2 Chronicleschapter 22
12 verses · KJV2 Chronicles book hub →
Key verse
Forty and two years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign, and he reigned one year in Jerusalem. His mother’s name also was Athaliah the daughter of Omri.
It stands in Ahaziah walks in Ahab's counsel and dies with Ahab's house, verses 1 to 9.
The chapter
Chapter summary
Ahaziah reigns one year, with Athaliah his mother as his counsellor to do wickedly and the house of Ahab as his advisors 'to his destruction.' He goes with Joram of Israel against Hazael at Ramoth-gilead and visits him wounded in Jezreel. And 'the destruction of Ahaziah was of God, in that he went unto Joram,' for Jehu, executing judgment on Ahab's house, finds and kills him. Athaliah then destroys all the royal seed of Judah. But Jehoshabeath, the king's daughter and wife of Jehoiada the priest, steals the infant Joash from among the murdered sons and hides him in the house of God six years, while Athaliah reigns. The lamp of David burns down to one child in a temple bedchamber.
Context
History · Ezra · 2 Chronicles overview
The world behind this chapter
2 Chronicles 22The history
The chapter belongs to Ahaziah, who reigned one year, and then to his mother Athaliah of the house of Omri, who held the throne for six. Thiele's reconstruction places the accession and the seizure at about 841 BC.
The places are Jerusalem, the battlefield at Ramoth-gilead, Jezreel, Samaria where the king was found, and a bedchamber in the temple precinct.
The occasion of his death is someone else's revolution, since Jehu was anointed to cut off the house of Ahab and Ahaziah was caught in the purge while visiting a wounded northern relative.
The rest of the history, and what it meant to them
A first hearer knew why Athaliah moved as she did. Killing every possible claimant was the standard method by which a usurper secured a throne in that world, and she was thorough.
A first hearer knew why the rescue worked. Jehoshabeath was a king's daughter and the wife of Jehoiada the priest, which gave her access to the royal children and a place to hide one.
The age given at the accession differs between the two books, twenty-two in one place and forty-two in the other, and the larger figure would make him older than his father. The difference is read as a slip in copying a numeral, the commonest scribal error there is.
What it meant to them
For six years the promise to David was a child in a store room, and the only people who knew were a priest and his wife.
The first hearers were themselves a remnant that had nearly disappeared inside a foreign empire. This chapter told them the promise had survived a narrower margin than their own.
Sources cited
- Edwin R. Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings
- Keil and Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament: Chronicles
- John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews, and Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament
- The 2 Chronicles rows of `scripts/data/historical-context/ch3-chronicles.mjs`
Where the chapter sits
2 Chronicles 22 falls in Kings of Judah: Rehoboam to Ahaz (chapters 10–28). The divided kingdom narrated from Judah's side only; reform kings (Asa, Jehoshaphat, Joash, Uzziah, Jotham) and evil kings; prophetic interventions unique to Chronicles (Azariah, Hanani, Zechariah son of Jehoiada).
Before it: Solomon's reign, chapters 1–9. After it: Hezekiah to the exile, chapters 29–36.
The whole shape of 2 Chronicles→The structure of this chapter
The heads below are this chapter's scenes. The numbered points under each are its verses.
