2 Kings 17:11, commentary and pictures

The verse describes Israel burning incense in all the high places after the pattern of the heathen nations whom the Lord had carried away before them, and working wicked things to provoke the Lord to anger. Working those wicked things meant not hearing God, rejecting His statutes and His covenant made with their fathers and His testimonies, leaving all the commandments of the Lord their God, making molten images of two calves, making a grove, worshiping all the host of heaven, serving Baal, and steadfastly refusing to repent. That course was disobedience to the voice of the Lord their God and transgression of His covenant and all that Moses commanded.

Israel persisted in this departure from God to idol worship despite His repeated calls to repent, in harmony with the plain warnings He had sent by His servants the prophets. Because of this rebellion the Lord afflicted Israel and delivered them into the hand of spoilers until He had cast them out of His sight, so they were carried away out of their own land to Assyria, their land was spoiled and the people were taken captive, bringing about the nation's downfall. By rejecting God's ways and worship for human and heathen practices learned from the heathen nations, Israel became prey and subject to the very nations whose ways it had chosen to imitate.

The verse belongs to the Assyrian success in capturing Samaria and scattering the shattered remnant of the ten tribes among the nations during the earlier portion of Hezekiah's reign. That success put before the surrounding nations the question of whether the God of Israel was with His people and led many to question His power, while Nineveh, emboldened by success, set aside the message of Jonah and became defiant against Heaven, leaving it still to be demonstrated before the world toward the close of Hezekiah's reign whether the gods of the heathen would finally prevail.