Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Chronicles · About this commentary
The Seven Petitions
2 Chronicles 6:22-42
22 “If a man sins against his neighbor, and an oath is laid on him to cause him to swear, and he comes and swears before your altar in this house, · WEB
Every case the dedication prayer imagines is a case of something going wrong, and the widest promise in it is made to a foreigner.
Seven situations are laid before God, each with the same hinge: then hear from heaven. What the seven have in common is more revealing than their differences. A dispute needing an oath. Defeat by an enemy. Drought. Famine, plague, blight, locust, siege. A foreigner arriving. An army sent out. And captivity in a distant land.
Six of the seven presuppose disaster, and in five of those the disaster is deserved. The house is dedicated by describing, at length, the occasions on which its worshipers will have ruined things.
The fourth petition is the most carefully worded. Whatever the affliction, the prayer is for the man who will each know his own plague and his own sorrow 2 Chronicles 6:29 — a public calamity understood as something each person carries privately. And the answer asked for is individual: give to every man according to his ways, for you, even you only, know the hearts of the children of men 2 Chronicles 6:30. That is the same claim David made when he charged Solomon 1 Chronicles 28:9, and it is the ground of the whole prayer.
The fifth petition is the widest thing in the chapter. When a foreigner comes from a far country for the sake of God's name and prays toward the house, Solomon asks that God do according to all that the foreigner calls to you for 2 Chronicles 6:32–33.
That is a larger request than any made for Israel. His own people are asked to be judged according to their ways; the outsider is asked to be given whatever he requests. And the reason given is not hospitality but publicity — that all the peoples of the earth may know your name. A national sanctuary is dedicated with a clause designed to make it international.
The seventh petition is the longest, and it is the one the book's first readers had lived. It describes exile precisely: sin, anger, captivity to a land far off, then coming to their senses, confessing, returning with all their heart and with all their soul, and praying toward the land, the city and the house 2 Chronicles 6:36–38.
Inside its opening clause sits a parenthesis that changes the status of the whole case: for there is no man who doesn't sin 2 Chronicles 6:36. The seventh situation is therefore not a remote hypothesis. It is stated, in passing, as the one that must eventually arise.
The prayer ends by borrowing words that were already old Psalms 132:8–10: arise, Yahweh God, into your resting place, you, and the ark of your strength 2 Chronicles 6:41. And the last line pleads nobody's merit but a dead man's: remember your loving kindnesses to David your servant 2 Chronicles 6:42.
settled What this mark means