Jeconiah

Jeconiah in scripture

Reign

Jeconiah reigned three months and ten days, beginning December 9, 598 BCE. He succeeded Jehoiakim as king of Judah after raiders from surrounding lands invaded Jerusalem and killed his father. It is likely that the king of Babylon was behind this effort, as a response to Jehoiakim's revolt, starting sometime after 601 BCE. Three months and ten days after Jeconiah became king, the armies of Nebuchadnezzar II seized Jerusalem, with the intention to take high class Judahite captives and assimilate them into Babylonian society. On March 15/16th, 597 BCE, Jeconiah, his entire household and three thousand Jews were exiled to Babylon.

The Masoretic Text of 2 Chronicles 36 states that Jeconiah's rule began at the age of eight, while in 2 Kings 24:8 Jeconiah is said to have come to the throne at eighteen. Modern scholars have treated the difference between "eight" and "eighteen" as reflecting a copying error on one side or the other of the issue.

During exile

After Jeconiah was deposed as king, his uncle Zedekiah (2 Kings 24:17) was appointed by Nebuchadnezzar to rule Judah. Zedekiah was the son of Josiah. Jeconiah would later be regarded as the first of the exilarchs. In the Book of Ezekiel, the author refers to Jeconiah as king and dates certain events by the number of years he was in exile. The author identifies himself as Ezekiel, a contemporary of Jeconiah, and he never mentions Zedekiah by name.

Release from captivity

According to 2 Kings 25:27–30, Jeconiah was released from prison "in the 37th year of the exile", in the year that Amel-Marduk (Evil-Merodach) came to the throne, and given a prestigious position at court. Jeconiah's release in Babylon brings to a close the Books of Kings and the Deuteronomistic history. Babylonian records show that Amel-Marduk began his reign in October 562 BCE. According to Jeremiah 52:31, Jeconiah was released from prison "in the twelfth month, on the twenty-fifth day of the month": this indicates the first year of captivity to be 598/597 BCE, according to Judah's Tishri-based calendar. The 37th year of captivity was thus, by Judean reckoning, the year that began in Tishri of 562, consistent with the synchronism to the accession year of Amel-Marduk given in Babylonian records.

Jeremiah (22:28–30) cursed Jeconiah that none of his descendants would ever sit on the throne of Israel:

This is what the LORD says: 'Record this man as if childless, a man who will not prosper in his lifetime, for none of his offspring will prosper, none will sit on the throne of David or rule anymore in Judah.

Chapter 1, verses 11–12 of the Gospel of Matthew lists Jeconiah in the genealogy of Jesus, through Joseph. If Joseph was the biological father of Jesus (contrary to Christian belief), then Jesus could not rightfully claim to be the Messiah as the curse of Jeconiah, if true, would apply to Him.

Richard Challoner interpreted the two genealogies of Matthew and Luke to be referring to a biological offspring and an offspring from a Levirate marriage. According to this concept, Joseph may have been a biological descendant from Jeconiah, but within Jewish law he would have been counted as a descendant of someone else due to the carrying of a brother's name through the Levirate marriage.

In Rabbinical literature

Jehoiachin was made king in place of his father by Nebuchadnezzar; but the latter had hardly returned to Babylon when some one said to him, "A dog brings forth no good progeny," whereupon he recognized that it was poor policy to have Jehoiachin for king (Lev. R. xix. 6; Seder 'Olam R. xxv.). In Daphne, near Antiochia, Nebuchadnezzar received the Great Sanhedrin, to whom he announced that he would not destroy the Temple if the king were delivered up to him. When the king heard this resolution of Nebuchadnezzar he went upon the roof of the Temple, and, turning to heaven, held up the Temple keys, saying: "As you no longer consider us worthy to be your ministers, take the keys that you have entrusted to us until now." Then a miracle happened; for a fiery hand appeared and took the keys, or, as others say, the keys remained suspended in the air where the king had thrown them (Lev. R. l.c.; Yer. Sheḳ. vi. 50a; other versions of the legend of the keys are given in Ta'an. 29a; Pesiḳ. R. 26 [ed. Friedmann, p. 131a], and Syriac Apoc. Baruch, x. 18). The king as well as all the scholars and nobles of Judah were then carried away captive by Nebuchadnezzar (Seder 'Olam R. l.c.; compare Ratner's remark ad loc.). According to Josephus, Jehoiachin gave up the city and his relatives to Nebuchadnezzar, who took an oath that neither they nor the city should be harmed. But the Babylonian king broke his word; for scarcely a year had elapsed when he led the king and many others into captivity.

