Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Chronicles · About this commentary
The Warning He Would Not Hear
2 Chronicles 35:20-27
20 After all this, when Josiah had prepared the temple, Neco king of Egypt went up to fight against Carchemish by the Euphrates, and Josiah went out against him. · WEB
The best king in the book dies refusing a word from God delivered by a pagan, in a battle that was none of his business.
The campaign is not defensive. An Egyptian army is marching north to fight somebody else at a river far beyond Judah's borders, and Josiah went out against him 2 Chronicles 35:20.
Neco's message is diplomatic and then theological. I come not against you today, but against the house with which I have war. Then: God has commanded me to make haste. Beware that it is God who is with me, that he not destroy you 2 Chronicles 35:21.
A foreign king claims a commission from Israel's God. There was every reason to doubt it, and Josiah had a prophetess in his own city whom he had consulted before on a smaller question 2 Chronicles 34:22. He does not ask.
The writer's judgment is unambiguous, and it is the sharpest verdict passed on any good king in the book. He didn't listen to the words of Neco from the mouth of God 2 Chronicles 35:22. The words are identified as God's, and the man who would not hear them is the one who tore his clothes when he heard the law read.
His method makes it worse. He disguised himself, that he might fight — the same device Ahab used to evade a word he had been given, in the same book, with the same result 2 Chronicles 18:29–33. An arrow finds him too.
So the reign that began with a boy seeking God ends with a man declining to inquire. The pattern the book has traced everywhere holds here in its most painful form: no reformer's record buys exemption from the next decision, and a lifetime of listening does not make one instance of not listening safe.
What follows is grief on a national scale. He is buried in the tombs of his fathers; all Judah and Jerusalem mourned; a prophet composes a lament, and singers keep it as an ordinance in Israel to the writer's own day 2 Chronicles 35:24–25.
That is a remarkable ending for a chapter that has just called him disobedient. The book does not weigh the error against the reign and issue a net verdict. It records both at full strength — the finest king since David, and the avoidable death — and lets the mourning stand as the last word on him.
The closing formula names where the rest is written, and adds a clause used of no other king: his good deeds were according to that which is written in Yahweh's law 2 Chronicles 35:26. The book he found is the standard by which he is finally described.
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