Did Jotham reign sixteen years, when Kings speaks of his twentieth year?

Jotham’s years can be counted from more than one starting point, and Kings itself tells us why. His father Uzziah (also called Azariah) became a leper and lived in a separate house, and “Jotham the king’s son was over the house, judging the people of the land” (2 Kings 15:5). So Jotham governed for his father for some years before Uzziah died. At the other end, his son Ahaz began to reign “in the seventeenth year of Pekah” (2 Kings 16:1), only fifteen years after Jotham began in Pekah’s second year (2 Kings 15:32). Ahaz too seems to have taken power while his father was still alive.

The ‘twentieth year of Jotham’ is therefore a count of years from the start of his rule, carried on past the point where Ahaz took over. Keil and Delitzsch, following Archbishop Ussher, explain that the writer dates Hoshea’s rise by Jotham’s years because he has not yet introduced Ahaz, whose reign begins only in chapter 16. Gill suggested counting from the start of Jotham’s regency for his father.

Leslie McFall, building on Edwin Thiele’s chronology, sets out the dates like this: Jotham became co-regent when Uzziah was struck with leprosy (about 750 BC), became sole king when his father died, gave up the throne to Ahaz in about 735 BC, and yet the years of his rule went on being counted until Hoshea’s accession in about 732/731 BC, the twentieth year from 750. The ‘sixteen years’ are the years he reigned before Ahaz took his place.

A copyist’s addition

Some older critics, such as Thenius, proposed that the words ‘in the twentieth year of Jotham’ crept into the text through copying mistakes. Keil and Delitzsch rejected this as too complicated to be credible, and the co-regency explanation needs no change to the text.

The chronology of the last kings of Israel and Judah is one of the hardest in the Old Testament. 2 Kings 17:1, which dates Hoshea’s accession to the twelfth year of Ahaz, raises further questions, and Christian chronologists do not all reconstruct this period in the same way.