A. Ahaziah walks in Ahab's counsel and dies with Ahab's house
1. (vv. 1-2)
2 Chronicles 22:1
“Made Ahaziah his youngest son king - All the others had been slain by the Arabians, etc.; see the preceding chapter, 2Ch 21:17 (note).”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
2 Chronicles 22:2
“Forty and two years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign--(Compare 2Ki 8:26). According to that passage, the commencement of his reign is dated in the twenty-second year of his age, and, according to this, in the forty-second year of the kingdom of his mother's family [LIGHTFOOT].”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
2 more voices on this verse
2 Chronicles 22:2
“Some make this forty-two to be the age of his mother Athaliah, for in the original it is, he was the son of forty-two years, that is, the son of a mother that was of that age; and justly is her age put for his, in reproach to him, because she managed him, and did what she would--she, in effect, reigned, and he had little more than the title of king.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
2 Chronicles 22:2
“Forty and two years old was Ahaziah - See the note on 2Ki 8:26. Ahaziah might have been twenty-two years old, according to 2Ki 8:26 (note), but he could not have been forty-two, as stated here, without being two years older than his own father! See the note there. The Syriac and Arabic have twenty-two, and the Septuagint, in some copies, twenty. And it is very probable that the Hebrew text read so originally; for when numbers were expressed by single letters, it was easy to mistake מ mem, Forty, for כ caph, Twenty.”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
made Ahaziah his youngest son king: Only the youngest son is left to crown, since the Arabian raid already named at the end of the previous chapter had killed the elder brothers. Chronicles gives his age as forty and two, though 2 Kings 8:26 gives twenty and two, and the bench reads the gap as a scribal slip between the Hebrew letters for twenty and forty rather than two figures needing to be forced together. Matthew Henry offers a second reading, that the number first described Athaliah's own age as mother, since her rule over the reign is the verse's real subject either way.
2. (vv. 3-6)
2 Chronicles 22:3
“His mother was his counsellor - Athaliah, the wicked daughter of a wicked parent, and the wicked spouse of an unprincipled king.”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
2 Chronicles 22:4
“Wherefore he did evil in the sight of the Lord, like the house of Ahab,.... See 2Ki 8:27. for they were his counsellors, after the death of his father, to his destruction; both of soul and body; for they gave him bad advice, both in religious and civil things; these were some of the family or court of the king of Israel, that his mother sent for after his father's death to be of his council.”
1 more voice on this verse
2 Chronicles 22:4
“Those that debauch young men destroy them. It was bad enough that they exposed him to the sword of the Syrians, drawing him in to join with Joram king of Israel in an expedition to Ramoth-Gilead, where Joram was wounded, an expedition that was not for his honour.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
2 Chronicles 22:5
“Went with Jehoram - See on 2Ki 8:28 (note).”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
1 more voice on this verse
2 Chronicles 22:5
“He walked also after their counsel,.... Did as they advised him, as in matters of religion, so in political things, of which there is an instance in this and the next verse; of which see Gill on 2Ki 8:28, 2Ki 8:29.”
2 Chronicles 22:6
“Azariah went down--that is, from Ramoth-gilead, to visit the king of Israel, who was lying ill of his wounds at Jezreel, and who had fled there on the alarm of Jehu's rebellion.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
was his counsellor to do wickedly: The march to Ramoth-gilead against Hazael and the wound Joram carries back to Jezreel repeat the narrative 2 Kings 8:28-29 already tells in full. Chronicles adds its own verdict on the cause: his mother was his counsellor to do wickedly, a clause with no equivalent in Kings, naming Athaliah and the house of Ahab as the counsellors who worked Ahaziah's destruction after his father's death. The one-year reign is read here as inherited corruption, not a personal failure standing alone.
3. (v. 7)
2 Chronicles 22:7
“And the destruction of Ahaziah was of God by coming to Joram,....”
2 more voices on this verse
2 Chronicles 22:7
“The destruction of Ahaziah was of God - i. e. his untimely end was a judgment upon him for his idolatry.”
2 Chronicles 22:7
“His providence brought Ahaziah, just at this fatal juncture, to see Joram, that he might fall with him and be taken as in a snare. This we had an account of before, 2 Kings ix. It is here added that he was decently buried (not as Jehoram, whose dead body was cast into Naboth's vineyard, 2 Kings ix.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
the destruction of Ahaziah was of God: Chronicles states outright what Kings leaves for the reader to infer from Jehu's own commission: Ahaziah's death is folded into the same sentence against the house of Ahab that anointed Jehu to cut it off. The verse names God as the one who brought Ahaziah to Joram's side at that moment, so a king of Judah dies inside a purge aimed at Israel's throne rather than by ordinary family visit. Keil and Matthew Henry both read the clause as the Chronicler's habit of naming the hand behind an event Kings narrates without that comment.
