Jehoahaz

Jehoahaz, a Hebrew royal name meaning roughly “Yahweh has taken hold,” is borne in Scripture by more than one king: a ruler of the northern kingdom of Israel in the dynasty of Jehu, and a son of Josiah who reigned briefly in Judah and died in Egypt; the shorter spelling Joahaz also appears for the latter.

The northern Jehoahaz succeeded his father Jehu in Samaria. The text says that he did evil in Yahweh’s sight and that Yahweh’s anger burned against Israel, so that he delivered them into the hand of Hazael king of Syria and of Benhadad his son continually (2 Kings 13:3). The narrator records the cost in concrete terms: Jehoahaz was left with no more than fifty horsemen, ten chariots, and ten thousand footmen, because the king of Syria destroyed them and made them like dust at threshing (2 Kings 13:7). His son Jehoash, called Joash, succeeded him and later recovered from Benhadad the cities that had been taken from Jehoahaz by war (2 Kings 13:25).

The better-known Jehoahaz is the son of Josiah. After Josiah was killed at Megiddo and buried in Jerusalem, the people of the land took Jehoahaz and anointed him king in his father’s place (2 Kings 23:30; 2 Chronicles 36:1). His reign was cut short by Pharaoh Neco, who put him in bonds at Riblah in the land of Hamath so that he might not reign in Jerusalem and imposed on the land a tribute of one hundred talents of silver and a talent of gold (2 Kings 23:33). Neco then made Eliakim, his brother, king and changed his name to Jehoiakim; Jehoahaz was taken away, came to Egypt, and died there (2 Kings 23:34; 2 Chronicles 36:4). A related passage identifies this king with Shallum, whom Jeremiah addresses: the people are told not to weep for the dead but to weep bitterly for the one who goes away, for he will return no more and will not see his native country (Jeremiah 22:10–11). The genealogical list in 1 Chronicles 3:15 names Shallum as a son of Josiah, which is why most interpreters identify Shallum as this king’s personal name and Jehoahaz as his throne name, though some hold the reverse. A third bearer of the name appears in the Chronicler’s account of Jehoram of Judah, where the youngest surviving son, elsewhere called Ahaziah, is named Jehoahaz (2 Chronicles 21:17).

Christian traditions do not divide sharply over Jehoahaz, and the disagreements are mostly interpretive rather than confessional. The main question is whether the “dead” of Jeremiah 22:10 is Josiah and “him who goes away” is Jehoahaz, as most readers hold, or whether the verse is read more generally as a lament over the dynasty; a further question is how the Chronicler’s use of the name for Jehoram’s son should be explained, whether as a variant name, a scribal form, or a deliberate echo of the fate of Judah’s kings. Readers in Jewish and Christian traditions have also heard in Jehoahaz’s deportation an anticipation of later exiles, though the text itself makes no such explicit claim.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.