2 Chronicles16chapter 16

2 Chronicles 16:1

Chronicles opens this parallel passage with a date that has troubled readers, since Baasha reigned only twenty four years from the division of the kingdom and by a strict count of Asa's own reign was already dead before his thirty sixth year. The bench generally reckons the number from the split of the two kingdoms rather than from Asa's own coronation, which removes the apparent conflict with the Baasha of 1 Kings 15 and 16. Baasha fortifies Ramah, a few miles north of Jerusalem, to seal the road and cut off movement and defection into Judah.

2 Chronicles 16:2-4

Asa answers Baasha's blockade by emptying the treasures of the house of the Lord and his own house to buy a Syrian alliance, the same silver and gold that Kings records without comment. Chronicles alone sets the bribe against the field of Zerah's Ethiopian host in chapter fourteen, where Asa asked nothing of Ben-hadad and won by faith alone, so the reader already carries the contrast Hanani will name. Ben-hadad breaks his own treaty with Baasha for the price offered and strikes Naphtali's northern towns, buying Asa a respite his own later history will not let him keep.

2 Chronicles 16:5-6

The threat lifts at once: Baasha abandons Ramah, and Asa strips its stones and timber to build Geba and Mizpah, turning the enemy's own fortress into his own border defenses. The account runs nearly word for word with 1 Kings 15:21-22, and Chronicles adds nothing to the narrative itself here, saving its own comment for the seer who meets Asa next.

2 Chronicles 16:7-9

Hanani's confrontation has no parallel in Kings; it is Chronicles' own addition to Asa's history, and the charge is exact, relied on the king of Syria, and not relied on the Lord thy God. The seer recalls the far larger host of Ethiopians and Lubim that Asa met by faith alone in chapter fourteen, so the rebuke measures the king against his own earlier obedience rather than against some standard he never knew. Verse nine gives the seeking refrain its fullest statement in the book, the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him, and turns Asa's peace into wars for the rest of his days.

2 Chronicles 16:10

Asa's rage puts Hanani in the stocks, the first recorded imprisonment of a prophet in Scripture, and in the same season he oppresses some of the people, most likely for the same complaint against the Syrian treaty. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown note that no cause is given for the second act, only that it falls in the same reign as the first. Chronicles names both without softening either, holding the reformer of chapters fourteen and fifteen and the persecutor of chapter sixteen in one verse.

2 Chronicles 16:11

the book of the kings of Judah and Israel: The notice that Asa's acts stand written in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel is the Chronicler's own footnote, naming a source outside this text that he never quotes directly. Several such citations run through Chronicles, evidence that the writer worked from official annals rather than inventing the record he compresses into a few verses.

2 Chronicles 16:12

Asa's disease files the same charge Hanani brought a season before, sought not to the Lord, but to the physicians, and the fault the bench names is the omission, not the medicine. Wesley draws the line plainly: using physicians was Asa's duty, trusting in them for what only God supplies was his sin. Spurgeon, preaching this chapter by name, reads the king who once cried it is nothing with thee to help as ending his reign asking help of anyone but the Lord he once called on without hesitation.

2 Chronicles 16:13-14

Asa sleeps with his fathers in the one and fortieth year of his reign, and Judah gives him a king's burial, a bed filled with spices and a very great burning made for him. Matthew Henry reads the honor as the balance the Chronicler leaves standing: let the faults be buried in the grave while the service is remembered over it, so that the reformer of chapters fourteen and fifteen outweighs the failures of chapter sixteen in the memory the text leaves. Adam Clarke takes the burning as spices and aromatic woods consumed with the body, an honor pointedly withheld from later kings such as Jehoram at 21:19.