2 Chronicles35chapter 35

2 Chronicles 35:1-3

Kings gives this passover three verses, 2 Ki 23:21-23; Chronicles gives it nineteen, the same expansion the book gave Hezekiah's passover in chapter 30. Verse 3 tells the Levites who taught all Israel to put the holy ark back in the house Solomon built and frees them from carrying it further, a notice that assumes the ark had been moved, whether by the idols Manasseh had set up and Amon kept, or by Josiah's own repair of the temple in chapter 34. The instruction answers the due order David corrected at 1 Chr 15:2: the Levites' burden from here on is instruction and service, not transport.

2 Chronicles 35:4-6

The Levites prepare by courses, according to the writing of David king of Israel and the writing of Solomon his son, the same courses David organized in 1 Chr 23-26 and the same kind of claim 28:19 makes for the temple's plans, that David had them in writing by the LORD's hand upon him. Passover runs here as an executed plan rather than an improvised gathering, Levites assigned by family to serve the people the text calls their brethren, and everyone doing what the hand of Moses commanded. Chronicles treats its own earlier chapters as the working manual for this single day.

2 Chronicles 35:7-9

Josiah supplies thirty thousand lambs and kids and three thousand bullocks of his own substance, and his princes and the named chiefs of the priests and Levites, Hilkiah, Zechariah and Jehiel, then Conaniah, Shemaiah, Nethaneel, Hashabiah, Jeiel and Jozabad, add several thousand more on top of it, a larger provision than the king and princes together made for Hezekiah's passover in chapter 30. Chronicles keeps the names of the givers, the same instinct that names potters and gardeners at 1 Chr 4:23 for ordinary service done for the king.

2 Chronicles 35:10-11

the priests stood in their place: The passover runs by a stated division of labor: priests stand in their place to receive and sprinkle the blood at the altar, and Levites do the slaughtering and flaying a family would ordinarily do for itself. It is the order Hezekiah's hurried passover in chapter 30 could not fully keep, priests too few for the work and Levites filling in beside them; here, prepared under Josiah's own charge, the assignments already match the courses the writing of David and Solomon set out in verse 4.

2 Chronicles 35:12-14

The burnt offerings are separated by family so each household gets its own portion, roasted with fire according to the ordinance, while the other holy offerings are boiled in pots and pans and divided quickly among the people, keeping the two categories the law distinguishes apart rather than blurring them into one meal. Verse 14 has the priests so occupied with the burnt offerings and the fat until night that the Levites cook for the priests as well as for themselves, a small notice of which order carried the heavier practical load that day.

2 Chronicles 35:15

The singers, sons of Asaph, stand in their place by the commandment of David and of Asaph, Heman and Jeduthun, the three houses of temple song 1 Chr 25 set apart to prophesy with harps and cymbals, and Jeduthun still carries the title the king's seer generations after that appointment. The porters keep every gate without leaving their post, so the whole structure David and Solomon planned in writing, courses, singers, gatekeepers, runs in one day exactly as designed.

2 Chronicles 35:16-17

The chapter's refrain closes on the commandment of king Josiah, and verse 17 keeps two feasts together as one continuous keeping, the passover and the seven days of unleavened bread that follow it, rather than as separate observances. The whole operation, courses, singers, porters, offerings, completes inside a single day before the week-long feast even opens, the outcome of everything the previous sixteen verses have just documented.

2 Chronicles 35:18-19

Verse 18 dates the superlative to the days of Samuel the prophet, further back than Hezekiah's passover in chapter 30, which had claimed nothing like it only since the time of Solomon. Wesley reads a difference of kind and not only scale: Hezekiah's keeping had irregularities the law did not intend, while Josiah's ran exactly according to the law, and Josiah alone furnished the whole congregation at his own cost. The eighteenth year, verse 19, is the same year 34:8 dates the temple repair and the finding of the book of the law, so the reform and this passover belong to one burst of activity late in the reign.

2 Chronicles 35:20-22

After all this marks a sudden reversal at the height of the reform: Necho of Egypt marches for Carchemish and sends word that his war is not with Judah, for God commanded me to make haste: forbear thee from meddling with God, who is with me, that he destroy thee not. Josiah will not turn, disguising himself before the battle exactly as Ahab disguised himself at Ramoth-gilead in 2 Chr 18:29, a scene Chronicles has already told once as a warning, and verse 22 names what he refused as the words of Necho from the mouth of God. The commentators divide over what kind of word this was: Barnes and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read it as a real oracle Josiah should have weighed, carried through an unlikely messenger, while the text itself gives Necho no identity beyond a pagan king's own claim, a claim the outcome will vindicate.

2 Chronicles 35:23-24

The disguise fails to protect him: archers shot at king Josiah, and his own words to his servants, have me away, for I am sore wounded, repeat Ahab's words in the same kind of scene at 1 Ki 22:34, a detail Gill draws out directly. He dies in the second chariot on the road to Jerusalem and is buried among his fathers, and all Judah and Jerusalem mourn him, the last king Chronicles will show holding a passover like this one.

2 Chronicles 35:25

Jeremiah enters Chronicles by name here, one chapter before the book ends, and his lament for Josiah becomes a fixed ordinance, sung by the singing men and women to this day at the time of writing. The elegy itself is not the text now called Lamentations; Barnes and others conclude the actual composition is lost and that a separate collection of funeral dirges lies behind the note. Josiah is the only king of Judah for whom Scripture records a mourning ordinance kept to this day.

2 Chronicles 35:26-27

the rest of the acts of Josiah: The closing formula matches every reign Chronicles reports, pointing to a fuller written source now lost, here the book of the kings of Israel and Judah, and it closes Josiah's story on his goodness rather than on the ambiguity of his last decision. Four kings remain in Chronicles after Josiah, compressed into the single closing chapter, none of them reforming, before the temple burns at 36:19; this passover is the last one the book records before the exile it is writing to explain.