Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Chronicles · About this commentary
Uzziah, Strong Until He Was Strong
2 Chronicles 26:1-23
1 All the people of Judah took Uzziah, who was sixteen years old, and made him king in the place of his father Amaziah. · WEB
A gifted king is helped until he is strong, and then does the one thing his office did not entitle him to do.
Fifty-two years, and for most of them a record of unusual competence. Fortifications, cisterns dug in the wilderness, herds in two regions, farmers and vineyard keepers in the hills — for he loved farming 2 Chronicles 26:10. The detail is affectionate and it is the only one of its kind in the book.
The army is organized by a scribe and an officer working under a captain 2 Chronicles 26:11, equipped down to the sling stones, and supplied with engines invented by skillful men for the towers 2 Chronicles 26:15.
The writer gives the reason for all of it twice, and both times it is the book's verb. He set himself to seek God, and as long as he sought Yahweh, God made him prosper 2 Chronicles 26:5. The clause has a term built into it, and the chapter is about what happened when the term ran out.
The hinge is one of the finest sentences in Scripture, and it turns on repeating a word. He was marvelously helped until he was strong. But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up 2 Chronicles 26:15–16.
The help produced the strength, and the strength ended the seeking. Nothing external changed. There is no defeat here, no seduction, no bad counsel. A man became capable enough to stop feeling dependent, and that was the whole of it.
What the lifted heart produces is not a moral collapse but a liturgical one. He goes into the temple to burn incense 2 Chronicles 26:16. Considered as an act of piety it is unimpeachable; he is not sacrificing to another god. What is wrong with it is jurisdictional, and the priests say so: it isn't for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to Yahweh, but for the priests the sons of Aaron, who are consecrated 2 Chronicles 26:18.
Eighty priests block him, and they are described as valiant men 2 Chronicles 26:17 — an army word, used of men holding a doorway against their own king. The boundary between the throne and the altar is defended by unarmed clergy, and it holds.
The anger and the disease arrive in the same clause, while he was angry with the priests 2 Chronicles 26:19. And the closing detail is the cost of it: he lived apart to the day of his death, for he was cut off from Yahweh's house 2 Chronicles 26:21.
That is the exact reversal of what he wanted. A man who insisted on entering the sanctuary spent the rest of his life unable to enter it at all, while his son governed for him.
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