2 Chronicles13chapter 13

2 Chronicles 13:1-3

Kings dismisses this reign in three verses as Abijam, a king who walked in his father's sins; Chronicles spends the whole chapter on him, calls him Abijah, and gives him a sermon and a covenant kept, the two portraits standing together with neither displacing the other. The armies mustered here, four hundred thousand against eight hundred thousand, are Chronicles' own report, unparalleled in Kings, and Barnes ties the disparity to the emigration from the north Chronicles already recorded at 11:13-17. Jeroboam's number, twice Abijah's, reflects the ten tribes he draws from against Judah's two.

2 Chronicles 13:4-5

Abijah climbs a hill in Ephraim and does what ancient commanders sometimes did before a battle, he harangues the opposing camp, JFB notes, with Jeroboam's army arrayed below him. His opening claim reaches past Rehoboam's schism to the covenant of salt at verse 5, a phrase Clarke ties through the Targum to salt's incorruption, sealing the kingdom to David's house and his sons for ever. The theology of the covenant retold at 1 Chronicles 17, the LORD's own throne held for David's line, is here put into one king's mouth on a hillside.

2 Chronicles 13:6-7

Abijah names Jeroboam Solomon's servant before naming him king, Gill notes, a title chosen to shame a man he still calls a rebel against his lord. The charge against the men who backed Jeroboam, vain men, the children of Belial, falls on the moment Rehoboam was young and tenderhearted and could not withstand them, a phrase Clarke reads as evidence Rehoboam was younger at his accession than some had reckoned. Abijah's speech lays the schism on Jeroboam's opportunism and Rehoboam's inexperience together, not on any fault of Judah's own.

2 Chronicles 13:8-9

The sermon turns from politics to worship: Jeroboam's golden calves are no gods at all, and the priesthood built to serve them stands accused of abandoning the sons of Aaron for whoever brings a bullock and seven rams to consecrate himself. Barnes notes the extra ram is Jeroboam's own addition to the consecration Exodus and Leviticus prescribed with one ram fewer, ordination made a matter of the offering brought rather than of descent. Chronicles has already narrated the Levites and priests leaving the north for Judah at 11:13-17; here Abijah states the reasoning behind that migration as an argument to men he still calls kinsmen.

2 Chronicles 13:10-11

Against Jeroboam's manufactured priesthood Abijah sets Judah's own, the sons of Aaron, and the Levites wait upon their business, an unbroken succession offered as the case itself. Verse 11 lists the evidence, morning and evening burnt offerings, the shewbread on the pure table, and the golden lampstand kept burning every evening, the daily courses 1 Chronicles 23-26 established still running. We keep the charge of the Lord our God, but ye have forsaken him turns the sermon on the seeking refrain Chronicles measures every reign by, though Wesley allows that Abijah may partly have flattered himself that outward worship covered the faults of his own life.

2 Chronicles 13:12

Abijah's climax names God himself is with us for our captain and the priests with sounding trumpets as Judah's actual weapons, a claim the rest of the chapter makes good within the hour. The appeal, fight ye not against the Lord God of your fathers, for ye shall not prosper, still holds out peace, Wesley notes, treason against Jeroboam already charged and now war against Israel's own covenant God laid beside it. Jeroboam gives no recorded answer; the narrative moves straight to what he does instead.

2 Chronicles 13:13-14

While Abijah preaches, Jeroboam sends a detachment around behind Judah's line, and the trap closes with Judah caught before and behind, sprung before the sermon's appeal could be answered. Judah's response is the chapter's argument acted out: they cried unto the Lord, and the priests sounded with the trumpets, the same weapon of worship 2 Chronicles 20 puts in front of Jehoshaphat's army a generation later. Gill reads the trumpets as more than noise, a signal meant to remind the ranks that God stood with them despite the ambush at their backs.

2 Chronicles 13:15-16

The shout precedes the victory rather than following it: as the men of Judah shouted, it came to pass, that God smote Jeroboam, the timing clause doing the same work as when they began to sing at 2 Chronicles 20:22. Wesley reads the shout as the cry of prayer answered by the shout of faith, no ambush able to cut off Judah's access to heaven. Israel's flight follows at once, God delivered them into their hand, without a further blow from Judah's own hand recorded.

2 Chronicles 13:17-18

Five hundred thousand chosen men fall; Barnes notes the word rendered slain means literally pierced, covering both the dead and the wounded, and Henry sets the number against the grief of Israelites killing Israelites while Judah's heathen neighbors would have counted such a loss occasion for gladness. Verse 18 states the moral in the Chronicler's own key, the children of Judah prevailed, because they relied upon the Lord God of their fathers, faith rather than the larger army deciding the field. Gill notes the Targum renders it reliance on the Word of the Lord God of their fathers, sharpening the same point.

2 Chronicles 13:19-20

Abijah pursues and takes border towns rather than the ten tribes themselves; JFB reads it as abandoning any wider conquest and settling for towns Jeroboam had absorbed, Bethel chief among them for its old associations reaching back to Jacob. Jeroboam never recovers strength in Abijah's short reign, and the Lord struck him, and he died; Clarke notes both rabbinic and Christian readers divided over whether Jeroboam or Abijah is meant, with the majority reading taking Jeroboam as the one struck, since he is recorded living roughly two more years past Abijah's own death at 1 Kings 14:20 and 15:9.

2 Chronicles 13:21-22

Abijah's fourteen wives and thirty-eight children, Clarke suggests, likely sealed alliances with neighboring powers the way royal marriages regularly did; Gill notes most were had before his three-year reign even began. The source citation, the story of the prophet Iddo, gives Clarke what he calls the first biblical mention of the word that becomes midrash, a lost commentary this very chapter appears to draw from. Kings closes Abijam's three verses with the verdict that his heart was not perfect with the Lord his God; Chronicles closes its fuller chapter without repeating that line, and the two accounts are read alongside each other rather than resolved into one.