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44. When did Baasha die? 1 Kings 16:6-8 vs. 2 Chronicles 16:1
I should have read through some of these before I committed to this project. I thought we were going to have some good conversations. Had I but known …
1 Kings 16:6-8
So Baasha rested with his fathers and was buried in Tirzah. Then Elah his son reigned in his place. 7 And also the word of the Lord came by the prophet Jehu the son of Hanani against Baasha and his house, because of all the evil that he did in the sight of the Lord in provoking Him to anger with the work of his hands, in being like the house of Jeroboam, and because he killed them. 8 In the twenty-sixth year of Asa king of Judah, Elah the son of Baasha became king over Israel, and reigned two years in Tirzah.
2 Chronicles 16:1
In the thirty-sixth year of the reign of Asa, Baasha king of Israel came up against Judah and built Ramah, that he might let none go out or come in to Asa king of Judah.
1 Kings 16 says Baasha died in the twenty-sixth year of Asa. 2 Chronicles mentions Baasha going to war in the thirty-sixth year of Asa.
Several scholars and commentators explain that 2 Chronicles refers to the thirty-sixth year of Judah, as a nation separate from Israel. The Jamieson-Fausett-Brown Commentary is one of these:
the best biblical critics are agreed in considering this date to be calculated from the separation of the kingdoms, and coincident with the sixteenth year of Asa’s reign. This mode of reckoning was, in all likelihood, generally followed in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel, the public annals of the time (2Ch 16:11), the source from which the inspired historian drew his account.
Others, such as Keil and Delitzsch shrug at what is clearly a copyist error:
the letters ל (30) and י (10), which are somewhat similar in the ancient Hebrew characters, having been interchanged by a copyist; and hence the Numbers 35 and 36 have arisen out of the original 15 and 16.
They continue:
By this alteration all difficulties are removed, and all the statements of the Chronicle as to Asa’s reign are harmonized. During the first ten years there was peace (2 Chronicles 14:1); thereafter, in the eleventh year, the inroad of the Cushites; and after the victory over them there was the continuation of the Cultus reform, and rest until the fifteenth year, in which the renewal of the covenant took place (2 Chronicles 15:19, cf. with 2 Chronicles 15:10); and in the sixteenth year the war with Baasha arose.