The kings of Israel and Judah

King Jehoiachin

The kingdom of Judah (the south) · Reigned three months (2 Kings 24:8) · Also called Jeconiah, Coniah · Evil before God · 2 Kings 24:8 to 17; 25:27 to 30; 2 Chronicles 36:9 to 10

Jehoiachin, the son of Jehoiakim, reigned only three months before Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem and carried him, his family, and the leading men of Judah into exile in Babylon along with the treasures of the temple. He did evil in the sight of the LORD. Yet his story ends with a strange gleam of hope: many years later, a new Babylonian king lifted his head, freed him from prison, and gave him a seat above the other captive kings, a small sign that David's line was not extinguished.

And it came to pass in the seven and thirtieth year of the captivity of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the twelfth month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month, that Evilmerodach king of Babylon in the year that he began to reign did lift up the head of Jehoiachin king of Judah out of prison;2 Kings 25:27 (KJV)

A three-month reign and the first great deportation

Jehoiachin was eighteen when he began to reign, and he reigned three months in Jerusalem, and he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, according to all that his father had done. In his brief reign Nebuchadnezzar's army came up and besieged the city, and Jehoiachin surrendered himself, his mother, his servants, and his princes to the king of Babylon.

Babylon carried away Jehoiachin, the royal household, the officials, the craftsmen and smiths, and ten thousand captives, and stripped the temple and palace of their treasures, leaving only the poorest of the land. This was the great deportation of 597 BC, in which the young king Jehoiachin, the prophet Ezekiel, and the future of Judah were carried to Babylon.

Coniah, cut off yet not forgotten

Jeremiah, calling him Coniah, spoke a hard word over him: Write ye this man childless, a man that shall not prosper in his days, for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David, and ruling any more in Judah. As far as the throne in Jerusalem went, the line of reigning kings ended with him and his uncle Zedekiah.

Yet the last four verses of the book of Kings return to him with unexpected tenderness. After thirty-seven years in a Babylonian prison, a new king, Evilmerodach, lifted up the head of Jehoiachin, brought him out of prison, spoke kindly to him, gave him a throne above the other captive kings, changed his prison clothes, and provided for him a daily portion all the days of his life.

The biblical verdict and where it points

Jehoiachin's own reign is judged evil, and it was brief and powerless. Scripture does not flatter him. But the writers of Kings chose to end the whole long history of the monarchy, not with the destruction of Jerusalem, but with this quiet scene of a captive son of David lifted up and fed at a foreign king's table.

It is a deliberate flicker of hope in the dark. The line of David was down but not destroyed; the lamp still burned, however faintly, in exile. And indeed Jehoiachin appears in the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, so that from the cut-off, imprisoned, seemingly childless king, the line ran on to Christ. What looked like the end of David's throne was, in God's hands, only a pause before the true and everlasting King.

A note on the record: everything here is drawn from the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. Kings and Chronicles sometimes tell a reign differently, Chronicles often adding a king's repentance or building works, and where they differ this is said plainly rather than smoothed over. The exact lengths and overlaps of the reigns are genuinely complex, because kings often shared the throne with a son for a time, so the totals in Scripture do not always add up in a simple line. The verdict good or evil is the Bible's own assessment, whether a king did right or evil in the sight of the LORD.

Related: Jehoiakim · Zedekiah · All the kings of Israel and Judah