The priest Jehoiada crowns the hidden child Joash at seven, has Athaliah executed, and guides the young king through reforms that include repairing the Temple, though Joash later drifts from faithfulness and has Jehoiada's own son murdered for confronting him.
Further context
3 min readJoash is seven years old when he is crowned, having spent six of those years hidden in the temple, and he reigns forty years. The assessment carries a qualification that turns out to be the whole story of his life: he did what was right in the eyes of the LORD all the years Jehoiada the priest instructed him.
The temple repairs are the achievement of the reign and the way they are managed is unusually well documented. The building is around a hundred and fifty years old and in disrepair, partly from neglect and partly because Athaliah's sons had broken into it and used its sacred objects for Baal.
His first arrangement fails. The priests are told to take the money brought as offerings and use it for repairs, and twenty-three years later nothing has been done. He summons Jehoiada and asks why, and the priests are relieved of the responsibility altogether and told to stop collecting money from the people.
The replacement is a piece of practical administration. A chest is made with a hole bored in the lid and set beside the altar, and the priests on duty at the entrance put everything brought in into it. When it gets full, the royal secretary and the high priest come, count the silver and put it into bags, and hand it over to the men supervising the work, who pay the carpenters, builders, masons and stonecutters and buy timber and dressed stone.
Then the detail that explains why the system worked: they did not require an accounting from those to whom they gave the money to pay the workers, because they acted with complete honesty. And no silver basins, wick trimmers, sprinkling bowls, trumpets or any other articles of gold or silver were made for the temple from that money; it went to the workmen alone.
A public collection box, two officials counting together, and no diversion of building funds into furnishings. It is the only detailed account of a public works programme in these books.
The reign ends badly and quickly once Jehoiada dies at a hundred and thirty. The officials of Judah come and pay homage to the king, and he listens to them, and they abandon the temple and worship Asherah poles and idols. When Zechariah, Jehoiada's own son, stands up and rebukes them, the king orders him stoned to death in the courtyard of the temple. His dying words are recorded: may the LORD see this and call you to account.
Within a year an Aramean force takes Jerusalem, and Joash strips the temple treasures to buy them off. His own officials then murder him in his bed, and the reason given is that he had killed the son of Jehoiada the priest.
Jehoiada the priest ran the country while the boy was a child, and Joash is said to have done what was right all the years Jehoiada instructed him. When the priest died at the age of a hundred and thirty, the officials of Judah came to the king and he listened to them instead, and the reforms were undone.
The temple repair scheme is the most administratively detailed passage in these books. The priests had been collecting money and not doing the work, so Jehoiada took a chest, bored a hole in the lid and set it beside the altar; the royal secretary and the high priest counted the contents, and the money went straight to the carpenters and masons without accounting, because they acted with complete honesty.
Zechariah, Jehoiada's own son, is stoned in the temple courtyard on the king's orders for saying the reforms had been abandoned.