Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Chronicles · About this commentary
Amaziah, and the Hired Soldiers
2 Chronicles 25:1-28
1 Amaziah was twenty-five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Jehoaddan, of Jerusalem. · WEB
A king obeys the law at real cost and then worships the gods of the people he has just defeated.
The verdict is qualified in the second verse: he did right, but not with a perfect heart 2 Chronicles 25:2. The chapter is an account of what that looks like in practice.
It starts well. He executes his father's assassins and stops there, sparing their children according to that which is written in the law in the book of Moses 2 Chronicles 25:4. The statute is quoted — every man dies for his own sin Deuteronomy 24:16 — and it costs him the ordinary security of wiping out a family that has already killed one king.
The second test is financial. He has hired a hundred thousand northern soldiers for a hundred talents when a prophet tells him to send them home. His objection is not theological: but what shall we do for the hundred talents which I have given? 2 Chronicles 25:9.
The answer is one line and it settles the matter: Yahweh is able to give you much more than this. He sends them away, at the cost of the money and of their goodwill, and they raid his towns on the way home 2 Chronicles 25:13. Obedience here is expensive twice over, and he pays.
Then he wins the battle. And then, coming home from it, he takes the gods of the defeated and set them up to be his gods, and bowed down himself before them 2 Chronicles 25:14.
The prophet's question cannot be improved on: why have you sought after the gods of the people, which have not delivered their own people out of your hand? 2 Chronicles 25:15. The objects he is worshiping had just demonstrably failed. There is no argument to make, and none is attempted.
What he does instead is silence the speaker. Have we made you one of the king's counselors? Stop! Why should you be struck down? 2 Chronicles 25:16. Asa jailed a seer; Joash had one stoned; this king threatens one and the prophet obeys, stopping mid-sentence with a single observation left behind: God has determined to destroy him because you have done this and have not listened.
The destruction comes through his own initiative. He challenges the northern king to meet, and receives back a fable about a thistle proposing marriage to a cedar and being trampled by a passing animal 2 Chronicles 25:18. The diagnosis inside it is accurate: your heart lifts you up to boast. Now stay at home 2 Chronicles 25:19.
He will not listen, for it was of God, that he might deliver them into the hand of their enemies, because they had sought after the gods of Edom 2 Chronicles 25:20. The refusal to hear is his and the consequence is arranged, and the chapter has already shown him capable of hearing when he chose to.
The defeat costs a breach in the city wall four hundred cubits wide, the treasuries of both houses, and hostages 2 Chronicles 25:23–24. He survives fifteen years, and the conspiracy is dated from the turning point rather than from the defeat: from the time that Amaziah turned away from following Yahweh 2 Chronicles 25:27. He is run down at Lachish and killed there.
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