XV.

(1-7) THE REIGN OF AZARIAH (Uzziah), KING OF JUDAH. (Comp. 2 Chronicles 26)

(1) In the twenty and seventh year of Jeroboam.--An error of transcription for the fifteenth year (?? 15, , 27). The error is clear from 2Kings 14:2; 2Kings 14:17; 2Kings 14:23. Amaziah reigned twenty-nine years (2Kings 14:2), fourteen concurrently with Joash, and fifteen with Jeroboam. It was, therefore, in the fifteenth of Jeroboam that Uzziah succeeded his father.

Azariah.--An Azriyahu (.Az-ri-ya-a-u), king of Judah, is mentioned in two fragmentary inscriptions of Tiglath Pileser II. (B.C. 745-727). The most important statement runs: "19 districts of the city of Hamath (Hammatti) with the cities of their circuit, on the coast of the sea of the setting of the sun (i.e., the Mediterranean), which in their transgression had revolted to Azariah, to the border of Assyria I restored, my prefects my governors over them I appointed." The Eponym list records a three years' campaign of Tiglath Pileser against the Syrian state of Arpad in B.C. 742-740. Schrader supposes that Azariah and Hamath were concerned in this campaign. (This conflicts with the ordinary chronology, which fixes 758 B.C. as the year of Azariah's death.)

Verse 1. - In the twenty and seventh year of Jeroboam King of Israel began Azariah son of Amaziah King of Judah to reign. In 2 Kings 14:23 it is distinctly stated that Jeroboam's reign of forty-one years commenced in the fifteenth of Amaziah, who from that time lived only fifteen years (2 Kings 14:17). Either, therefore, Azariah must have begun to reign in the fifteenth year of Jeroboam, or there must have been an interregnum of twelve years between the death of Amaziah and the accession of Azariah. As this last hypothesis is pre-eluded by the narrative of 2 Chronicles 26:1 and 2 Kings 14:20, 21, we must correct the, twenty-seventh year" of this verse into the "fifteenth." If we do this, corresponding changes will have to be made in vers. 8, 13, 23, and 27.

15:1-7 Uzziah did for the most part that which was right. It was happy for the kingdom that a good reign was a long one.In the twenty amd seventh year of Jeroboam king of Israel began Azariah the son on Amaziah king of Judah to reign. Now Amaziah lived only to the fifteenth year of Jeroboam, 2 Kings 14:2 in which year, and not in his twenty seventh, it might be thought Azariah his son began to reign. There are various ways taken to remove this difficulty, not to take notice of a corruption of numbers, "twenty seven for seventeen", which some insist on. Ben Gersom and Abarbinel are of opinion, that those twenty seven years of Jeroboam's reign are not to be understood of what were past, but of what were to come before the family of Jehu was extinct; and that he reigned twenty six years, and his son six months, which made twenty seven imperfect years. Others suppose that Jeroboam reigned with his father eleven or twelve years before his death; and, reckoning from the different periods of his reign, this was either the twenty seventh year, or the fifteenth or sixteenth: and others, that the reign of Azariah may be differently reckoned, either from the time his father fled to Lachish, where he might remain eleven or twelve years, or from his death, and so may be said to begin to reign either in the fifteenth or twenty seventh of Jeroboam; or there was an interregnum of eleven or twelve years after the death of his father, he being a minor of about four years of age, which was the fifteenth of Jeroboam, during which time the government was in the hands of the princes and great men of the nation; and it was not till Azariah was sixteen years of age, and when it was the twenty seventh of Jeroboam's reign, that the people agreed to make him king, see 2 Kings 14:21 and which seems to be the best way of accounting for it.