrote both statements, a chapter apart, and plainly did not think they clashed. Two explanations are given, and they can stand together. First, the high places (Hebrew bamot) were of two kinds. Some were shrines of foreign gods. In 2 Chronicles 14:3 the high places Asa removed stand beside “the altars of the strange gods”, the images and the Asherah poles (the ‘groves’ of the KJV): this was his attack on idolatry. Others were local altars where the people still sacrificed to the Lord himself, against the law that sacrifice was to be offered only at the place God chose (Deuteronomy 12:13–14). The note that the high places remained sits beside the statement that Asa’s heart was wholly the Lord’s, which suits this second kind. Gill reads it so, and Haley cites several scholars who take the same view. Keil and Delitzsch rejected this distinction, because the high places that Jehoshaphat removed (2 Chronicles 17:6) cannot, they argued, have been only idolatrous ones.

Second, a king’s order is not the same as the people’s practice. Keil and Delitzsch, Barnes’ Notes and Ellicott think that Asa did set out to abolish the high places but could not carry the reform through. The people clung to their local shrines, and some were rebuilt. On this view 2 Chronicles 14 describes what the king did and intended, and 15:17 what still remained among the people. The same pattern appears with his son Jehoshaphat (2 Chronicles 17:6; 20:33; see the question on Jehoshaphat and the high places). A reform from the top that did not reach everyone, or did not last, can truly be described both ways.

Different times in his reign

Rawlinson, cited by Haley, suggested that the passages refer to different times. Asa put down the high places early in his reign, but in his later years, when his faith had cooled (2 Chronicles 16), they crept back.

What ‘out of Israel’ in 2 Chronicles 15:17 means is uncertain. Ellicott takes it as Asa’s own kingdom of Judah; some have taken it as the northern kingdom or the towns Asa had captured from it (15:8), though the Pulpit Commentary thinks this unlikely. Chronicles does not say in so many words which high places were removed and which remained.