Biblion Bible Commentary
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Jehoshaphat and Ahaziah
1 Kings 22:41-53
41 Jehoshaphat the son of Asa began to reign over Judah in the fourth year of Ahab king of Israel. · WEB
A good king of Judah with one persistent flaw and one bad friendship, and a northern king who inherits all three of his family's religions.
He walked in all the way of Asa his father. He didn't turn away from it, doing that which was right in Yahweh's eyes. However, the high places were not taken away 1 Kings 22:43.
Jehoshaphat gets the good verdict with the standing qualification. Twenty-five years, a genuine reformer who finishes his father's work by clearing out the last of the cult prostitutes 1 Kings 22:46 — and the local shrines survive him, as they survive every good king of Judah until Hezekiah. The book will not let a reform be reported as complete when it was not.
Jehoshaphat made peace with the king of Israel 1 Kings 22:44.
The single line covers the chapter's other subject. Ending sixty years of war between the two kingdoms is a real achievement, and the price is visible in the chapter just read: Judah's king in the wrong robes on a battlefield he had no business being on, having promised his army before he asked God anything 1 Kings 22:4. The alliance was sealed by marrying his son to Ahab's daughter, and that marriage nearly extinguishes David's line within two generations 2 Kings 11:1.
So the book's assessment of him is genuinely two-sided, and both sides are stated without being reconciled: right in Yahweh's eyes, and yoked to a house under sentence.
Jehoshaphat made ships of Tarshish to go to Ophir for gold, but they didn't go, for the ships wrecked at Ezion Geber 1 Kings 22:48.
The attempt to revive Solomon's gold fleet ends on the rocks in the harbor. And then a small, telling refusal: Ahaziah proposes a joint venture and Jehoshaphat would not 1 Kings 22:49. Having lost a fleet and nearly his life, he has finally learned where the line is. Late, and he learns it.
He did that which was evil in Yahweh's sight, and walked in the way of his father, and in the way of his mother, and in the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat 1 Kings 22:52.
Ahaziah's verdict is the fullest in the book, and it names three inheritances: his father's, his mother's, and Jeroboam's. Ahab's compromise, Jezebel's Baal, and the calves that founded the northern state — all of it received intact by a young man who reigns two years. Nothing has been given up, and the delay granted to Ahab's humility is running out in his son's reign exactly as promised 1 Kings 21:29.
He served Baal and worshiped him, and provoked Yahweh, the God of Israel, to anger in all the ways that his father had done 1 Kings 22:53.
The book ends here, mid-sentence in the story. The Greek translation's division cut the scroll at this point, and the cut lands on an unfinished threat: a king under his father's sentence, a prophet still alive, a house waiting for the sword. First Kings closes with everything announced and almost nothing yet collected — which is what a book arguing that God's word always comes to pass can afford to do, and what makes its second half necessary.
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