2 Chronicles9chapter 9

six hundred and threescore and six talents: The annual gold intake, six hundred and threescore and six talents, funds the two hundred large shields and three hundred smaller shields of beaten gold housed in the forest of Lebanon armory. These same shields do not stay Solomon's; 2 Chr 12:9 records Shishak carrying them off within Rehoboam's fifth year, and Rehoboam replaces them with brass. The gold Chronicles spends four verses describing here is gone from the record two chapters later, a fall told as briefly as the making.

a great throne of ivory: The throne combines ivory and gold, six steps, a footstool, armrests with lions, and twelve more lions on the steps, matching 1 Ki 10:18-20 detail for detail. Henry reads the lustre as a type of the greater kingdom to come, a faint representation of Christ's throne set above every throne, a reading offered as the church's typology rather than the text's own statement. The twelve lions on David's son's throne stand over Israel's twelve tribes as plainly as the number allows.

none were of silver: Gold replaces silver so completely in daily use that silver is not any thing accounted of, and the ships of Tarshish sailing every three years bring gold, silver, ivory, apes and peacocks home in the same cargo that made silver common. The Hebrew words behind apes and peacocks are themselves foreign loanwords, which the older commentators take as evidence of a voyage reaching well past the Mediterranean trade lanes.

passed all the kings of the earth: Solomon exceeds every king in riches and wisdom, and all the kings of the earth are said to seek his presence, the scene behind the greater than Solomon that 1 Kings 10 already carries in full at its own telling. Verse 25 counts four thousand stalls for horses and chariots; 1 Ki 4:26 gives forty thousand, and the older commentators weigh the numbers as a copying variant between the two records rather than two different counts of the same stable. Chronicles states the scale without drawing any lesson from it here.

unto the land of the Philistines: Solomon's reach runs from the river to the Philistine border and Egypt, silver made as common as stones, cedar as common as sycamore, and horses brought from Egypt and every land. In 1 Kings this same notice of horses from Egypt sits beside Deut 17:16's ban on a king multiplying horses and returning to Egypt for them, a juxtaposition the narrative then answers in chapter 11's fall. Chronicles carries the notice without the chapter that would give it a shadow, since the fall it would foreshadow is never told here.

the visions of Iddo the seer: The Chronicler names his own sources by title, the book of Nathan, the prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite, and the visions of Iddo the seer against Jeroboam the son of Nebat. Jeroboam is named here and nowhere else told: Chronicles never narrates his rise, his rebellion, or the kingdom's division, so the one mention of his name stands as a citation with no story attached to it in this book. Henry reads the silence over Solomon's own sin the same way, as an intimation that what is not repeated is not held against him.

reigned in Jerusalem over all Israel: Forty years, then Solomon slept with his fathers and was buried in the city of David, and Rehoboam his son reigned in his stead. This is the chapter's loudest silence: 1 Kings gives Solomon's foreign wives, his heart turned after other gods, and the Lord's anger and the kingdom's tearing in eleven full chapters, and Chronicles tells none of it, closing the reign on the queen's gold and the ivory throne instead. The book's own method from its genealogies onward is selection toward the temple, the throne of the Lord, and the line that carries the promise, and this ending is that method applied to its own builder.