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2 Chronicles 36: What the Passage Says

76 claims across 23 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What 2 Chronicles 36 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter runs quickly through four kings of Judah: Jehoahaz, whom Egypt deposes; Jehoiakim; Jehoiachin, whom Babylon carries off; and Zedekiah. It reports that the leaders of the priests and the people were unfaithful, that they mocked the messengers the LORD sent, and that Babylon then burned the temple, broke down Jerusalem's wall, and carried the survivors into exile. The land lay empty for seventy years, as the LORD had said through Jeremiah. The book closes with Cyrus king of Persia announcing that he has been charged to build a house for the LORD in Jerusalem, and inviting the LORD's people to go up.

Claim by Claim

  1. 36:1
    • The people of the land took Jehoahaz son of Josiah.
    • The people of the land made Jehoahaz king in Jerusalem in place of his father.
  2. 36:2
    • Jehoahaz was twenty-three years old when he began to reign.
    • Jehoahaz reigned three months in Jerusalem.
  3. 36:3
    • The king of Egypt removed Jehoahaz from the throne at Jerusalem.
    • The king of Egypt imposed a fine on the land of a hundred talents of silver and a talent of gold.
  4. 36:4
    • The king of Egypt made Eliakim, Jehoahaz's brother, king over Judah and Jerusalem.
    • The king of Egypt changed Eliakim's name to Jehoiakim.
    • Necho took Jehoahaz, Eliakim's brother, and brought him to Egypt.
  5. 36:5
    • Jehoiakim was twenty-five years old when he began to reign.
    • Jehoiakim reigned eleven years in Jerusalem.
    • Jehoiakim did what was evil in the sight of the LORD his God.
  6. 36:6
    • Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up against Jehoiakim.
    • Nebuchadnezzar bound Jehoiakim in bronze fetters to take him to Babylon.
  7. 36:7
    • Nebuchadnezzar carried some of the vessels of the house of the LORD to Babylon.
    • Nebuchadnezzar put those vessels in his temple in Babylon.
  8. 36:8
    • The rest of the acts of Jehoiakim are written in the book of the kings of Israel and Judah.
    • The abominations Jehoiakim committed are written in that book.
    • What was found against Jehoiakim is written in that book.
    • Jehoiachin, Jehoiakim's son, reigned in his place.
  9. 36:9
    • Jehoiachin was eight years old when he began to reign.
    • Jehoiachin reigned three months and ten days in Jerusalem.
    • Jehoiachin did what was evil in the sight of the LORD.
  10. 36:10
    • At the turn of the year king Nebuchadnezzar sent and brought Jehoiachin to Babylon.
    • Nebuchadnezzar brought the precious vessels of the house of the LORD to Babylon along with him.
    • Nebuchadnezzar made Zedekiah, Jehoiachin's brother, king over Judah and Jerusalem.
  11. 36:11
    • Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he began to reign.
    • Zedekiah reigned eleven years in Jerusalem.
  12. 36:12
    • Zedekiah did what was evil in the sight of the LORD his God.
    • Zedekiah did not humble himself before Jeremiah the prophet, who spoke from the mouth of the LORD.
  13. 36:13
    • Zedekiah rebelled against king Nebuchadnezzar.
    • Nebuchadnezzar had made Zedekiah swear an oath by God.
    • Zedekiah stiffened his neck.
    • Zedekiah hardened his heart against turning to the LORD, the God of Israel.
  14. 36:14
    • All the chief of the priests and the people were exceedingly unfaithful.
    • They followed all the abominations of the nations.
    • They defiled the house of the LORD in Jerusalem.
    • The LORD had consecrated that house in Jerusalem.
  15. 36:15
    • The LORD, the God of their fathers, sent word to them by his messengers.
    • He sent them persistently, again and again.
    • He did so because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place.
  16. 36:16
    • They mocked the messengers of God.
    • They despised his words.
    • They scoffed at his prophets.
    • The wrath of the LORD rose against his people because of this.
    • The wrath rose until there was no remedy.
  17. 36:17
    • The LORD brought the king of the Chaldeans up against them.
    • The king of the Chaldeans killed their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary.
    • He had no compassion on young man or young woman, on the old or the infirm.
    • God gave them all into his hand.
  18. 36:18
    • He brought all the vessels of the house of God, great and small, to Babylon.
    • He brought the treasures of the house of the LORD to Babylon.
    • He brought the treasures of the king and of his officials to Babylon.
  19. 36:19
    • They burned the house of God.
    • They broke down the wall of Jerusalem.
    • They burned all its palaces with fire.
    • They destroyed all its precious vessels.
  20. 36:20
    • He carried away to Babylon those who had escaped the sword.
    • They became servants to him and to his sons.
    • They remained servants until the reign of the kingdom of Persia.
  21. 36:21
    • This fulfilled the word of the LORD spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah.
    • It continued until the land had enjoyed its sabbaths.
    • The land kept sabbath all the days of its desolation.
    • This lasted until seventy years were completed.
  22. 36:22
    • This was in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia.
    • It happened so that the word of the LORD spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah might be accomplished.
    • The LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia.
    • Cyrus made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom.
    • Cyrus also put the proclamation in writing.
  23. 36:23
    • Cyrus king of Persia said this.
    • Cyrus said the LORD, the God of heaven, had given him all the kingdoms of the earth.
    • Cyrus said the LORD had charged him to build him a house in Jerusalem.
    • Jerusalem is in Judah.
    • Cyrus asked who among them belonged to all the LORD's people.
    • Cyrus said the LORD his God be with such a man.
    • Cyrus said let such a man go up.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

