2 Chronicles: The Last Page of My Bible

At a Glance

Who wrote it: The same unknown writer as 1 Chronicles.

When: Probably the 300s BC.

Where it fits: Set from King Solomon, about 970 BC, to the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and the end of the exile, retelling 1 and 2 Kings from Judah’s side; written one or two centuries after the exiles came home.

Where I quote it: The murder of Zechariah in the Temple courtyard, the last murder of a prophet in my scriptures (Luke 11:51; Matthew 23:35; 2 Chronicles 24:20–22).

If you only read three chapters: 2 Chronicles 24, 2 Chronicles 30 and 2 Chronicles 36.

Words to Know

Sabbath of the land — the rest the Law gave the fields every seventh year.

Cyrus — the Persian king who conquered Babylon in 539 BC and let the exiles go home.

Repentance — turning around. The Chronicler believes anyone can do it, even the worst king.

The Book in Brief

Second Chronicles follows the kings of Judah from Solomon to the exile.

Chapters 1 to 9 are Solomon’s reign. God offers him whatever he asks, and he asks for wisdom. With help from the king of Tyre, he builds the Temple. At its dedication the priests bring in the ark of the covenant, the singers praise God, and a cloud fills the house. After Solomon’s prayer, fire comes down from heaven on the sacrifices. God answers him in the night with a promise and a warning. The queen of Sheba visits, and Solomon grows rich and famous.

In chapter 10, his son Rehoboam refuses to lighten the people’s load, and the northern tribes break away. From then on the book follows only David’s line in Judah, and mentions the north only when it touches Judah.

Chapters 11 to 36 take those kings one by one. Kings who seek the LORD prosper. Kings who turn away meet trouble, often announced by a prophet. Jehoshaphat sends teachers of the Law through the towns, and wins a battle by sending singers ahead of his army. Joash repairs the Temple, then has Zechariah stoned. Uzziah grows proud, burns incense in the Temple, and is struck with a skin disease.

In chapters 29 to 32, King Hezekiah cleanses the Temple, holds a great Passover, and invites the northern tribes to it. When Assyria attacks Jerusalem, God saves the city. His son Manasseh is the worst king of all, but in chapter 33 he is taken captive to Babylon, humbles himself, and is brought home. In chapters 34 and 35, Josiah cleanses the land, the book of the Law is found in the Temple, and he keeps a great Passover. Then he dies fighting Egypt.

In chapter 36, after four more kings, the Babylonians burn the Temple, break down Jerusalem’s walls and take the survivors to Babylon, and the land lies desolate for seventy years. The book ends with Cyrus, king of Persia, announcing that God has charged him to build a house in Jerusalem, and that any of God’s people may go up.

Second Chronicles retells the story of the kings of Judah from Solomon to the exile. It mostly ignores the northern kingdom. For the Chronicler, the true Israel was the one that kept the Temple in Jerusalem.

And in the Jewish order, this is the last book of the scriptures. Its last words are the words of a foreign king telling the exiles to go home: Whoever there is among you of all his people, the LORD his God be with him, and let him go up (2 Chronicles 36:23).¹

That is most likely how my Bible ended. Not with a warning, as yours does with Malachi. With go up.

Zechariah in the courtyard

In 2 Chronicles 24, after the good priest Jehoiada dies, King Joash and his officials turn to other gods. Jehoiada’s son Zechariah stands up in the Temple and warns them.

They conspired against him, and stoned him with stones at the commandment of the king in the court of the LORD’s house. As he died, he said, May the LORD look at it, and repay it (2 Chronicles 24:21–22).

When I spoke against the Pharisees and the lawyers, I said that this generation would be charged with the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world … from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zachariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary (Luke 11:50–51).

Abel was the first murder in Genesis. Zechariah is the last prophet murdered in Chronicles. From the first page to the last. In Matthew’s version, Zechariah is called son of Barachiah, which seems to mix him up with the prophet Zechariah of a later book.² The man I meant was the one stoned in the courtyard, by order of the king, for telling the truth.

Go deeperWhich Zechariah?

Matthew’s copy of my words names the murdered man as Zachariah son of Barachiah (Matthew 23:35). The man stoned in Chronicles was the son of Jehoiada. People have tried to untangle this for nearly two thousand years.

