A Victory That Invites Defeat

For a few years two kings named Joash rule at once, one in Samaria and one in Jerusalem, and the King James spells the northern one both Joash and Jehoash within this single chapter. Amaziah's own name means the LORD is strong, a claim his reign will test.

The Judean opening always names the king's mother, Jehoaddan here, while the northern notices never name one. In Judah the queen mother held a recognised place at court, which is why the record keeps her name beside the years.

David is the yardstick, and Amaziah is measured against his own father instead. That is faint praise: Joash did right while Jehoiada the priest guided him (12:2), and his reign ended in a palace murder.

“Howbeit” is the same reservation made of Joash in 12:3, word for word. The high places were local hilltop altars, often used for the LORD rather than for idols, and no king removes them until Hezekiah (18:4).

He waits until the kingdom is “confirmed in his hand” before acting. The killers were court officials, Jozachar and Jehozabad (12:21), men with standing, and a new king of twenty five could not move against them until his own position was secure.

The book names a written “book of the law of Moses” that a king could consult and obey, generations before Josiah's men find such a book in the temple (22:8). The closing clause, every man for his own sin, is the principle Ezekiel 18:20 later builds a whole chapter on.

The Valley of Salt, south of the Dead Sea, is where David's army had already beaten Edom (2 Samuel 8:13). Selah simply means rock. Renaming a captured stronghold declared ownership, and “unto this day” shows the name still stood when the record was written.

“Look one another in the face” sounds like an invitation to talk; it is a challenge to battle. The Second Book of Chronicles supplies a motive Kings leaves out: hired Israelite troops, sent home unused, had plundered Judah's towns on the way (2 Chronicles 25:13).

The only other plant fable in the Old Testament is Jotham's in Judges 9, also aimed at a man with inflated ambitions. “In Lebanon” is said of all three characters, so the cedar, the thistle and the beast share one landscape, and only one of them is trampled.

In 1611 “meddle” meant to engage in fighting, not merely to interfere. “Glory of this” means boast of it all you like. The final words widen the risk from Amaziah to “Judah with thee”, which is exactly who pays.

“Which belongeth to Judah” is there because another Beth-shemesh lay in Naphtali (Joshua 19:38). This one guarded a valley west of Jerusalem, so the northern army fought on Judah's own soil. It was the town where the ark came back from the Philistines (1 Samuel 6).

“Every man to their tents” is the old phrase for an army dissolving, kept from the days when Israel lived in tents. It is the same cry that broke the kingdom in two under Rehoboam (1 Kings 12:16).

At the moment of capture the full pedigree is spelled out: son of Jehoash, son of Ahaziah. A king of David's line stands in the hands of Jehu's grandson. The gate of Ephraim to the corner gate was the city's northern wall, some two hundred yards of it.

Joash of Judah had already emptied these treasuries once to buy off Hazael (12:18), so what was taken may have been modest. The word for hostages, literally sons of pledges, occurs only here and in the parallel at 2 Chronicles 25:24.

This closing notice for Jehoash has already been given, nearly word for word, at 13:12. It is repeated so that his death can be placed after the battle with Amaziah and his son Jeroboam brought onto the stage.

The kings of Jehu's house lie in the royal tombs of Samaria, the city Omri founded, alongside the dynasty Jehu wiped out. In 13:13 the same succession was worded “Jeroboam sat upon his throne”; here it takes the standard form.

Judah's defeated king outlives his conqueror by fifteen years. The figure fits the chronology: Jeroboam began in Amaziah's fifteenth year (verse 23), and Amaziah reigned twenty nine years in all.

The book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah is a lost court record, cited as a source, not the biblical Books of Chronicles, which were written centuries later and draw on Kings.

Lachish was Judah's second city, a fortress in the lowland about thirty miles southwest of Jerusalem. Amaziah is the second king running to be killed by his own people; his father Joash died the same way (12:20).

Whoever killed him did not deny him a royal grave. The body came home on horses, likely on a litter between them, and went into the tombs of the city of David like any king who died in his bed.

“All the people of Judah” act again, as they did in crowning the boy Joash (11:14) and as they will for Josiah (21:24). Azariah is the same king called Uzziah elsewhere (15:13; Isaiah 6:1), a sixteen year old taking a throne twice stained with blood.

Elath sat on the Gulf of Aqaba, Judah's gateway to Red Sea trade, near Solomon's port of Ezion-geber (1 Kings 9:26). Recovering it follows from Amaziah's Edom campaign. Judah will lose it again under Ahaz (16:6).

Forty one years makes Jeroboam son of Joash the longest reigning king of the northern kingdom. The whole reign will receive seven verses.

Two Jeroboams stand in one verse, the second convicted of following the first. The son of Nebat is by now shorthand for the calf shrines at Bethel and Dan, and no northern king ever breaks with them.

From the entering of Hamath in the north to the sea of the plain, the Dead Sea, are the limits Solomon's feast was drawn from (1 Kings 8:65). Jonah appears nowhere else outside his own book; Gath-hepher was a village of Zebulun (Joshua 19:13), close to later Nazareth.

“None shut up, nor any left” is an old pairing that covers everyone, whether confined or free; Deuteronomy 32:36 uses it of the moment God sees his people's strength gone. The phrase is borrowed from there almost exactly.

To blot out a name from under heaven is Sinai language: God said it of Israel after the golden calf (Deuteronomy 9:14). Here he did not say it, yet. The verb “saved” makes Jeroboam the unnamed “saviour” promised in 13:5.

Damascus had been Aram's capital and Israel's oppressor through the Hazael years, so recovering it is a sharp reversal. “Which belonged to Judah” is obscure in the Hebrew; many read it as lands once held under David (2 Samuel 8:6).

Zachariah is Jehu's great great grandson. The LORD promised Jehu four generations on the throne (10:30): Jehoahaz, Joash, Jeroboam, and now Zachariah, the last. A reader counting knows what the next chapter holds.