Misinterpretations often include viewing Pekah's assassination of Shallum as divinely sanctioned regime change or a model for righteous rebellion against corrupt leaders, ignoring the biblical pattern in Kings that condemns such bloodshed as symptomatic of Israel's moral decay without prophetic approval; others erroneously apply it to justify modern coups or political violence, overlooking the historical context of God's sovereignty over flawed human kings and the call to submit to authority in the New Testament.
II Kings 15:25
King James Version (1769)
25 But Pekah the son of Remaliah, a captain of his, conspired against him, and smote him in Samaria, in the palace of the king’s house, with Argob and Arieh, and with him fifty men of the Gileadites: and he killed him, and reigned in his room.
This passage records the conspiracy led by Pekah, a captain under King Shallum of Israel, who assassinated him with fifty Gileadite men and usurped the throne in the twentieth year of Judah's King Jotham, exemplifying the rampant political instability and violent power struggles in the northern kingdom that stemmed from Israel's covenant unfaithfulness and foreshadowed its downfall under Assyrian conquest.