2 Chronicles32chapter 32

2 Chronicles 32:1-2

Chronicles opens Sennacherib's invasion with a clause Kings does not carry: after these things, and the establishment thereof, tying the Assyrian threat directly to the temple reformation just finished in chapters 29 to 31. Barnes reads the phrase literally as the faithfulness thereof, the reform completed and secured before the trial arrived. The narrative that follows compresses into thirteen verses what 2 Kings 18 to 19 tells at length, and the Kings exposition carries the campaign's full detail.

2 Chronicles 32:3-4

Stopping the fountains outside the city is material Kings never records; the whole episode belongs to Chronicles alone. Hezekiah works by counsel, not command, gathering princes and mighty men before the wider people join to stop the water so that an invading king should find none. The engineering here is bound up with the Gihon project verse 30 will describe, hiding the springs from Assyria while routing the flow inside the walls.

2 Chronicles 32:5-6

The wall repair, the outer fortification, and the captains set over the people belong to the same building record Kings only summarizes in a single line at 2 Ki 20:20. Millo, the terraced fill on the city's eastern slope, had needed repair since Solomon's day, and its mention here places Hezekiah among the kings who kept up Jerusalem's defenses. He speaks comfortably to the assembled people before any battle is fought, arming their resolve as carefully as he arms the walls.

2 Chronicles 32:7-8

Be strong and courageous: Verse 8 is the sentence Kings does not have: with him is an arm of flesh, but with us is the Lord our God to help us, and to fight our battles. Hezekiah's charge opens with words spoken earlier to Joshua and to Asa, and Clarke notes the closing clause, there be more with us than with him, echoes Elisha's word to his servant at 2 Ki 6:16. Chronicles closes the speech with a detail Kings omits entirely: the people rested themselves upon the words of Hezekiah, trust taking hold before a single Assyrian arrow is loosed.

2 Chronicles 32:9-15

The Rabshakeh's taunt occupies a chapter and a half at 2 Ki 18:17 to 19:13; Chronicles compresses the same speech into seven verses, and the Kings exposition carries its full argument, the comparison of the Lord to the gods of nations that could not deliver their peoples. What Chronicles keeps is the accusation Hezekiah's own reform provoked: hath not the same Hezekiah taken away his high places and his altars, turning the work of chapters 29 to 31 into the enemy's evidence that Judah's God has been offended. Gill directs the reader to his notes on the parallel verses in Isaiah 36 for the speech's fuller detail.

2 Chronicles 32:16-19

Sennacherib's servants press the same argument in writing and aloud, a letter to rail on the Lord God of Israel and a shout in the Jews' own speech meant to frighten the defenders on the wall. Verse 19 states the blasphemy plainly: they spake against the God of Jerusalem as against the gods of the people of the earth, the work of the hands of man, refusing any distinction between the living God and an idol. Chronicles gives four verses to what Kings tells at greater length, and the Kings notes carry the fuller answer to the taunt.

2 Chronicles 32:20-21

Hezekiah and Isaiah pray together, the king and the prophet joined in one petition, and 2 Ki 19 with Isaiah 37 already carry the fuller record of that prayer's words. Chronicles states the answer in one verse: the Lord sent an angel, which cut off all the mighty men of valour, and the leaders and captains, and Sennacherib returns home to be slain by his own sons in the house of his god. The Kings exposition holds the campaign's numbers and Isaiah's oracle; Chronicles' interest lands on the shame that answers the blasphemy, an enemy destroyed in his own temple by his own house.

2 Chronicles 32:22-23

Verse 23 is Chronicles' own addition to the story: many brought gifts unto the Lord to Jerusalem, and presents to Hezekiah, so that he was magnified in the sight of all nations from thenceforth. Kings closes the Sennacherib episode with the king's death; Chronicles adds the nations' response, the same pattern of recognition that follows Jehoshaphat's deliverance in chapter 20. Gill reads the gifts as proof the surrounding nations understood who had fought the battle, and did not wish Judah's God for an enemy.

2 Chronicles 32:24

The sickness and the sign belong to the fuller narrative of 2 Ki 20 and Isaiah 38, where the going back of the shadow on Ahaz's dial is told at length; that exposition carries the sign's detail. Chronicles states the bare fact, sick to the death, prayed, and given a sign, because its interest lies not in the healing but in what the king does after it, which the next two verses take up.

2 Chronicles 32:25-26

These two verses are Chronicles' own moral commentary, absent from the parallel in 2 Ki 20: Hezekiah rendered not again according to the benefit done unto him, for his heart was lifted up, and wrath followed. Wesley reads the pride as gathering from three mercies at once, the Assyrian victory, the recovery from sickness, and the honor of Babylon's embassy, any one of which could have swelled a lesser king. Verse 26 answers it: Hezekiah humbled himself for the pride of his heart, so that the wrath of the Lord came not upon them in the days of Hezekiah, the repentance Chronicles alone records standing beside the fall it alone names.

2 Chronicles 32:27-29

The inventory of treasuries, storehouses, stalls, and cotes is material Kings never gives; Chronicles alone catalogs the wealth Hezekiah will show the Babylonian ambassadors in the next verse's account. Verse 29 credits the increase to its source directly: for God had given him substance very much, the same doctrine the book applies to every king who seeks the Lord. The list reads like an administrative record kept for its own sake, the kind of detail Chronicles preserves throughout its unique material elsewhere in the book.

2 Chronicles 32:30

Verse 30 names the engineering the book already showed underway at verses 3 to 4: this same Hezekiah stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon, and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David. This is the Siloam tunnel, and it survives; an inscription cut by the workmen who met in the middle of the rock still stands in the tunnel wall, discovered in 1880, an ancient Hebrew record of the same project the verse describes. Clarke and Wesley trace the route from the spring outside the walls into the pool inside them, water security built for a siege the city had not yet faced.

2 Chronicles 32:31

God left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart states the purpose behind the one episode Chronicles fills out from a single clause in Kings: the embassy from Babylon that drew out Hezekiah's pride. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown locate the fault not in showing the treasures itself but in giving God no glory for the recovery or the victory, leaving the ambassadors to go home without knowing the God who had done both. The verse names testing as the LORD's own purpose in withdrawing, and the book leaves the statement standing without further comment.

2 Chronicles 32:32-33

The closing formula names Isaiah's vision and the book of the kings of Judah and Israel as the sources behind the reign, the same double citation the Chronicler gives most kings before him. Hezekiah is buried in the chiefest of the sepulchres of the sons of David, honored at his death by all Judah and Jerusalem, closing a reign Chronicles has told as reform, deliverance, sickness, pride and humbling in one continuous account. Manasseh his son reigned in his stead, the transition into the chapter Chronicles alone tells with a repentance Kings never records.