Asa in Fausset's Bible Dictionary

("healing".) Son of Abijah; third king of Judah. Faithful to Jehovah; determined in rooting out idolatry and its attendant licentiousness (1 Kings 15:9-15; 1 Kings 15:2 Chronicles 14; 15; 16). He built fenced cities, the Lord giving him and his land rest and prosperity. No respecter of persons: so much so that he deposed Maachah, the queenmother (wife of Rehoboam and Asa's grandmother), because she made an idol (Hebrew "horror," some abominable and impure object of worship) in a grove; and he cut her idol down, stamped, and burnt it at the brook Kedron, as Moses had done to the golden calf (Exodus 32:20). For "in a grove," translate" to Asherah" (Hebrew haasheerah), the Phoenician Venus (1 Kings 15:14; 2 Chronicles 15:16). The high places to idols he took away (2 Chronicles 14:3). But those to Jehovah, being an irregularity of a secondary kind, he did not take away (2 Chronicles 15:17; 1 Kings 15:14)...