Jehoiachin's sad experiences changed his nature entirely, and as he repented of the sins which he had committed as king he was pardoned by God, who revoked the decree to the effect that none of his descendants should ever become king (Jer. xxii. 30; Pesiḳ., ed. Buber, xxv. 163a, b); he even became the ancestor of the Messiah (Tan., Toledot, 20 [ed. Buber, i. 140]). It was especially his firmness in fulfilling the Law that restored him to God's favor. He was kept by Nebuchadnezzar in solitary confinement, and as he was therefore separated from his wife, the Sanhedrin, which had been expelled with him to Babylon, feared that at the death of this queen the house of David would become extinct.

They managed to gain the favor of Queen Semiramis, who induced Nebuchadnezzar to ameliorate the lot of the captive king by permitting his wife to share his prison. As he then manifested great self-control and obedience to the Law, God forgave him his sins (Lev. R. xix., end). Jehoiachin lived to see the death of his conqueror, Nebuchadnezzar, which brought him liberty; for within two days of his father's death, Evil-Merodach opened the prison in which Jehoiachin had languished for so many years.

Genealogy

Jeconiah was the son of Jehoiakim and Nehushta, the daughter of Elnathan of Jerusalem. He had eight children: Assir, Shealtiel, Malkiram, Pedaiah, Shenazzar, Jekamiah, Hoshama and Nedabiah. (1 Chronicles 3:17–18). Jeconiah is also mentioned in the first book of Chronicles as the father of Pedaiah, who in turn was the father of Zerubbabel. A list of his descendants is given in 1 Chronicles 3:17–24.

In listing the genealogy of Jesus Christ, Matthew 1:11 records Jeconiah the son of Josiah as an ancestor of Joseph, the husband of Mary.

Dating Jeconiah's reign

The Babylonian Chronicles establish that Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem for the first time on 2 Adar (16 March) 597 BCE. Before Wiseman's publication of the Babylonian Chronicles in 1956, Thiele had determined from biblical texts that Nebuchadnezzar's initial capture of Jerusalem and its king Jeconiah occurred in the spring of 597 BCE, whereas Kenneth Strand points out that other scholars, including Albright, more frequently dated the event to 598 BCE.

Thiele's dates

Thiele said that the 25th anniversary of Jeconiah's captivity was April 25 (10 Nisan), 573 BCE, implying that he began the exile to Babylon on 10 Nisan 597, 24 years earlier. His reasoning in arriving at this exact date was based on Ezekiel 40:1, where Ezekiel, without naming the month, says it was the tenth day of the month, "on that very day." Since this fits with his idea that Jeconiah's (and Ezekiel's) exile to Babylon began a month later than the capturing of the city, thus allowing a new Nisan-based year to begin, Thiele took these words in Ezekiel as referring to the day in which the captivity or exile proper began. He therefore ended Jehoiachin's reign of three months and ten days on this date. The dates he gives for Jeconiah's reign are then: 21 Heshvan (9 December) 598 BCE to 10 Nisan (22 April) 597 BCE.

Thiele's reasoning in this regard has been criticized by Rodger C. Young, who advocates the 587 date for the fall of Jerusalem. Young argues that Thiele's arithmetic is inconsistent, and adds an alternative explanation of the phrase "on that very day" (be-etsem ha-yom ha-zeh) in Ezekiel 40:1. This phrase is used three times in Leviticus 23:28–30 to refer the Day of Atonement, always observed on the tenth of Tishri, and Ezekiel's writings in several places show familiarity with the Book of Leviticus. A further argument in favor of this interpretation is that in the same verse, Ezekiel says it was Rosh Hashanah (New Year's Day) and also the tenth of the month, indicating the start of a Jubilee year, since only in a Jubilee year did the year begin on the tenth of Tishri, the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 25:9). The Talmud (tractate Arakin 12a,b) and the Seder Olam (chapter 11) also say that Ezekiel saw his vision at the beginning of a Jubilee year, the 17th, consistent with this interpretation of Ezekiel 40:1.

Because this offers an alternative explanation to Thiele's interpretation of Ezekiel 40:1, and because Thiele's chronology for Jeconiah is incompatible with the records of the Babylonian Chronicle, the infobox below dates the end of Jeconiah's reign to 2 Adar (16 March) 597 BCE, the date of the first capture of Jerusalem as given in the Babylonian records. Thiele's dates for Jeconiah, however, and his date of 586 BCE for the fall of Jerusalem, continue to hold considerable weight with the scholarly community.

However, no such complication is necessary since the tenth of Tishri 574 BCE is precisely as stated in Ezekiel 40:1, both in the fourteenth year of the Temple's destruction in 587 BCE and the twenty-fifth year of Jeconiah's exile in 597 BCE.

Dating the fall of Jerusalem using Jeconiah's dating

The reign of Jeconiah is considered important in establishing the chronology of events in the early sixth century BCE in the Middle East. This includes resolving the date of the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar. According to Jeremiah 52:6, the city wall was breached in the summer month of Tammuz in the eleventh year of Zedekiah.

Historians, however, have been divided on whether the year was 587 or 586 BCE. A 1990 study listed eleven scholars who preferred 587 and eleven who preferred 586. The Babylonian records of the second capture of Jerusalem have not been found, and scholars looking at the chronology of the period must rely on the Biblical texts, as correlated with extant Babylonian records from before and after the event. In this regard, the Biblical texts regarding Jeconiah are especially important, because the time of his reign in Jerusalem was fixed by Donald Wiseman's 1956 publication, and this is consistent with his thirty-seventh year of captivity overlapping the accession year of Amel-Marduk, as mentioned above.

Ezekiel's treatment of Jeconiah's dates are a starting point for determining the date of the fall of Jerusalem. He dated his writings according to the years of captivity he shared with Jeconiah, and he mentions several events related to the fall of Jerusalem in those writings. In Ezekiel 40:1, Ezekiel dates his vision to the 25th year of the exile and fourteen years after the city fell. If Ezekiel and the author of 2 Kings 25:27 were both using Tishri-based years, the 25th year would be 574/573 BCE and the fall of the city, 14 years earlier, would be in 588/587—i.e., in the summer of 587 BCE. This is consistent with other texts in Ezekiel related to the fall of the city. Ezekiel 33:21 relates that a refugee arrived in Babylon and reported the fall of Jerusalem in the twelfth year, tenth month of "our exile." Measuring from the first year of exile, 598/597, this was January of 586 BCE, incompatible with Jerusalem falling in the summer of 586 BCE, but consistent with its fall in the summer of 587 BCE. The other side holds that since Jeconiah surrendered in March 597, January 586 is less than eleven years later and therefore can not be considered in the twelfth year of the exile.

Thiele held to a 586 BCE date for the capture of Jerusalem and the end of Zedekiah's reign. Recognizing to some extent the importance of Ezekiel's measuring time by the years of captivity of Jeconiah, and in particular the reference to the 25th year of that captivity in Ezekiel 40:1, he wrote,

Archeological findings

During his excavation of Babylon in 1899–1917, Robert Koldewey discovered a royal archive room of King Nebuchadnezzar near the Ishtar Gate. It contained tablets dating to 595–570 BCE. The tablets were translated in the 1930s by the German Assyriologist, Ernst Weidner. Four of these tablets list rations of oil and barley given to various individuals—including the deposed King Jehoiachin—by Nebuchadnezzar from the royal storehouses, dated five years after Jehoiachin was taken captive.

One tablet reads:

10 (sila of oil) to the king of Judah, Yaukin; 2 1/2 sila (oil) to the offspring of Judah's king; 4 sila to eight men from Judea.

Another reads:

1 1/2 sila (oil) for three carpenters from Arvad, 1/2 apiece; 11 1/2 sila for eight wood workers from Byblos ...; 3 1/2 sila for seven Greek craftsman, 1/2 sila apiece; 1/2 sila to the carpenter, Nabuetir; 10 sila to Ia-ku-u-ki-nu, the son of Judah's king[1]; 2 1/2 sila for the five sons of the Judean king.

The Babylonian Chronicles are currently housed in the Pergamum Museum in Berlin.