36:1
"The people of the land" is a fixed term in Judah for the free landholding citizens of the country, as distinct from the court and the officials in the capital. Several times in these books they act as a body to settle the succession. Their choice here follows the death of King Josiah, killed in battle against Egypt in the previous chapter.
36:2
Three months is a very short time to be king. Most kings ruled for many years.
36:3
A talent was a weight of roughly seventy-five pounds (about thirty-four kilograms), so the sum is close to three and a half tons of silver and seventy-five pounds of gold. This was not a court fine but tribute imposed by a conqueror; Judah is being made a paying dependency of Egypt.
36:4
The king of Egypt is Necho II. Giving a new name to the king he installed was an assertion of ownership: an overlord who could rename you controlled you. Both names are built on the same root, but "Eliakim" means roughly "God establishes" and "Jehoiakim" substitutes the personal name of Israel's God, so the change also declared under whose authority the new king ruled.
36:5
"Did what was evil in the sight of the LORD" is a set formula these books use when summing up a reign. It is a judgment on the king's religious policy, chiefly whether he tolerated or promoted the worship of other gods, rather than a comment on his personal character or his competence as a ruler.
36:6
Nebuchadnezzar II ruled Babylon from 605 to 562 BC. In 605 Babylon smashed the Egyptian army at Carchemish and took over the whole belt of small kingdoms Egypt had been holding, Judah among them. So Jehoiakim, who had been installed by Egypt, abruptly found himself the subject of a different and far more dangerous empire.
36:7
The "objects" are the equipment of the temple: basins, bowls, lamps, censers and other fittings of gold and bronze. Carrying a defeated nation's sacred objects home and depositing them in your own god's temple was standard practice for Mesopotamian kings; it displayed the victory as a victory of your god over theirs.
36:8
The Book of the Kings of Israel and Judah is a source the writer is citing, now lost. It is not the biblical books of 1 and 2 Kings. "What was found against him" is deliberately vague in the Hebrew and has been read both as charges laid against Jehoiakim and as things discovered about him.
36:9
The Hebrew text of Chronicles reads "eight," but the parallel account in 2 Kings 24:8, along with some manuscripts and the ancient Greek version, reads "eighteen." Eighteen fits the surrounding narrative better, since Jehoiachin is described elsewhere as already having wives. The discrepancy is in the manuscripts themselves and cannot be settled from the text alone.
36:10
"At the turn of the year" means the spring, when kings normally resumed campaigning after the winter rains. The King James calls Zedekiah Jehoiachin's "brother"; the Hebrew word covers any close male relative, and 2 Kings 24:17 identifies him as Jehoiachin's uncle, a younger son of Josiah.
36:12
Jeremiah was a prophet active in Jerusalem through these decades, and the book bearing his name records his warnings that resistance to Babylon would destroy the city. "Humble himself before" a prophet means accepting the message as coming from God, not showing deference to the man.
36:13
Nebuchadnezzar had installed Zedekiah as a vassal and bound him by an oath sworn in the name of Zedekiah's own God. Breaking such an oath was both treaty-breaking and, in the terms of the day, an offense against the god invoked as witness.
36:14
"Abominations" is the standard word for the religious practices of neighboring peoples, images, shrines, and their attendant rites. To make the temple "unclean" is a ritual category, not a matter of dirt: it means the building had been used in ways that disqualified it from its set-apart purpose.
36:15
"Rising up betimes" in the King James renders a Hebrew idiom, literally "rising early," used to mean doing something persistently and urgently. The "dwelling place" God is said to pity is the temple in Jerusalem.
36:16
"Misused" in 1611 English means mistreated or abused, not used for the wrong purpose. The prophets in question were beaten, imprisoned and in some cases killed.
36:17
The Chaldeans were a people of southern Babylonia; the dynasty Nebuchadnezzar belonged to came from among them, so the name is used as a synonym for the Babylonian empire. Killing men "in the house of their sanctuary" is pointed: the temple precinct was a place of asylum, and the slaughter shows the protection failed.
36:18
Officials were the king's helpers who ran the country for him.
36:19
This is 586 BC. The temple Solomon built had stood for roughly four hundred years and was the only place where sacrifice could legally be offered, so its destruction did not just remove a building; it ended the entire public religious system of Judah and forced the survivors to work out what worshiping God without a temple could even look like.
36:20
"Servants" here means subject population owing labor and tribute to the crown, not privately owned household slaves. "His sons" means the kings who succeeded Nebuchadnezzar on the Babylonian throne.
36:21
The law of Leviticus 25 required that farmland be left unworked every seventh year, its "sabbath." The writer reads the empty land as finally taking, all at once, the rest years it had been denied. The seventy years is the figure Jeremiah gave for the length of Babylonian domination (Jeremiah 25:11; 29:10).
36:22
Cyrus of Persia captured Babylon in 539 BC; his first year as ruler over the former Babylonian empire was 538 BC. "Stirred up the spirit" is an idiom for prompting someone to act. Cyrus is known from his own inscriptions to have made a policy of returning displaced peoples and their gods to their home sanctuaries.
36:23
"The God of heaven" was the usual title for the God of the Jews in official documents of the Persian period. "Go up" is the standard idiom for traveling to Jerusalem, which sits high in the hill country, whatever direction you come from. The book breaks off in mid-sentence here; the same proclamation is given in fuller form at the start of Ezra.

Read 2 Chronicles 36