Week 24 2 Chronicles 36
In the last week of May 2023 I ranked the fifteen kings of Judah. I purposely didn’t bother with the last four kings since it’s a little difficult to think of a person being a king if a foreign ruler is telling him what to do. But technically there were 19 kings. Not 15.
But I decided to look at the Last Four this year: Jehoahaz Jehoiakim Jehoiachin & Zedekiah. The one big thing they had in common was that they all did evil in the sight of the Lord. Even though Jehoahaz and Jehoiachin only had short reigns – about three months – they took that narrow window of opportunity to do-evil (and it’s possible they acted evilly before the were crowned and after they were deposed.)
Anyway the point is that I didn’t find anything good about any of them. And what that means is that if I had included them in my 2023 ranking they all would have been at or near the very bottom of the list for the same reason that landed Ahaziah Jehoram Ahaz & Amon at numbers 12 13 14 & 15 last year: not a single good quality was recorded about them.
Note: an interesting take-away for me was the reminder about Jehoiachin. In his long exile in Babylon he had a grandson named Zerubbabel who was one of the people who returned to Jerusalem after the exile. His story is told in Ezra 1-6. And one other thing…Jehoiachin and Zerubbabel also show up in Matthew’s family name list of Jesus.