Strengthen your faith in God's word

“In the third year of Asa king of Judah began Baasha the son of Ahijah to reign over all Israel in Tirzah, twenty and four years” (1 Kings 15:33), and his son Elah began to reign “in the twenty and sixth year of Asa” (16:8). Baasha was dead by Asa’s twenty-seventh year at the latest. Yet Chronicles says, “In the six and thirtieth year of the reign of Asa Baasha king of Israel came up against Judah, and built Ramah” (2 Chronicles 16:1), and before that, “there was no more war unto the five and thirtieth year of the reign of Asa” (15:19).

Some answer that the years are counted from the division of the kingdom. Critics reply that the same chapter uses the same words for Asa’s own years: “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Asa” (15:10), and “in the thirty and ninth year of his reign” (16:12).

Preferred: The Hebrew malkuth, rendered “reign,” is also “kingdom,” and the thirty-sixth year is of the kingdom that was Asa’s: the kingdom of Judah, counted from the year it was divided from Israel. Rehoboam reigned seventeen years (2 Chronicles 12:13) and Abijah three (13:2); Asa came to the throne in the twentieth year of that kingdom, so its thirty-fifth year was Asa’s fifteenth, and its thirty-sixth his sixteenth, ten years before Baasha died. Gill: “it can never mean the year of his reign … but it is to be understood of the kingdom of Judah, when it was divided from Israel.” This is the reckoning of the Jewish chronicle Seder Olam Rabbah, as Gill notes, and of Poole and Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown.

Chronicles itself bears it out. In Asa’s fifteenth year Israelites “fell to him out of Israel in abundance, when they saw that the LORD his God was with him,” and they gathered at Jerusalem and made a covenant (2 Chronicles 15:9–10). The next year Baasha built Ramah “to the intent that he might let none go out or come in to Asa king of Judah” (16:1): to stop the very movement Chronicles has just described. The thirty-fifth year of the kingdom, to which there was no more war (15:19), is the year of that covenant; the thirty-sixth, the year of Baasha’s answer to it.

That the chapter counts Asa’s own years in other verses does not forbid it here. Poole answers that Scripture often reckons the same king’s years from different beginnings, “and that in the very same chapter and history”; Nebuchadnezzar’s years are counted from his accession in 2 Kings 25:8, and differently in Daniel 2:1. Where a year cannot be of Asa’s person, since Baasha was then dead, it is of his kingdom.

Some commentators would change thirty-six to sixteen or twenty-six, and thirty-five to fifteen or twenty-five, as a copyist’s error. The Hebrew has thirty-six and thirty-five, the KJV keeps them, and they are right as they stand.