2 Chronicles14chapter 14

2 Chronicles 14:1

Abijah's death closes the sermon and battle chapter before this one, and the throne passes to Asa while the record marks the land quiet ten years. Chronicles reads the quiet as the fruit of the victory at Zemaraim, when the routed Israel and Abijah's Syrian alliance kept the northern kingdom occupied through the change of kings. Barnes reckons Asa a boy of ten or eleven at his accession, so the quiet years cover a minority reign as much as a lull between kingdoms.

2 Chronicles 14:2-5

Asa's reform runs point by point: the altars of strange gods, the high places, the images and the groves come down, and he commands Judah to seek the Lord God of their fathers and do the law and the commandment, the seeking refrain the Chronicler tracks through every reign that follows. Kings and Chronicles do not agree on the detail: 1 Kings 15:14 says the high places were not removed under Asa, while this chapter says they were, the same tension the record states again of Jehoshaphat at 2 Chronicles 17:6 against 20:33. Henry reads the reform as ground recovered since Solomon's old age, when idolatry first got a foothold and went unchecked.

2 Chronicles 14:6-7

Asa turns the quiet into fortification: fenced cities, walls, towers, gates and bars go up while the land is yet before us, because we have sought the Lord our God and he has given us rest on every side. The chain is the book's own logic stated once more, seeking answered by rest and rest spent on preparation rather than ease, the reasoning Jehoshaphat's court will run again in chapter 20. Barnes notes the fortification was itself a quiet act of independence, since Judah still sat inside the sphere Shishak's invasion had drawn a generation before.

2 Chronicles 14:8

The muster totals five hundred and eighty thousand between Judah's spearmen and Benjamin's archers, a figure the Chronicler sets down without comment, the same plain accounting the book gives for David's census lists and later reigns. Clarke reads the two tribes' equipment, targets and spears against shields and drawn bows, as the ordinary split between close fighting and fighting at distance in a Judean army of the period. The size sets up a contrast the next verses will not let stand, since a host this large still meets one many times over.

2 Chronicles 14:9-10

Zerah comes with a thousand thousand, the largest army named anywhere in the Old Testament, and three hundred chariots, advancing to Mareshah in Judah's own lowland. Wesley notes the Hebrew Cush often names an Arabian people rather than African Ethiopia, since Arabia sat far nearer Asa's border, and Barnes identifies Zerah with Osorkon the Second of Egypt's line, an identification offered as the historian's reading rather than a settled fact. Asa meets him at the valley of Zephathah rather than waiting for the advance to reach Jerusalem, choosing ground that favored the smaller army.

2 Chronicles 14:11

Asa's cry, Lord, it is nothing with thee to help, whether with many, or with them that have no power, is the book's first battle prayer and the model for Jehoshaphat's own we have no might, neither know we what to do at 2 Chronicles 20:12. Clarke traces the same reasoning back to Jonathan's word at Michmash, there is no restraint to the Lord to save by many or by few, a king leaning on a young soldier's theology at the edge of an army many times his own. The prayer asks nothing of tactics; it rests the whole outcome on whose name the army carries into the field.

2 Chronicles 14:12-13

The verb belongs to the Lord, smote, ahead of any detailed account of the two armies closing, and the Ethiopians flee the way Jeroboam's Israel fled the chapter before at 2 Chronicles 13:15. Judah pursues them to Gerar, well inside Philistine country, and verse 13 twice credits the outcome to the Lord and to his host rather than to Judah's own numbers. Barnes calls the victory one of the rare occasions Judah met a great neighboring power in open field and prevailed, since Shishak, Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar were mostly resisted from behind walls, if resisted at all.

2 Chronicles 14:14-15

The pursuit widens into a raid on every city around Gerar, the fear of the Lord going ahead of the army the way it goes before Jehoshaphat's enemies at 2 Chronicles 20:29. Gill reads the fallen towns as Philistine cities allied to Zerah's force, which explains the exceeding much spoil the chapter records inside them. The tents of cattle, the sheep and the camels taken from Arab herdsmen close the account in abundance rather than in a body count, and Judah carries it home to Jerusalem.