2 Chronicles29:20–36

i. A verb of haste, and a bill of three debts — 29:20-21

Chronicles dates this reform by a verb, not a speech. וַיַּשְׁכֵּם (shâkam, H7925) is the word for loading a beast before light, and Geneva reads the idiom precisely: “By this manner of speech the Hebrews mean a certain diligence and speed to do a thing: and when there is no delay.” Ellicott and JFB both draw the negative from the haste: only the śārê hā‘îr, the princes of the city, are gathered, because Hezekiah “wished to proceed at once with the sacrifices of expiation” (Ellicott) and so never summoned the representatives of Israel. Gill's reading is more pastoral and equally textual: he “took the first opportunity to attend the worship of God, and set an example to his people.”

Then the bill: twenty-eight animals, four kinds, seven of each, for the kingdom and for the sanctuary and for Judah. The law asked for one goat. Poole (1685) and Benson after him give the same reason, that “here the sins were many and presumptuous,” and Cambridge grounds it in the offerer rather than the offence: “As the sacrifice was not for an individual but for a whole people.” JFB reads the number itself as “indicating completeness.” The three beneficiaries are named with three words and they are an indictment: JFB takes the kingdom of “the sins of the king and his predecessors,” the sanctuary of “the sins of the priests themselves and for the desecration of the temple,” and Judah of the people “who, by their voluntary consent, were involved in the guilt of the national apostasy.” ⚙ Note what that costs the reformer: the first thing the new king pays for is his own father's reign.

One word in v. 21 is worth the whole verse. The he-goats are צְפִירֵי עִזִּים, and Ellicott identifies the term as “properly an Aramean word, and only found in late Heb.,” while Pulpit records that this passage is its first occurrence in Scripture. The Verifier counts it in five verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. Two verses later the Chronicler will switch to the classical śᵉʻîrîm, “hairy ones.” He knows both words and chooses.

ii. Blood thrown, hands leaned, a kingdom uncovered and covered — 29:22-24

Verse 22 is three identical clauses, and Ellicott says why: “The repetition is a mark of the writer's anxiety to show how carefully the legitimate ritual was observed in each instance.” Each clause turns on two verbs the English blurs. The priests וַיְקַבְּלוּ the blood, a late and uncommon Piel that Ellicott renders “Caught it in bowls of sprinkling” and Cambridge “In basins”; then they וַיִּזְרְקוּ it, which Cambridge insists is not sprinkling at all: “In basins with which they dashed (not ‘sprinkled’) the blood against the altar. This dashing was different from the sprinkling with the finger.” And the destination is הַמִּזְבֵּחָה, with the directional ending: Ellicott, “Threw it against (literally, towards ) the altar.” Pulpit records the meaning of the act in one line, with his own cross-references: “The sprinkling of the blood marked the expiation ( Leviticus 4:7, 18, 30 ; Leviticus 5:9 ; Leviticus 8:14, 15 ; Hebrews 9:12-14, 19-22 ).”

Then the goats are brought near (Hifil of nâgash, H5066) and hands are וַיִּסְמְכוּ on them, from çâmak, which Strong's glosses “to prop.” Weight rests on the animal's head. K&D is careful about who does it, noting that the king and the assembly acted, “the latter, of course, by their representatives,” and Geneva, Poole and Cambridge all say the same: the king and the elders, as at Leviticus 4:15. On the meaning the voices converge without collapsing into one another. Geneva: the hands “signify that they had deserved that death.” Gill: “vicarious sacrifices to be offered up in their own room and stead… an emblem of the imputation of the sins of the Lord's people to Christ.” Benson puts it in the present tense: “By faith we lay our hands on the Lord Jesus, and so receive the atonement, Romans 5:11.”

Verse 24 then does something the English cannot: וַיְחַטְּאוּ is the Piel of the verb to sin, used privatively, so that Ellicott must translate “Literally, made sin offering of their blood” and Cambridge simply “R.V. made a sin offering.” Alongside it stands לְכַפֵּר, whose only Qal occurrence Pulpit traces to Genesis 6:14, “to pitch, or cover with pitch”: Noah caulking the ark. And twice in the verse: all Israel. Barnes gives the politics, that the north under Hoshea was “in a condition approaching to anarchy” and ruled by “an Assyrian feudatory,” so Hezekiah “included ‘all Israel’ in the expiatory sacrifice, by which he prefaced his restoration of the old worship.” K&D agrees the phrase means “Israelites in general (the twelve tribes).” Benson takes the last step: “Thus is Christ a propitiation, not for the sins of Israel only, but for those of the whole world.”

iii. The song of YHWH begins in the same instant as the fire — 29:25-30

Hezekiah וַיַּעֲמֵד the Levites, Hifil, “caused to stand”; a verse later they וַיַּעַמְדוּ, Qal, “stood.” Ellicott names the restoration: “Hezekiah restored the ancient choral worship as established by David.” But the warrant is the contested point, and the commentators split visibly. JFB has the music “enlisted in the service of divine worship by David on the advice of the prophets Gad and Nathan, as well calculated to animate the devotions of the people” (a prudential reading). Cambridge will not have it: “The Chronicler urges the point that David's arrangements for Temple song were by inspiration.” Geneva is blunter: “This thing was not appointed by man, but it was the commandment of God.” K&D splits the difference exactly where the Hebrew does, since bᵉyad YHWH … bᵉyad nᵉbîʼâw puts a hand twice in one clause: “David had consequently made this arrangement at the divine suggestion, coming to him through the prophets.” Ellicott is the most honest of them: “This is the only place where the institution of the Levitical minstrelsy is ascribed to the injunctions of prophets; but the thing is probable in itself.”

