Bible Synapse
Did Jehoiachin reign three months, or three months and ten days?
Hard question · Israel’s history: Joshua to Esther · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate
See the passages joined in the interactive mapThe passages
Jehoiachin was eighteen when he became king, “and he reigned in Jerusalem three months”.
Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he began to reign, and he reigned in Jerusalem three months. And his mother’s name was Nehushta, the daughter of Elnathan of Jerusalem.
He “reigned three months and ten days in Jerusalem: and he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord”.
Jehoiachin was eight years old when he began to reign, and he reigned three months and ten days in Jerusalem: and he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.
“When the year was expired”, Nebuchadnezzar sent and brought him to Babylon.
And when the year was expired, king Nebuchadnezzar sent, and brought him to Babylon, with the goodly vessels of the house of the Lord, and made Zedekiah his brother king over Judah and Jerusalem.
The objection
2 Kings 24:8 says that Jehoiachin reigned three months in Jerusalem; 2 Chronicles 36:9 says three months and ten days. Shabir Ally lists this among his clear contradictions: two books give two lengths for the same reign.
The answer
One figure is rounded and the other is exact, and both are true. Kings, here as elsewhere, gives a short reign in whole months; Chronicles adds the extra ten days. To say that a reign of three months and ten days lasted ‘three months’ is no more false than to call a reign of forty years and a few months ‘forty years’. Neither writer says ‘exactly’, and Kings gives the reign of Jehoahaz, a few years earlier, in the same round way: he “reigned three months in Jerusalem” (2 Kings 23:31).
Keil and Delitzsch read the two passages in this way: Kings has three months, and Chronicles the ‘more precise statement’ of three months and ten days. The exact figure was known to others too. The first-century Jewish historian Josephus says that Jehoiachin ‘reigned three months and ten days’, and Ellicott reports that the Syriac and Arabic versions of Chronicles put the same length as ‘one hundred days’.
The short reign fits the story. Jehoiachin came to the throne as Nebuchadnezzar’s army closed in; after a brief siege he surrendered, and he was taken to Babylon in the spring, “when the year was expired” (2 Chronicles 36:10).
Other answers Christians give
Two end-points
Some suggest that the two books count to slightly different moments, Kings to Jehoiachin’s surrender and Chronicles to the day he was actually led away. The texts do not say so, and the simpler answer, a round figure and an exact one, needs no such help.
From the classic commentators
was eighteen years old when he ascended the throne (the eight years of the Chronicles are a slip of the pen), and reigned three months, or, according to the more precise statement of the Chronicles, three months and ten days, in the spirit of his father.Keil & Delitzsch, Commentary on 2 Kings 24
Sources
- Keil & Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament: 2 Kings 24 (1857–78), at Bible Hub
- Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers: 2 Chronicles 36 (the Syriac and Arabic ‘one hundred days’), at Bible Hub
- Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, book 10, chapter 6, section 3, trans. William Whiston (1737), at Project Gutenberg