4. (vv. 8-9)
2 Chronicles 22:8
“And it came to pass, that when Jehu was executing judgment on the house of Ahab,.... On Joram, his son, and seventy more sons, his kinsfolks, courtiers, and priests: and found the princes of Judah, and or even the sons of the brethren of Ahaziah; whose number was forty two: that ministered to Ahaziah; had offices in his court, or in obedience to his will, went to visit the children of the king and queen of Israel: and he slew them; Jehu did; of the occasion, time, and place of his meeting with them, and slaying them, see 2Ki 10:12.”
2 Chronicles 22:9
"Ahaziah fled first to the garden house and escaped to Samaria; but was here, where he had hid himself, taken by Jehu's men who pursued him, brought to Jehu, who was still near or in Jezreel, and at his command slain at the hill Gur, beside Ibleam, in his chariot; that is, mortally wounded with an arrow, so that he, again fleeing, expired at Megiddo" [KEIL].
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
the princes of Judah, and the sons of the brethren: Chronicles compresses two episodes Kings tells at length, the slaughter of Ahaziah's kinsmen at the shearing house of 2 Kings 10:12-14 and his own death and burial at 2 Kings 9:27-28, into two verses naming only that Jehu found and slew the officials who ministered to Ahaziah, then hunted the king himself out of hiding in Samaria. The burial reason Chronicles supplies, because he is the son of Jehoshaphat, who sought the Lord with all his heart, has no equivalent clause in Kings and reaches back to the refrain the book uses to measure Jehoshaphat's whole reign. A wicked son still receives a king's grave on his grandfather's account, and the house of Ahaziah is left, in the narrator's own words, with no power to keep still the kingdom.
B. Athaliah's slaughter and the baby hidden in the temple
1. (v. 10)
2 Chronicles 22:10
“All the seed royal of the house of Judah - Nothing but the miraculous intervention of the Divine providence could have saved the line of David at this time, and preserved the prophecy relative to the Messiah. The whole truth of that prophecy, and the salvation of the world, appeared to be now suspended on the brittle thread of the life of an infant of a year old, (see 2Ch 24:1), to destroy whom was the interest of the reigning power! But God can save by few as well as by many.”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
destroyed all the seed royal of the house of Judah: Two royal cullings fall within two chapters: the Arabian raid of 21:16-17 already killed all the elder sons, and now Athaliah moves to finish what that raid began, striking at the whole line rather than at rivals for her own throne alone. Adam Clarke reads the stakes as the covenant itself, since the promise to David's house has by this verse only one infant standing between it and extinction. 2 Kings 11:1 records the same act in nearly identical words, and both books let the sentence stand without softening it.
2. (vv. 11-12)
2 Chronicles 22:12
“Hid in the house of God - “In the house of the sanctuary of God.” - Targum. Or, as he says on 2Ch 22:11, בקודש קודשיא bekudash kudeshaiya “in the holy of holies.” To this place Athaliah had no access, therefore Joash lay concealed, he and his affectionate aunt-nurse. - See on 2Ki 11:1 (note).”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
took Joash the son of Ahaziah: Where 2 Kings 11:2 names the rescuer only as Jehosheba, daughter of king Joram, sister of Ahaziah, Chronicles adds a detail Kings never states: she is the wife of Jehoiada the priest, so the woman who steals the infant from among the slaughtered king's sons is already married into the priesthood that will hide and later crown him. The royal house and the priestly house join in one rescue, the same pairing that stands together at the covenant renewal in the next chapter. Six years hidden in the house of God, under Athaliah's own reign over the land, is the whole distance between the promise to David's line and its being cut off for good.
This page carries no textual note on 2 Chronicles 22. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
Sources for this chapter
The summary
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.
The exposition
Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible; Jamieson Fausset and Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible; John Gill, Exposition of the Old Testament; John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament; Keil, The Books of the Chronicles; Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible and W. H. Bennett, The Books of Chronicles (Expositor's Bible).