Did Jehoshaphat take away the high places or not?

The Chronicler wrote both statements, three chapters apart, and plainly did not think they clashed. The summary of the reign itself gives the reason the high places (Hebrew bamot, local hilltop shrines) remained: “for as yet the people had not prepared their hearts unto the God of their fathers” (2 Chronicles 20:33). 2 Chronicles 17 describes the king’s early zeal and what he set out to do; the summaries in 1 Kings 22:43 and 2 Chronicles 20:33 describe the people’s practice over the whole reign. However hard the king worked, the people kept going to their local altars, and some were rebuilt. Keil and Delitzsch explain the passages in this way: the kings did abolish the altars on the high places, but did not carry the reform through among the people. Barnes’ Notes makes the same distinction between what the king intended and attempted and what the people went on doing.

A second answer, given by Gill, is that the high places were of two kinds. Some were centres of idol worship, with altars to Baal and Asherah poles (the ‘groves’ of the KJV). Others were old places where the people sacrificed to the Lord himself, against the law that sacrifice should be offered only at the place God chose (Deuteronomy 12:13–14). 2 Chronicles 17:6 pairs the high places with the groves, and its context is his refusal to seek ‘Baalim’ (17:3); the prophet Jehu later praises him for the same thing: “thou hast taken away the groves out of the land” (2 Chronicles 19:3). On this view the idolatrous high places went, while those where the Lord was worshipped stayed. Keil and Delitzsch rejected this distinction, because they held that the high places Jehoshaphat removed (17:6) cannot have been only idolatrous ones.

The same pattern appears with his father Asa, who “took away out of all the cities of Judah the high places” (2 Chronicles 14:5), and yet “the high places were not taken away out of Israel” (2 Chronicles 15:17). A reform from the top that did not reach everyone, or did not last, can truly be described both ways.

A reform that did not last

Some suggest that Jehoshaphat removed the high places in the early years of his reign (2 Chronicles 17:7 dates his teaching mission to his third year), but that they were rebuilt and he did not remove them again. 2 Chronicles 20:33 would then describe how things stood at the end of his reign.

Chronicles does not say in so many words which high places were removed and which remained, and commentators differ over whether the two kinds of high place should be distinguished here.