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536 / 1113 · 2 Kings 12 ‖ 2 Chronicles 24 · The Divided Kingdom · c. 835–796 BC

The King Who Outlived His Mentor

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Many of us had a teacher, a grandparent or a mentor whose steadiness held us upright — and some discovered, only after they were gone, how much of our goodness had really been theirs. Joash was crowned at seven by the priest Jehoiada, who had hidden him as a baby. As long as Jehoiada lived, Joash did right; he even pushed the priests to repair a neglected temple. Chronicles tells what happened after the old priest died. Before long the king had abandoned the temple he restored and ordered the death of his mentor's son.

Where it sits in the story: Joash is the boy who carried David's line through Athaliah's reign (2 Kings 11). His long reign shows the promise surviving without guaranteeing a faithful king. Aram under Hazael now presses on Judah as well as Israel, and Solomon's temple has become a building that needs rescuing — a theme the later reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah will return to.

What this chapter is doing: To show a reign of real achievement undone by borrowed faith: Joash's goodness lasted as long as his mentor, and in Chronicles' telling the consequences of abandoning God — and killing his prophet — follow swiftly.

The walk-through
  • 2 Kings 12:1–3 — Joash reigns forty years in Jerusalem and does right all the years Jehoiada instructs him, though the local high places remain.
  • 2 Kings 12:4–16 — Joash orders temple money set aside for repairs, but by his twenty-third year the priests have repaired nothing. Jehoiada bores a hole in a chest beside the altar; the king's secretary and the high priest count the silver and pay it straight to the carpenters, builders and masons, who are so honest no accounts are required.
  • 2 Chronicles 24:1–16 — Chronicles tells the repair as glad national giving to a chest at the temple gate, with the surplus made into temple vessels, and adds that Jehoiada died at a hundred and thirty and was buried among the kings for the good he had done in Israel.
  • 2 Chronicles 24:17–22 — After Jehoiada's death Judah's officials win the king over, and they abandon the temple for Asherah poles and idols. Jehoiada's son Zechariah warns that because they have forsaken the LORD, he has forsaken them; at the king's command he is stoned in the temple court, crying that the LORD would see and avenge.
  • 2 Kings 12:17–21 — Hazael captures Gath and turns toward Jerusalem; Joash buys him off with the temple and palace treasures. His own servants conspire and kill him at Beth-millo.
  • 2 Chronicles 24:23–27 — Chronicles reads these as consequences: a small Aramean force defeats Judah's large army, Joash is left badly wounded, and his servants kill him in his bed for the blood of Jehoiada's son. He is buried in the city of David, but not in the kings' tombs.
PARALLEL PASSAGE: Kings tells a building story and a political story; Chronicles turns Joash's reign into two halves, faithful then faithless. It adds Jehoiada's honoured burial, the apostasy after his death and the stoning of Zechariah, and links the Aramean defeat and Joash's murder directly to that sin — the Chronicler's pattern of swift consequence. The accounts also differ in detail: Kings says no temple vessels were made from the repair money, Chronicles that the surplus went into vessels, perhaps describing different stages of the work.
⚖︎ Is this the Zechariah Jesus mentions, murdered 'between the sanctuary and the altar' (Matthew 23:35; Luke 11:51)?
Bounds
Luke names only 'Zechariah'; Matthew calls him 'son of Berechiah', the name of the later prophet Zechariah's father (Zechariah 1:1), not Jehoiada.
Positions
  • Many commentators identify him with Jehoiada's son: he was killed in the temple court with a cry for vengeance, and since Chronicles usually stands last in the Hebrew Bible, 'from Abel to Zechariah' spans the first and last murders in its pages.
  • Matthew's 'son of Berechiah' points to the post-exilic prophet Zechariah, whose death the Old Testament does not record; some think a tradition about him is in view.
  • Matthew's wording blends the two Zechariahs, whether in the Gospel's composition or its copying.
Our reading: We think the link to 2 Chronicles 24 is the likeliest, and note that the 'son of Berechiah' wording is a genuine puzzle careful readers have discussed since the early church.
What it showsExcavations at Tell es-Safi, identified with Philistine Gath, uncovered a siege system and a late ninth-century destruction that the excavators attribute to Hazael — a striking fit with 2 Kings 12:17.
Where the evidence stopsThe 'Jehoash Inscription', a stone tablet that surfaced around 2003 describing temple repairs like these, was declared a forgery by the Israel Antiquities Authority; a later trial did not establish it as genuine, and it should not be cited as evidence. Chronicles' extra episodes have no outside confirmation.

Key verse: 2 Chronicles 24:20  ·  So what: Joash's story is a warning about second-hand faith. Good habits held up by someone else's conviction may not survive that person's absence. Chronicles also refuses to let the killing of an unwelcome truth-teller pass unremarked, and Zechariah's dying cry echoes into the New Testament. The question it leaves is personal: whose faith am I living on, and will it hold when they are gone?

← The Hidden Boy-KingYou have just read Joash's rescue and coronation (2 Kings 11 ‖ 2 Chronicles 23); here is the long reign that followed. Next, the prophet Joel, whose date is uncertain, describes a devastating locust plague and calls the whole land to lament (Joel 1).When the Locusts Came →
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