One answer is that the two Zechariahs had already run together in people’s memory. The prophet Zechariah, whose book is near the end of your Old Testament, was the son of Berechiah and the grandson of Iddo. An Aramaic paraphrase of Lamentations, written down centuries after my day and read in the synagogues, accuses the people of killing “Zechariah the son of Iddo, the high priest and faithful prophet” in the sanctuary. Nothing in the scriptures says the prophet was killed. The paraphrase gave him the other Zechariah’s death.³

A second answer comes from Jerome, the scholar who translated the Bible into Latin around the year 400. He wrote that in the gospel used by a group of Jewish followers of mine, called the Nazarenes, the verse read “son of Joiada,” which is Jehoiada.⁴

A third answer looks forward instead of back. The Jewish historian Josephus tells how, during the war with Rome, about AD 68, rebels murdered a respected man named Zechariah, son of Baris or Baruch, “in the middle of the temple.” A few scholars have thought Matthew’s wording was shaped by that killing. Most doubt it. Abel and Zechariah of Chronicles mark the first and last murders in the scriptures, and Luke has the same saying with no father’s name at all (Luke 11:51).⁵

The murder in the courtyard haunted my people for a long time. A rabbinic legend says that Zechariah’s blood went on seething on the Temple floor for more than two hundred years. When the Babylonian general who burned the Temple saw it, he killed great numbers of scholars, young priests and schoolchildren over it, and only when he cried out to Zechariah by name did it rest.⁶

Heaven cannot contain you

When Solomon dedicates the Temple, the Chronicler gives him a long prayer, taken mostly from Kings. In the middle of it, Solomon says the most honest thing anyone could say at the opening of a temple:

But will God indeed dwell with men on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens can’t contain you; how much less this house which I have built! (2 Chronicles 6:18).

And Solomon prays for foreigners, too: when they come from a distant land and pray toward this house, then hear from heaven, even from your dwelling place, and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you for; that all the peoples of the earth may know your name (2 Chronicles 6:32–33).

When I drove the money-changers out of the Temple courts, I quoted Isaiah: My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations (Mark 11:17). Solomon’s prayer had already asked for it.

Go deeperWhat happened to the ark?

At the dedication, the priests carry the ark of the covenant into the inner room of the Temple, and the Chronicler repeats from Kings that its poles are there to this day (2 Chronicles 5:9; compare 1 Kings 8:8). Its last mention is when Josiah tells the Levites, Put the holy ark in the house which Solomon the son of David king of Israel built (2 Chronicles 35:3). Then it vanishes. Neither Kings nor Chronicles says what became of it, and the lists of Temple treasures the Babylonians carried off do not name it.

Jeremiah had already told the people they would not miss it: They won’t remember it. They won’t miss it, nor will another be made (Jeremiah 3:16).

Others could not let it go. 2 Maccabees, written a little over a century before I was born, says that Jeremiah, warned by God, carried the ark to the mountain from which Moses saw the promised land, and sealed it in a cave, to stay hidden until God gathers his people again. The rabbis later told of a priest who noticed an odd paving stone in a Temple storeroom and died before he could tell anyone, so it was said that the ark lay beneath it. Others among them said it had been carried off to Babylon.⁷

In my day the inner room was empty. Josephus, who came from a priestly family and knew that Temple, says there was nothing in it at all. When the Roman general Pompey forced his way in, sixty years before I was born, the Roman historian Tacitus says it became common knowledge that “the place was empty and the secret shrine contained nothing.”⁸

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church says the ark is at Aksum, in Ethiopia, brought there by a son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba, and that only one monk, its guardian, may see it.⁹

Solomon had already said what matters most. Heaven cannot contain God, much less a house, and much less a wooden chest.

If my people

You may know one verse from this book better than any other, from signs and bumper stickers:

If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin, and will heal their land (2 Chronicles 7:14).

Read the verse just before it. God is speaking to Solomon about Israel, about drought and locusts and plague in the land of Israel (2 Chronicles 7:13). My people means Israel. Their land means the land around Jerusalem.

It is a beautiful promise about humility and turning back. It is not a promise about any modern country, and it was never addressed to one.

The prayer for the unclean

Here is a story Kings does not tell.

King Hezekiah holds a great Passover in Jerusalem, and he sends letters even to the remnant of the northern tribes, inviting them to come. Most of them laugh at his messengers. Some come (2 Chronicles 30:10–11).

