Athaliah Killed the Royal Seed and One Child Survived

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The North Falls to Hazael's Sword

Hazael, king of Syria, tore through the eastern tribes of Israel like a brushfire. Reuben fell. Gad fell. The half-tribe of Manasseh, the highlands of Gilead, the pastures of Bashan, all of it burned or bowed. And Jehu, king of Israel, the man once anointed to purge the house of Ahab, did nothing. He had turned his back on the God who raised him up, grown contemptuous of law and worship, and after twenty-seven years on the throne he died with his kingdom in ashes. The rot did not stay in the north. Ahab's line had married into the house of David, and the blood of that marriage sat in Jerusalem.

Athaliah Rises Over a House of Corpses

Athaliah was Ahab's daughter and the mother of King Ahaziah of Judah. When word reached her that her son was dead and her father's whole house in the north had been cut down root and branch, she did not tear her clothes. She did the arithmetic of a throne. The seed of David stood between her and the crown, so she killed it.

She destroyed the royal seed. Sons, grandsons, every heir with David's blood in his veins, hunted through the palace and put to the sword by her command. There was great anguish in Jerusalem, and the house of David, the line promised to hold the throne forever, came within one heartbeat of ending in a single afternoon of murder. When the killing was counted, the covenant of David hung on nothing.

The Infant Hidden in the Temple

Nothing, except one child. In the confusion of the slaughter a small infant named Joash was carried out of the reach of Athaliah's men. Jehoiada, the High Priest, took the baby and hid him. He raised him in secret inside the Temple, the one place the queen's blade never thought to search, while Athaliah sat on the throne of David and reigned. Six years she ruled over Judah. For six years a boy who should have been dead grew up between the altar and the sanctuary, learning to walk in rooms his own grandmother had emptied of his family.

In the seventh year Jehoiada moved. He brought the hidden boy into the light, set David's crown on a child's head, and the anguished city that had watched the seed die watched it come back. They killed Athaliah. The daughter of Ahab, who had drowned a dynasty to take a throne, was cut down beside it, and the poison of the north was answered at last in the south.

The Chest Beside the Altar

Joash grew into a king with one consuming want, to repair the house that had hidden him. The Temple had been left to rot by the kings before him. He told Jehoiada to gather a half-shekel from every head in the land and pour it into the walls and the roof. The old priest doubted. Who would pay a tax for stones? So he built something cleverer than a decree. He set a wooden chest beside the altar, sealed on every side but for a single hole in the lid, and let the people come.

They came, and then they competed. Silver and gold rang against the wood until the chest was heavy, and heavier, and men crowded to be seen giving. The Temple rose again. The surplus was melted into sacred vessels, and the altar ran fat with daily offerings. When Jehoiada finally died at the age of one hundred and thirty, they buried him among the kings of Judah, an honor no priest was owed, because he had saved the line of David from a woman's knife.

Blood in the House That Hid Him

Then everything the old priest had built came apart in his absence. Joash turned. The king who owed his life to the Temple grew wicked, and when God sent prophet after prophet to call him back, he waved them all away. One of them was Zechariah, Jehoiada's own son, the child of the man who had smuggled the king to safety. He stood up in the Temple court and cried out, "You have abandoned the God who kept you, and so he abandons you." Joash gave the order where he stood. They stoned Zechariah to death on the stones of the sanctuary, in the very house that had once kept Joash alive. The son of his rescuer, murdered in the room his rescuer had used to save him.

The King the Tombs Refused

The reckoning came fast. Hazael, who had gutted the north, now marched on Jerusalem. Joash stripped the Temple he had rebuilt, emptied its treasury and every sacred gift, and bought the Syrians off. It worked, barely. But his own officers had not forgotten Zechariah's blood on the sanctuary floor. They conspired against the king, killed him, and buried him in the city. They would not lay him among the kings of Judah. He reigned forty years and went into the ground disgraced, in the same city where he had once been the only heir of David left alive.