Jehoiachin: Eighteen Years Old, Three Months King, Then Babylon

A king of Judah at the end of the kingdom

Jehoiachin (Hebrew יְהוֹיָכִין), also called Jeconiah and Jechoniah in the texts that name him, was a king of Judah in the era of the divided kingdom, around 975 BC to 586 BC (era placed on Ussher's chronology of 1650). He belonged to the tribe of Judah. His name is scattered across seven books, twenty-two verses in all: nine mentions in Jeremiah, five in 2 Kings, two each in 2 Chronicles, 1 Chronicles and Matthew, and one each in Ezekiel and Esther. That is a wide footprint for a man whose recorded reign lasted a season.

The family the records name

His father was Jehoiakim. "So Jehoiakim slept with his fathers, and Jehoiachin his son reigned in his place" (2 Kings 24:6). His mother is named with unusual care: "His mother's name was Nehushta the daughter of Elnathan of Jerusalem" (2 Kings 24:8). The Chronicler's genealogy runs, "The sons of Jehoiakim: Jeconiah his son, and Zedekiah his son. The sons of Jeconiah, the captive: Shealtiel his son," (1 Chronicles 3:16-17). The title attached to him there is not king but captive.

Matthew's genealogy names the line differently at this point: "Josiah became the father of Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the exile to Babylon" (Matthew 1:11). The dossier gives Jehoiakim as his father from 2 Kings 24:6; Matthew's compressed list places him after Josiah. Both stand in the text, and neither is smoothed away here.

No story, only notices

It has to be said plainly: no scene is told about Jehoiachin. Every mention of him in Scripture is a list, a genealogy, a dating formula or a passing note. He never speaks. No one speaks to him in any recorded exchange. He is the man about whom things are said.

What the notices say is this. He came to the throne when his father died (2 Kings 24:6). "Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he began to reign, and he reigned in Jerusalem three months" (2 Kings 24:8). The Chronicler's account gives different figures: "Jehoiachin was eight years old when he began to reign, and he reigned three months and ten days in Jerusalem" (2 Chronicles 36:9). Eight or eighteen, the reign is measured in months, not years.

Then the ending, and it is a surrender rather than a battle: "and Jehoiachin the king of Judah went out to the king of Babylon, he, and his mother, and his servants, and his princes, and his officers; and the king of Babylon captured him in the eighth year of his reign" (2 Kings 24:12). The whole household walks out of the city together. His mother, named a few verses earlier, goes with him. He is carried away as recorded also in 2 Kings 24:15.

His name then becomes a marker other writers use. He is mentioned in 2 Kings 25:27, in Jeremiah 22:11, 22:24, 22:28, 24:1, 27:20, 28:4, 29:2, 37:1 and 52:31, in Ezekiel 1:2, and in Esther 2:6. A king of three months became a fixed point by which later years and later exiles were reckoned.

The verdict Scripture writes over him

The judgment is one sentence, and it is not softened: "He did that which was evil in Yahweh's sight" (2 Chronicles 36:9). Whatever an eight or eighteen year old could accomplish in three months, the record does not excuse him for youth or for brevity. He inherited a throne from a father whose "abominations" the same chapter names (2 Chronicles 36:8), and he walked the same road. The Chronicler does not tell us which acts earned the verdict. He simply files it.

What we are not told

We are not told what Jehoiachin did in those three months, what counsel he took, or why he went out to the king of Babylon rather than resisting. We are not told what he thought of the exile, whether he repented, or how he died. The two ages given in 2 Kings 24:8 and 2 Chronicles 36:9 are not reconciled for us. Because no scene is told about him, everything of his inner life is silence. Anyone who fills that silence is inventing.

The line that runs through him

And yet the genealogy keeps him. "After the exile to Babylon, Jechoniah became the father of Shealtiel. Shealtiel became the father of Zerubbabel" (Matthew 1:12). The one whom 1 Chronicles 3:17 calls "the captive" is the one through whom Matthew traces the descent to Christ. The chain does not break at the deported king. Matthew names him in the same breath as the exile itself (Matthew 1:11), and then carries the line forward past it.

That is the strange mercy in this short entry. A boy king with an evil verdict over his name, taken out of Jerusalem with his mother and his servants and his officers, is still a link the Gospel refuses to drop. God's promise ran on through a man whose only recorded act was to walk out and surrender.