Biblion Bible Commentary
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Ahaziah, and Athaliah's Purge
2 Chronicles 22:1-12
1 The inhabitants of Jerusalem made Ahaziah his youngest son king in his place, because the band of men who came with the Arabians to the camp had slain all the oldest. So Ahaziah the son of Jehoram king of Judah reigned. · WEB
A king ruled by his advisers lasts a year, his mother destroys the royal family, and one baby is hidden in the temple for six years.
The new king is the youngest son because raiders killed the others 2 Chronicles 22:1. The reign begins with the family already destroyed once.
What is said about him is unusual in that it is entirely about other people. His mother was his counselor in acting wickedly, and after his father's death the house of Ahab supplied his advisers to his destruction 2 Chronicles 22:3–4. He is not credited with a policy of his own. He is described as a man surrounded, and the surrounding is given as the whole account of his character.
He follows their counsel to the letter, and the first campaign is northward alongside his kinsman of Israel — the same alliance, the same battlefield, the third generation 2 Chronicles 22:5. His grandfather went there and was nearly killed. His father married into that house. He dies through it.
The writer states the theological reading plainly: the destruction of Ahaziah was of God, in that he went to Joram 2 Chronicles 22:7. A visit to a wounded relative put him in the path of a purge already commissioned.
When he is caught and killed, his executioners bury him, and the reason they give is a sentence about somebody else: he is the son of Jehoshaphat, who sought Yahweh with all his heart 2 Chronicles 22:9. A grandfather's reputation earns a grandson a grave. The book's verb appears here as an epitaph applied at two removes.
Then Athaliah, and the account is four verses of horror described without adjectives. Seeing her son dead, she arose and destroyed all the royal offspring of the house of Judah 2 Chronicles 22:10. A grandmother kills her grandchildren to take the throne, and the line that had survived murder, revolt, plague and a foreign raid comes down to nothing.
Except for one. Jehoshabeath, the dead king's sister and the wife of the high priest, takes the baby from among the king's sons who were slain and hides him 2 Chronicles 22:11.
The details of where matter. First a bedroom, then hidden in God's house six years while Athaliah reigned 2 Chronicles 22:12. The heir is concealed in the temple, in the building the whole book is about, by a priest's wife, for the entire duration of the usurpation.
The lamp of the previous chapter is at this point one infant in a back room, kept alive by a woman whose name occurs twice in Scripture and nowhere else. The promise held, and the whole of its holding was a family decision made in the middle of a massacre.
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