Sunday Sermonette: More Groundhog Day

The story of Chapter 24 -- the repairs to the Temple and the apostasy of Joash after the death of Jehoiada-- is also told in 2 Kings. It ' s basically the same plot but the  text is different in many details, which I assume is just the usual result of repeated copying by hand -- every scribe is also an editor. Jehoiada living to 130 appears to be a regression to the absurd lifepans of the patriarchs in Genesis, but it ' s likely a copying error. Ancient Hebrew had no numerals, letters were used to represent numbers. The letter representing 100, quof, looks like this: ק The letter for 70, ayin, looks like this: ע As you can see they ' re fairly similar. The letter for 30, lamed, is this:  ל Numbers are set off from text by punctuation marks, which are just like an apostropohe, ' and quotation mark, " . So it would be easy to mix up quof an ayin, and for a stray letter to sneak in to what ' s supposed to be a number. I expect that ' s what happened. He probably just made it to 70, assuming any of this is true to begin with. Anyway, the usual happens. Judah enjoys Yahweh ' s favor as long as the King is following the law, and gets slammed by a hostile army when he starts messing with other gods. The reference to "the annotations on the book of the kings " at the end probably does not refer to the canonical Book of Kings but to the lost chronicles of the kings of Judah. 24 Joash was seven years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerus...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs