2 Chronicles 36:9

Verse 9 gives Jehoiachin’s whole reign in one sentence: his age, how long he reigned and God’s judgment on it. He followed his father Jehoiakim, whose wicked reign and death are told just before (2 Chronicles 36:5–8), and after him came Zedekiah, of whom the same verdict is given (2 Chronicles 36:12). Chronicles tells the end of Judah’s kings quickly, and what it records of each is how he stood before the LORD. One after another they failed, and the chapter ends with Jerusalem destroyed and the people in exile (2 Chronicles 36). The parallel account of Jehoiachin is in 2 Kings 24:8–9.

His name, Yᵉhôwyâkîyn, means “Jehovah will establish”, and it stands with a sad irony over a reign that was over almost as soon as it began and ended in captivity. The verb for his reigning, mâlak, means to reign, and it is also used of coming to the throne, which is the sense of “when he began to reign”.

Jehoiachin took the throne while Nebuchadnezzar was besieging Jerusalem, the first great siege of the city, brought on by his father’s rebellion against Babylon. After the collapse of Assyria, Babylon had become the master of Judah and the nations round about, and Judah was a small kingdom subject to it. The year was 597 BC. Jehoiachin held the title of king for a few months while Babylon held the power, and the exact count of “three months and ten days” shows how fast the end of David’s line of kings in Jerusalem was coming.

“Expired” translates tᵉshûwbâh, a word for a return or turning, used here of the turn of the year. That was the spring, around March and April, when the winter rains were over and armies took the field, the season the Bible elsewhere calls “the time when kings go forth to battle”. The phrase marks the moment Nebuchadnezzar chose to act, as a new season of campaigns opened and he moved again to make his hold on Judah firm.

Nebuchadnezzar II was at the height of his power. He had defeated Egypt at the battle of Carchemish in 605 BC and then set about bringing the lands along the eastern Mediterranean under his rule. In that same year he carried off the first captives from Judah, among them Daniel (Daniel 1:1–2). The deportation of verse 10, in 597 BC, was the second. The Assyrians and the Babylonians both moved conquered peoples in large numbers, because it broke a nation’s spirit, made revolt harder and brought skilled workers into the empire.

So “king Nebuchadnezzar sent, and brought him to Babylon”, and with the king went the leading people of Judah, among them skilled craftsmen, fighting men and the prophet Ezekiel, whom God called to prophesy among the exiles in Babylon (Ezekiel 1:1–3). Jehoiachin’s reign was among the shortest in Judah’s history, and its end opened the Babylonian captivity, which shaped God’s people for centuries afterward.

Nebuchadnezzar took the treasures of the temple along with the king (2 Kings 24:13). The word for vessels, kᵉlîy, means something prepared, and it covers any implement, utensil or article. “Goodly” translates chemdâh, delight, something precious. Together they name the valued articles and furnishings used in the worship and service of the LORD in his house at Jerusalem.

To Babylon these were spoils, and by the conquerors’ way of thinking they were a public sign that their gods had overcome the God of the people they ruled. For Judah their loss was a stripping away of glory from the house where God dwelt among his people, and it was the fruit of the people’s long unfaithfulness. The temple had been plundered before, and each time its glory grew less. The worship went on while the people forsook the LORD, and God takes no pleasure in outward forms of religion kept up without obedience from the heart.

The loss of the vessels also pointed ahead. About a decade later, in Zedekiah’s reign, the temple itself and Jerusalem were destroyed (2 Chronicles 36:19).

Zedekiah was Jehoiachin’s uncle, the brother of his father Jehoiakim, as 2 Kings 24:17 says, and the word ʼâch, brother, was also used of a kinsman or close relative. Calling him “his brother” keeps the succession within the royal family of David.

The change lay in who chose the king. Nebuchadnezzar “made Zedekiah his brother king over Judah and Jerusalem”, so the throne of David now went to the man Babylon picked, a king who reigned at a foreign master’s pleasure. Jeremiah’s account of King Zedekiah begins from this appointment (Jeremiah 37:1). Judah had lost the power to govern itself.

Nebuchadnezzar is the one acting in every clause of verse 10: he sent, he brought, he made. Behind him stands the LORD. Through Jeremiah God called Nebuchadnezzar his servant (Jeremiah 27:6), and Daniel praises the God who changes times and seasons, who removes kings and sets up kings (Daniel 2:21). The king of Babylon served God’s purpose without knowing him, and so God’s own people were judged, and his own house was emptied, by the hand of a king who worshipped other gods.

The exile came as God had warned. His covenant with Israel held warnings for disobedience along with its blessings, and through Jeremiah he said that because Judah would not hear his words he would bring the king of Babylon against the land (Jeremiah 25:8–11). The judgment was just, and it was discipline as well, meant to purify a rebellious people, humble them and prepare them for a return. Jeremiah also set its length at seventy years (Jeremiah 25:11–12), so from the beginning the captivity had an end appointed by God.

God promised David a son whose throne would be established for ever (2 Samuel 7:12–16). By Jehoiachin’s day David’s line had given Judah king after king who led the nation astray, and in these verses its king is led away to Babylon. Jehoiachin is also called Jeconiah and Coniah, and under that name Jeremiah prophesied against him (Jeremiah 22:24–30). Yet he is named in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:11–12), where the carrying away into Babylon marks one of the stages of the line (Matthew 1:17). The God whose name Jehoiachin bore did establish David’s house, through judgment and exile, in the Son of David.

Jesus is the King that Jehoiachin was meant to be. He is holy and without sin (Hebrews 7:26, 1 Peter 2:22), and he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), the very sin that sent Judah into exile. The angel promised that God would give him the throne of his father David, and that “of his kingdom there shall be no end” (Luke 1:32–33). He told Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), and he is King of kings and Lord of lords (Revelation 19:16). Where Judah’s king went into captivity, the Son sets his people free indeed (John 8:36).

The vessels of the temple could be carried off, and the temple itself was later destroyed. Jesus spoke of the temple of his body, which would be destroyed and raised up in three days (John 2:19), and he rose on the third day. God now dwells in his people by his Spirit, so that they are his temple (1 Corinthians 3:16).

These two short verses show a God who sees. Jehoiachin’s reign was brief, and it was weighed in full “in the sight of the LORD”, whatever the king’s age and however short his time. They show how far the choices of a leader reach, since the sin of Judah’s kings brought ruin on the whole nation. They show the LORD ruling over the most powerful king of the day and using him for his own purposes.

Above all they show that God’s word holds. The warnings he gave through the prophets came true, to the month and the season. The promise he made to David came true as well, in Christ, through the very king who was carried away to Babylon. Even the darkest season of Judah’s history was under his hand, with an end set to it, and the God who kept both his warnings and his promises then is the same God his people trust today.