The division of the instruments in v. 26 is legal, not aesthetic. Gill: the Levites' gear is David's, while the priests' trumpets “were made by the direction of Moses, according to the order of God, Numbers 10:2.” Then v. 27 doubles a verb: הֵחֵל … הֵחֵל, the burnt offering began, the song began. Barnes reads the social effect: “A burst of music gave notice to the people of the moment when the old worship recommenced.” Benson reads the spiritual one: “Even sorrow for sin must not put us out of tune for praising God.” And Chronicles will not let the ear pass over the orchestration: Ellicott, “the harps and lyres were dominant throughout, and the clarions subordinate to their music”; K&D, the trumpet-blowing “regulated itself by the playing of the stringed instruments.”

Verse 28 is written in participles, and Ellicott catches the Hebrew's odd elegance: “The singers. —Heb., the song. So we might say ‘the music was playing’; or even ‘the song was singing’.” The trumpets are “clarioning,” masculine participle for a feminine noun, because, as he says, “the word ‘clarions’ really stands for the clarion-players. So in modern orchestras they speak of ‘the violins’.” K&D holds the scene still: “During the offering of the burnt-offering, until it was ended, the whole congregation stood worshipping.” Then two verbs of the body in v. 29, and Pulpit is right that they are not synonyms: kâraʻ is the knee, and וַיִּשְׁתַּחֲוּוּ “proclaims the force, not of the posture of the body merely, but rather of the mind, in the rising degrees of respect, reverence, allegiance.” Cambridge: “first bowed down (on their knees) and then completely prostrated themselves.” Finally v. 30 names the words: David's and Asaph's. Gill reports Jarchi's identification of the psalm as the one beginning “O give thanks unto the Lord, call upon his name.” And Asaph is titled chôzeh, seer, and Pulpit notes “This is the only place in which Asaph is thus distinctly named seer.”

iv. Free hearts, too few priests, and a thing done suddenly — 29:31-36

Hezekiah's invitation is built on a priestly idiom: you have filled your hand to YHWH. Pulpit lists its seventeen occurrences, from Exodus 28:41 to Ezekiel 43:26, and Cambridge gives the literal Hebrew, “filled your hand.” Who is being addressed is genuinely disputed. JFB says the priests: “This address was made to the priests as being now, by the sacrifice of the expiation offerings, anew consecrated to the service of God.” Barnes says the congregation, and paraphrases: “Now that by the atoning sacrifice which has been offered for you, you are consecrated once more to be a holy people to the Lord, approach with confidence.” K&D argues the grammar decides it, since supplying “but ye” before gōšû “is quite arbitrary,” and concludes the ordination phrase “is here used in a wider sense, and transferred to the whole congregation.” ⚙ We think K&D has the better of it, on his own grounds and on one more: gōšû is the same root that brought the goats near in v. 23. The animals were drawn near first; now the people are.

Then the counts, which the Chronicler audits like a ledger: seventy bulls, a hundred rams, two hundred lambs of burnt offering, and six hundred cattle with three thousand of the flock consecrated. Pulpit reads the figures as a gauge of “the amount of free. heartedness present in the nation”; Gill measures them downward against an earlier age, “a much lesser number than what were offered upon occasion in the times of David and Solomon, the nation being poorer”; Benson reads them upward as penitence, “Perhaps the remembrance of their sin in sacrificing on the high places, made them more willing to bring their sacrifices now to God's altar.”

And then the sentence that no propagandist would have written. The priests were too few and could not flay the burnt offerings, so the Levites had to help, because, in a literal rendering, the Levites were upright of heart to consecrate themselves more than the priests. K&D renders the phrase rectiores animo, “had endeavoured more honestly,” and names the likely cause: “Perhaps the priests had taken more part in the idolatrous worship of Ahaz than the Levites, which would be quite accounted for… by their relation to the court of the king, and their dependence upon it.” Barnes points to the individual: “Urijah, the high priest, had participated to some extent in the impieties of Ahaz.” JFB concedes that “a reflection does seem to be cast upon their order as dilatory and not universally ready for duty.” Benson is harshest: “It is recorded here, to the perpetual shame of the priests, that though they were so well provided for out of the offerings of the Lord, yet they did not mind their business.” Pulpit generalises it: “How true to nature and to history, both secular and ecclesiastical also, the superiority, in sincerity and life and preparation for work, of the subordinates ( the Levites ), to those who fed on dignity rather than maintained it.”

The unit closes on two roots joined. The service “was established,” וַתִּכּוֹן, Nifal of kûwn; and what Hezekiah rejoices over is הַהֵכִין, the Hifil of the same root: what God had set up. Ellicott notes the article standing for the relative, “a construction characteristic of the chronicler,” and reads the verse's last word as the theological one: “The hand of God was seen in the speed with which the revolution was effected, and the sudden turn of the princes and people from indifference to glad alacrity.” Poole: “whereby it plainly appeared to be the work of the Almighty God changing their hearts by his Holy Spirit.” Geneva: “He shows that religion cannot proceed unless God touches the heart of the people.”