He Rested with Faithful Kings: The Story of Jehoiada

NOTE: This message was delivered as a first person narrative. The basis for the narrative is the text of 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles – but some creative license was taken.

We do not know how the child Joash was missed by the guards who killed the palace children. There is no indication in the scriptures that he was injured in any way – but in the narrative story I have depicted him as wounded, but not fatally, this seems possible and even plausible, but not necessarily the way it happened.

The clothing and jewellery of Athaliah are not mentioned in scripture, based on practices of the idolatrous we have filled in these details.

I mention this so as not to distract from the truth of the story that you will find laced through the book of Kings and in a more concentrated form in from 2 Chronicles 21-24. Dating backwards from his death, and based on the age given of 130 years, we know that Jehoiada the priest was born not many years after the death of Solomon, would have begun his service as a priest during the extended reign of Good King Asa of Judah and must have been High Priest by the time Good King Jehoshaphat reigned. He is the only priest who was laid to rest in the tomb of the kings of Judah, and many sound scholars believe he is the most likely regent of Judah during the years of Joash’s minority.

I have chosen to follow the conservative scholars in harmonizing the accounts of Kings and Chronicles on the death of Athaliah, holding that both secular and religious soldiers were involved in the coup to restore the rightful king over Jerusalem.