Joash

Joash, also written Jehoash, is a Hebrew personal name borne by several men in Scripture, most prominently the father of Gideon and a boy king of Judah. The two spellings are long and short forms of the same name, and it is usually explained as meaning “Yahweh has given” or “Yahweh has helped,” though the exact derivation is not certain.

The first Joash in the biblical narrative is the Abiezrite, a man of Ophrah whose household the text describes as owning an altar of Baal and an Asherah pole; the angel of Yahweh came and sat under the oak that belonged to him while his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the winepress to hide it from Midian (Judges 6:11). When the men of the town wanted to put Gideon to death for tearing down the altar, Joash spoke for him, and the narrator attaches the name Jerubbaal to that moment (Judges 6:30–32).

The best-known Joash is the son of Ahaziah, king of Judah. After Athaliah destroyed the royal offspring (2 Kings 11:1), the child was hidden and then brought out, crowned, given the covenant, anointed, and acclaimed “Long live the king!” (2 Kings 11:12), and Jehoiada the priest made a covenant between Yahweh, the king, and the people (2 Kings 11:17). The Chronicler’s summary is that “Joash did that which was right in Yahweh’s eyes all the days of Jehoiada the priest” (2 Chronicles 24:2), and during those years the temple was restored and offerings made continually (2 Chronicles 24:14). After Jehoiada’s death, however, the king listened to the princes of Judah, the people abandoned the house of Yahweh for the Asherah poles and idols (2 Chronicles 24:17–18), and when Zechariah son of Jehoiada rebuked them by the Spirit of God, the king had him stoned in the court of Yahweh’s house; Zechariah died saying, “May Yahweh look at it, and repay it” (2 Chronicles 24:20–22). The same name belongs also to Jehoash king of Israel, son of Jehoahaz, who fought Amaziah of Judah (2 Kings 13:10; 14:8–16), and to minor figures in the genealogies (1 Chronicles 7:8).

Traditions differ mainly over the martyrdom of Zechariah. Matthew 23:35 speaks of “Zachariah son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the sanctuary and the altar,” while 2 Chronicles 24:20 gives the patronym Jehoiada; many interpreters, noting the temple-court setting and that 2 Chronicles closes the Hebrew ordering of the canon, identify the two and treat the difference as a variant or conflation, while others take the patronym at face value and see a different or otherwise unknown Zechariah. The two accounts of Joash’s reign are also weighed differently: 2 Kings judges him by the standard of the high places yet still leaves him a largely positive verdict (2 Kings 12:3), whereas Chronicles ties his fidelity to Jehoiada’s lifetime and narrates a deliberate apostasy afterwards; some read these as complementary emphases, others as a genuine tension.

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.