Bible Error: How Old was Ahaziah?

The late Dr. Gleason L. Archer addressed the issue of Ahaziah’s reign and age, since 2 Kings. 8:26 states he was 22 whereas 2 Chronicles 22:2 states he was 42.

When did Ahaziah ben Jehoram become king?

2 Kings 8:25 says that Ahaziah son of Jehoram of Judah became king in the twelfth year of Jehoram son of Ahab of Israel. Yet in 2 Kings 9:29 it is stated that it was in his eleventh year. Which is right? Is there not a discrepancy of one year?

The answer is that Ahaziah ben Jehoram became king in 841 B.C., which according to the nonaccession-year system came out to Jehoram ben Ahab’s twelfth year, but according to the accession-year system was his eleventh year. In 2 Kings 8:25 the nonaccession-year system was used, but in 2 Kings 9:29 it was the accession-year system that was followed. Confusing?

The fact of the matter is, however, that the Northern Kingdom followed the nonaccession-year system from 930 B.C. until 798 B.C., but from 798 (the beginning of the reign of Jehoash ben Jehoahaz) till the Fall of Samaria in 722 B.C., it switched to the accession-year system. The southern kingdom, on the other hand, used the accession-year system from 930 until the beginning of the reign of Jehoram ben Jehoshaphat (848-841), or possibly a couple of years earlier, in 850 B.C., before Jehoshaphat died. Around 850 the southern kingdom of Judah switched to the nonaccession-year system and stayed on it until the end of the reign of Joash ben Ahaziah (835-796)–when it finally reverted to the accession-year system (i.e., the first official regnal year did not begin until New Year’s Day of the year following the year when the new king came to the throne). Therefore, by the accession-year system, what was the eleventh year of Jehoram was the twelfth year by the nonaccession-year system, i.e., 841 B.C. No discrepancy!

How old was Ahaziah when he began to reign (cf. 2 Kings 8:26 with 2 Chron. 22:2) and Jehoiachin when he began to reign (cf. 2 Kings 24:8 with 2 Chron. 36:9-10)?

Copyists were prone to making two types of scribal errors. One concerned the spelling of proper names (especially unfamiliar proper names), and the other had to do with numbers. Ideally, we might have wished that the Holy Spirit had restrained all copyists of Scripture over the centuries from making mistakes of any kind; but an errorless copy would have required a miracle, and this was not the way it worked out.

It is beyond the capability of anyone to avoid any and every slip of the pen in copying page after page from any book–sacred or secular. Yet we may be sure that the original manuscript of each book of the Bible, being directly inspired by God, was free from all error. It is also true that no well-attested variation in the manuscript copies that have come down to us alter any doctrine of the Bible. To this extent, at least, the Holy Spirit has exercised a restraining influence in superintending the transmission of the text.

These two examples of numerical discrepancy have to do with the decade in the number given. In 2 Chronicles 22:2 Ahaziah is said to have been forty-two; in 2 Kings 8:26 he is said to have been twenty-two. Fortunately there is enough additional information in the biblical text to show that the correct number is twenty-two. 2 Kings 8:17 tells us that Ahaziah’s father Joram ben Ahab was thirty-two when he became king, and he died eight years later, at the age of forty. Therefore Ahaziah could not have been forty-two at the time of his father’s death at age forty!

Similar is the case of Jehoiachin, whose age at accession is given by 2 Chronicles 36:910 as eight but by 2 Kings 24:8 as eighteen. There is enough information in the context to show that eight is wrong and eighteen is right. That is to say, Jehoiachin reigned only three months; yet he was obviously a responsible adult at the time, for he “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord” and was judged for it.

Observe that in each case it is the decade number that varies. In Ahaziah’s case it is forty-two as against twenty-two. In Jehoiachin’s case it was eight as against eighteen. It is instructive to observe that the number notation used by the Jewish settlers in the Elephantine in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah (fortunately we have a large file of documents in papyrus from this source) consisted of horizontal hooks to represent decades. Thus eight would be /III IIII, but eighteen would be /III IIII, with a horizontal hook over the Is. Similarly twenty-two would be I, followed by two horizontal hooks, one over the other; but forty-two would be /I, followed by two sets of horizontal hooks, one hook over the other in each set. If, then, the manuscript being copied out was blurred or smudged, one or more of the decade notations could be missed by the copyist.

The same was probably the case with the date of Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah in 701 B.C. This is stated in 2 Kings 18:13 to have occurred in the “fourteenth” year of Hezekiah, which implies that Hezekiah must have begun his reign in 715. Yet the other six references to Hezekiah’s chronology in 2 Kings make it clear that he was crowned as assistant king in 728 and became sole king in 725. Since Sennacherib did not become king in Assyria until 705 and the invasion occurred in the fourth year of his reign, the 701 date for the invasion is absolutely certain. Therefore we are to understand the “fourteen” in 2 Kings 18:13 as a miscopying of an original “twenty-four”. The difference in the Hebrew notation would have been as follows: fourteen was /III, with a horizontal hook over the Is, and twenty-four was /III, with two horizontal hooks over the Is, one over the other. A blurred manuscript probably confused the scribe of Isaiah 36:1, who originated the error; and it may have been that the later scribe of 2 Kings 18 was so impressed by the number fourteen with which he was familiar in the Isaiah text that he decided to “correct” v.13 to conform with it. At least that is the likeliest explanation I know of. (See also the discussion of Sennacherib’s invasion in Hezekiah’s fourteenth year at 2 Kings 18:13.) (Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties [Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, MI, 1982], pp. 205-207)

In corroboration of Archer’s harmonization, there are copies of the Greek and Syriac versions of 2 Chron. 22:2 that actually read 22, not 42:

2 Chronicles 22:2 tc Heb “forty-two,” but some mss of the LXX and the Syriac along with the parallel passage in 2 Kgs 8:26 read “twenty-two.” (New English Translation Bible)

“Ahaziah was twenty-two^[a] years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem one year. His mother’s name was Athaliah, a granddaughter of Omri.”

2 Chronicles 22:2 Some Septuagint manuscripts and Syriac (see also 2 Kings 8:26); Hebrew forty-two. (New International Version)