2 Chronicles25chapter 25

The first act of the reign cites a law. Amaziah executed the servants who had killed his father but did not kill their children, because it is written in the law of Moses that fathers shall not die for the children, nor children for the fathers, but every man shall die for his own sin. Executing a traitor's whole family was normal practice in the region; Judah's law forbade it, and here a king obeys the text against the custom.

Then he hires a hundred thousand Israelite mercenaries for a hundred talents of silver, and a prophet tells him to send them home because the LORD is not with Israel. His objection is purely financial — what about the hundred talents? — and the answer is that the LORD is able to give much more than this. He obeys, and the dismissed troops raid Judah's towns on the way home out of fury, which is exactly the risk of firing an army you have already paid.

The Edomite campaign reached Sela, the rock stronghold in the mountains south of the Dead Sea in the region later famous for Petra, and ten thousand prisoners were thrown from a cliff — a brutality the text reports without approval.

Then comes the chapter's strangest turn. He brings home the gods of the people he has just defeated and worships them. The ancient logic was that a defeated nation's gods might still have local power worth having; the prophet's reply cuts straight through it — why have you sought after gods that could not deliver their own people out of your hand?

The war with Israel is told through a fable: a thistle in Lebanon sent word to a cedar asking for his daughter in marriage, and a wild beast trod the thistle down. Judah lost at Beth-shemesh, and four hundred cubits of Jerusalem's wall — about two hundred yards — was pulled down, with hostages taken.