Biblion Bible Commentary
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Judah Marries Into Ahab's House
2 Kings 8:16-29
16 In the fifth year of Joram the son of Ahab king of Israel, Jehoshaphat being king of Judah then, Jehoram the son of Jehoshaphat king of Judah began to reign. · WEB
The southern kingdom imports the northern disease through a wedding — and survives only because of a promise to a man three centuries dead.
He walked in the way of the kings of Israel, as did Ahab's house, for he married Ahab's daughter. He did that which was evil in Yahweh's sight 2 Kings 8:18.
Jehoram of Judah gets the verdict normally reserved for northern kings, and the reason is stated as a marriage. Jehoshaphat's alliance with Ahab — the peace that ended sixty years of war 1 Kings 22:44 — was sealed by marrying his heir to Ahab and Jezebel's daughter, and this is the invoice. Athaliah is now queen of Judah, and within a few chapters she will try to exterminate David's line altogether 2 Kings 11:1.
The book has been building this for some time. Jehoshaphat was a genuinely good king whose one persistent flaw was the friendship, and the flaw outlives him by two generations. Judah does not fall to Ahab's religion by conquest; it marries into it.
However, Yahweh would not destroy Judah, for David his servant's sake, as he promised him to give to him a lamp for his children always 2 Kings 8:19.
The lamp again 1 Kings 11:36 1 Kings 15:4, and the sentence structure carries the theology: however. Everything before it argues that Judah should end here, and the reason it does not has nothing to do with Judah. A promise made to a man long dead is the only thing between the southern kingdom and the fate the northern one is about to get.
In his days Edom revolted from under the hand of Judah, and made a king over themselves 2 Kings 8:20.
The empire starts coming apart at the edges — Edom gone, Libnah gone — and Jehoram's night attack breaks out of an encirclement without recovering anything 2 Kings 8:21–22. The territory David took is being handed back piece by piece, and the book reports it in the regnal formula without comment.
Ahaziah was twenty-two years old when he began to reign; and he reigned one year in Jerusalem. His mother's name was Athaliah the daughter of Omri 2 Kings 8:26.
The queen mother is named, as always in Judah's formula, and here the name is the story. Athaliah is Omri's granddaughter and Ahab's daughter, and her son on David's throne walked in the way of Ahab's house because, as the text says with unusual bluntness, he was the son-in-law of Ahab's house 2 Kings 8:27. Judah's king is a member of the northern dynasty by blood and by marriage both.
He went with Joram the son of Ahab to war against Hazael king of Syria at Ramoth Gilead, and the Syrians wounded Joram 2 Kings 8:28.
And so both kings are at Ramoth Gilead — the same disputed town where Ahab died 1 Kings 22:29 — fighting the Syrian usurper Elisha had wept over. Joram goes to Jezreel to recover from his wounds, and Ahaziah of Judah goes down to visit him.
The visit is the trap closing. Both kings are in one town, one of them convalescing, both of them descendants of Ahab, on the plot of ground where Naboth was stoned. Everything Elijah announced over that vineyard 1 Kings 21:21–24 is about to be collected in a single afternoon, and Judah's king is in the house because of a wedding his grandfather arranged.
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