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From: 2 Chronicles 24:17-25
Joash’s infidelity
[20] Then the Spirit of God took possession of Zechariah the son of Jehoiada the
priest; and he stood above the people, and said to them, “Thus says God, ‘Why
do you transgress the commandments of the Lord, so that you cannot prosper?
Because you have forsaken the Lord, he has forsaken you.’” [21] But they con-
spired against him, and by command of the king they stoned him with stones
in the court of the house of the Lord. [22] Thus Joash the king did not remember
the kindness which Jehoiada, Zechariah’s father, had shown him, but killed his
son. And when he was dying, they said, “May the Lord see and avenge!”
[23] At the end of the year the army of the Syrians came up against Joash. They
came to Judah and Jerusalem, and destroyed all the princes of the people from
among the people, and sent all their spoil to the king of Damascus. [24] Though
the army of the Syrians had come with few men, the Lord delivered into their
hand a very great army, because they had forsaken the Lord, the God of their
fathers. Thus they executed judgment on Joash.
[25] When they had departed from him, leaving him severely wounded, his ser-
vants conspired against him because of the blood of the son of Jehoiada the
priest, and slew him on his bed. So he died; and they buried him in the city of
David, but they did not bury him in the tombs of the kings.
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Commentary:
24:1-27. The account of the reign of Joash is written with a clearly pedagogical
purpose; we divide it into two stages, to help show the religious message it
contains.
The first stage (vv. 1-16) is all about the collection of monies to pay for the re-
storation of the temple (it follows the parallel passage of 2 Kings 12:1-17). Du-
ring these years the real protagonist is Jehoiada the priest, who implemented
the king’s initiatives to do with rebuilding the temple and returning it to its origi-
nal splendour (v. 13). When Jehoiada died, he was buried in the city of David,
that is to say, he was accorded royal honours.
The second stage was marked by disloyalty to the Lord and by idolatry. The
military defeats and conspiracies were forms of punishment for the king’s trans-
gressions (vv. 17-26). Joash’s worst crime was the shameful execution of the
son of Jehoiada, the prophet Zechariah (not the same person as the last of the
minor prophets), who had dared to denounce the king’s crimes. For this sin the
king himself will lose his life at the hands of conspirators (v. 25). Once again we
can see that God does not leave crimes unavenged.
This Zechariah is probably the prophet Jesus referred to as a prime example of
an innocent victim sacrificed by his own people: “that upon you may come all the
righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of the innocent Abel to the blood of
Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and
the altar” (Mt 23:35). The fact that Jesus calls him “son of Barachiah” instead of
“son of Jehoiada” could be because different genealogies were being used, or else
there may have been some error in the transmission of the text. Anyway, given
that the book of Chronicles is the last book in the Hebrew Bible, Jesus is saying
that all innocent victims, from the first (Abel) to the last (Zechariah), are figures of
the Christian martyrs and share in the redemption Christ effected by his death on
the cross: “Moreover, my brothers, you must not think that all those good men
who suffered persecution at the hands of the wicked – including those who were
sent to announce the coming of the Lord – were not members of Christ’s body.
Any man who belongs to the city of which Christ is the king must be a servant of
Christ. That city runs from the blood of the innocent Abel to the blood of Zecha-
riah. And on from there, from the blood of John [the Baptist], through that of the
apostles and martyrs and all those who were faithful to Christ: these people to-
gether make up the city of which we speak” (St Augustine, Enarrationes in
Psalmos, 61, 3).
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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.
Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.