2 Kings24chapter 24

Jehoiachin was eighteen years old: Jehoiachin's brief three months in Jerusalem carries an old textual question, since 2 Chronicles 36:9 gives his age as eight rather than eighteen. Gill and Clarke read the two numbers together by supposing a co-regency, crowned young alongside his father and reckoned differently by each book's own convention, though the text itself gives no such explanation. His mother Nehushta, daughter of Elnathan of Jerusalem, is named as every queen mother in this book is named, a detail that matters again when she is carried into exile with him. Verse 9 measures him against his father Jehoiakim and finds him no different, a son who ruled one season and sinned by the same standard.

the servants of Nebuchadnezzar: The siege that closes Jehoiachin's three months opens with his servants and ends with Nebuchadnezzar himself arriving in person, the king following his own army to press the surrender. Jehoiachin goes out to the king of Babylon with his mother, his servants, his princes and his officers rather than holding the city, a choice Wesley sets against Hezekiah's stand a century earlier under a harder threat. Gill dates the capture to the eighth year of Nebuchadnezzar's own reign and reckons the seventy years of captivity from this point, the first of Judah's kings actually taken to Babylon rather than merely made tributary. The whole royal household walks out together, the pattern the exile keeps to the book's last chapter.

cut in pieces all the vessels: The gold vessels Solomon made for the temple are cut in pieces exactly as the Lord had said, fulfilling the word given to Hezekiah through Isaiah a century before, that all the treasures in the house would be carried to Babylon. Barnes notes this first plundering strips the gold from the heavier furnishings, the table of showbread and the altar of incense, while the ark and the great bronze pieces wait for the final capture under Zedekiah at 2 Kings 25:13-17. Verse 14 names the first great deportation: all Jerusalem, the princes, the mighty men of valour, ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths, leaving only the poorest sort of the people of the land. Daniel and Ezekiel both date their books by removals recorded in this chapter, Daniel by the earlier captivity of his own first chapter and Ezekiel by this one, stated lightly in each book as its own setting.

the mighty of the land: Verse 15 sets a general term, the mighty of the land, beside verse 16's precise count, seven thousand men of might and a thousand craftsmen and smiths, and Barnes reads the two as distinct terms, one for civil rank and one for fitness in war. The king's mother, his wives, his officers and the mighty of the land go into captivity together, the same household that walked out to Nebuchadnezzar in verse 12 now walking on to Babylon itself. Among the priests and officials taken in this deportation is Ezekiel, whose book dates its opening vision by the years of Jehoiachin's captivity rather than by any king still reigning in Jerusalem. The removal of craftsmen and smiths is itself a strategy, a conquered land left without the hands to make weapons or rebuild its own walls.

2 Kings 24:17-18

changed his name to Zedekiah: Nebuchadnezzar installs Mattaniah, Josiah's remaining son and Jehoiachin's uncle, and changes his name to Zedekiah, a vassal now wearing a name his master gave him. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, along with Wesley, read the name, the righteousness of the Lord, as a standing warning aimed at the very unfaithfulness it names, a name meant to remind him of the justice that had already broken Jehoiakim. Verse 18 gives his age at twenty-one and his mother's name as Hamutal, the same mother who had borne Jehoahaz, so Zedekiah is Jehoiachin's uncle by both throne and blood rather than by throne alone. Gill notes he was not yet ten when his father Josiah died at Megiddo, the last of four sons of Josiah to sit on Judah's throne within a single generation.

according to all that Jehoiakim: Zedekiah's evil is measured by the same standard as Jehoiakim's, the third king in this chapter judged by that formula, and Barnes calls him weak rather than wicked, a king who heard Jeremiah and would not obey him. Verse 20 names the cause behind the political history already told: through the anger of the Lord it came to pass, until he had cast them out from his presence, so the narrator gives the theological reading before the political fact, that Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon. Wesley reads the sequence as the people's own sin producing the wicked king who then brought their punishment, not the king producing the people's sin. The chapter ends on the edge of the siege that chapter 25 will finish, the oath sworn to Babylon already broken.