How could Baasha attack Judah in Asa’s 36th year if he died in Asa’s 26th?

The records agree if Baasha’s attack came in about Asa’s sixteenth year, and Chronicles can be read that way. The Hebrew phrase is ‘the thirty-sixth year of the malkhut of Asa’, and malkhut can mean ‘kingdom’ as well as ‘reign’. If the Chronicler’s source counted the years of the kingdom of Judah, which Asa now ruled, from its split with Israel, the figures fall into place. Rehoboam reigned seventeen years and Abijam three (1 Kings 14:21; 15:2), so Asa came to the throne in the kingdom’s twentieth year, and its thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth years were Asa’s fifteenth and sixteenth. Archbishop Ussher took this view, and Adam Clarke followed him.

Keil and Delitzsch reach the same date by another route, as a copyist’s slip (below). Either way Chronicles’ own story runs smoothly: ten years of peace (2 Chronicles 14:1), the war with Zerah the Ethiopian, the renewal of the covenant in Asa’s fifteenth year (15:10), and the next year Baasha’s move against Ramah, while Baasha was still alive and reigning.

A copyist’s slip

Keil and Delitzsch argued that ‘the reign of Asa’ must mean Asa’s own years, as it does in 2 Chronicles 15:10. They took the original figures to be 15 and 16, the letters for 10 (yod) and 30 (lamed) having been confused in copying, a mistake they thought easy in the old Hebrew script.

Christian scholars are divided between these two explanations. Against the first, Chronicles uses the same phrase, ‘the reign of Asa’, for Asa’s own fifteenth year (15:10). The second is a conjecture: Keil cites no manuscript that reads 15 and 16, and the Greek Septuagint has ‘thirty-eighth’ in 16:1, which shows only that this number was not copied uniformly.