Many of those who came had not purified themselves according to the Law, but they ate the Passover anyway. Hezekiah does not throw them out. He prays for them: May the good LORD pardon everyone who sets his heart to seek God … even if they aren’t clean according to the purification of the sanctuary. And the book says, The LORD listened to Hezekiah, and healed the people (2 Chronicles 30:18–20).

A king praying that the heart counts for more than the rules of purity. I ate with people the religious leaders called unclean, and they called me a glutton and a drunkard for it. Hezekiah would have understood.

The worst king repents

In Kings, Manasseh is the worst king who ever lived, and the exile is his fault (2 Kings 21; 24:3–4).

Chronicles adds an ending. The Assyrians take Manasseh to Babylon with hooks and chains. In his distress, he humbles himself and prays. God hears him and brings him home, and he spends the rest of his reign tearing down the idols he set up (2 Chronicles 33:10–16).

Historians cannot confirm that story.¹⁰ But listen to what the Chronicler believed: even the worst king in Judah’s history could repent and be heard. Centuries later, someone wrote the prayer Manasseh might have prayed, and it is in some Bibles today as the Prayer of Manasseh.

I told the story of a son who wasted everything and came home, and of a father who ran to meet him. The Chronicler had already told it about a king.

Go deeperCould Manasseh have been taken to Babylon?

Manasseh reigned fifty-five years, longer than any other king of Judah (2 Kings 21:1). Those were the years when Assyria ruled the whole region, and Assyria’s records know him. The Assyrian king Esarhaddon lists “Manasseh, king of Judah” among twenty-two kings he made haul cedar beams and stone to Nineveh for his palace there, in the 670s BC. A few years later Esarhaddon’s son Ashurbanipal names him among the kings who helped with a campaign against Egypt.¹¹

So Manasseh was a vassal, a king who kept his throne by obeying a greater one. But no Assyrian record says he was ever arrested.¹⁰

Some historians think the story could still be true. Assyrian kings did call suspect vassals to account. Ashurbanipal’s own annals tell of an Egyptian vassal king, Necho, who was caught plotting, carried off to Nineveh, then pardoned, dressed in fine clothes and sent home to rule again. That is close to what Chronicles says of Manasseh. Babylon is a puzzle, since Nineveh was Assyria’s capital. But Babylon rose against Ashurbanipal from 652 to 648 BC, under his own brother, and a king of Judah suspected of siding with the rebels might have been called to answer for it there.¹²

Other scholars think the Chronicler built the story to solve a problem in his own teaching. He believed that God rewards the faithful and punishes the wicked within their own lifetimes. Then why did the worst king reign the longest? A Manasseh who repented answered the question.¹³

Either way, the Chronicler wanted his readers to know that it is never too late to turn around.

The land gets its rest

At the very end, Jerusalem falls, the Temple is burned, and the survivors are taken to Babylon. Then the Chronicler explains the exile in a way that surprises people:

To fulfill the LORD’s word by Jeremiah’s mouth, until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths. As long as it lay desolate, it kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years (2 Chronicles 36:21).

The Law gave the land a rest every seventh year. The kings and landowners had not given it. So the land took its rest anyway, all at once, while its owners were in exile.¹⁴

Go up

Then, in the last two verses, Cyrus, king of Persia, issues a decree. God has charged him to build a house in Jerusalem. Any of God’s people may go up (2 Chronicles 36:22–23).

The scriptures I grew up on most likely ended there, with a foreign king saying go up, and a people standing at the start of a road home. They did not end with everything fixed. They ended with an open door.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 2 Chronicles 24:20–22, then Luke 11:50–51.

You will find: the last murder of a prophet in the Jewish scriptures, and my use of it.

Then read 2 Chronicles 7:13–14 together. See who “my people” are and which land is meant.

The Short Version

• In the Jewish order, 2 Chronicles is the last book of the scriptures, and it ends with “Let him go up.”
• “From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zachariah” meant from the first murder in the scriptures to the last murder of a prophet.
• “If my people … heal their land” was spoken about Israel and its land.
• Hezekiah prayed for people who were not ritually clean, and God healed them.
• The Chronicler believed even Manasseh, the worst king, could repent, and that the exile gave the land the sabbaths it had been denied.