God’s Word for You

2 Chronicles 27:5-9 in the second and the third years

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Monday, May 12, 2025

5 Jotham made war against the king of the Ammonites and defeated them. That year the Ammonites gave him one hundred talents of silver, ten thousand cors of wheat and ten thousand cors of barley. The Ammonites paid him this—and again in the second and the third years. 6 So Jotham became strong because of his steadfast walk before the LORD his God. 7 The rest of the acts of Jotham, and all his wars and his ways, are written in the Book of the Kings of Israel and Judah. 8 He was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem. 9 Jotham slept with his fathers, and he was buried in the city of David. And his son Ahaz became king after him.

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27:5 There is an unusual paragraph break in the Hebrew text setting off what is placed here after the dash.

These verses end the shortest chapter in Chronicles. Jotham won a war against the Ammonites to the east; they paid him tribute three years running. A cor of dry goods is a donkey load; twenty-thousand donkeys loaded with wheat and barley would bake a lot of bread and brew a lot of beer.

Jotham’s death at 41 is not unusual. Some of the kings of Judah and Israel lived fairly long lives. Jotham’s father Uzziah reigned 52 years and died at 68. Uzziah’s father was murdered while in his fifties. Many of the kings who did not live long were in fact murdered, but there is no record of foul play with Jotham in Kings, Chronicles, or any of the prophets. There is also no record of him dying in battle. Therefore some more natural cause such as disease, stroke, cancer, or some other malady must have ended the young king’s life.

Our author is silent about the wars happening to the north at this time. There were murders and conspiracies in Israel, and a constant threat from Aram and a newer, much larger and more powerful enemy: Assyria. Since the Assyrians did not march against Judah until the time of Jotham’s son Ahaz, it makes some sense that they would not yet be mentioned until chapter 28.

A curiosity in the Hebrew text is the presence of an ordinary paragraph sign (setumah) following the words “The Ammonites paid to him” but before the words: “and again in the second and the third years.” This is a paragraph mark that shows a stronger break in the text than what we would call a period. For example, this is the same mark that divides each of the Ten Commandments from one another in Exodus 20. Often it occurs at the end of a chapter. But why place such a mark here? It’s weird.

First: Certain markings of the Hebrew text are part of the inspired Word of God, and others are not. The letters of the words themselves are the inspired text, and unless there is a very good reason to seriously doubt the certainty of the text, we leave it at that. One of the few examples of variations on this includes the numerals that are apparently missing from 1 Samuel 13:1, which says in Hebrew “Saul was __ years old when he became king, and he ruled over Israel for ___-two years.” We think that the missing numbers are “30” and “40 (meaning ‘42’),” but these numerals are missing from all of the Hebrew copies, and therefore I make it my practice to say, “We think this is what the original text said, but in this rare case, we are not exactly sure—and this does not have any effect on God’s plan of salvation.”

Second, third, fourth, and fifth: The vowel markings, the accent markings, and the chapter/verse numbers, and the paragraph markings were all added to the text quite a long time after the text was written and was transmitted by hand-copying. Most of those additional things were not added until the time of Christ or even later. They are helpful to our understanding of the text, and they help us to navigate the pages of text, but they are not part of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:18).

So how did this odd paragraph mark get where it is? I believe that this is a matter of a scribe’s fallibility. There are a couple of places where the term “Ammonites” is followed by a paragraph mark just as we have here: 2 Samuel 10:19 and Jeremiah 41:15. The better acquainted a scribe was with the Hebrew text means, ironically, that he would be more prone to just writing what was familiar to him rather than checking and re-checking the text as he copied it. As Ellis Brotzman put it, “A scribe could lapse into copying from mistaken memory instead of actually copying from the exemplar. This was all the more possible when the scribes knew their texts very well” (Old Testament Textual Criticism, p. 116).

There are a few reasons for textual variations or errors in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Most of these are unintentional:

1, An error because of a similar text (this is the one I think we have here in 2 Chronicles 27:5).
2, Confusion of similar letters or numbers.
3, Wrong word division (such as in Psalm 45:2)
4, Wrong assignment of vowels (this shows up in the Greek Septuagint)
5, Misunderstood abbreviation (perhaps in Joshua 17:14?).
6, Words with similar endings (homoeoteleuton), as in one famous copy of Leviticus 4:25.
7, Words with similar beginnings (homoeoarkton).

Some errors come because scribes are fallible human beings:

8, Haplography (failure to write a letter or word that should be there), sometimes also referred to as a spelling mistake or “forgot a word.”
9, Dittography. A letter is written twice, or sometimes a whole word. I can attest from experience that writing a word by hand twice in a row is more common than one would think, especially when copying from one page to another.
10, Transposing or reversing letters in a word (metathesis), such as the way I am prone to spell “the” as “”teh” when typing.

Some errors come when writing from dictation:

11, Mishearing one word for another, such as “four” and “for.” In Hebrew this is especially a problem with simple terms like lo, “to him” and lo’ ,“not,” which are pronounced exactly the same but spelled differently.

There are other kinds of manuscript errors, but these may suffice to show that such errors can be detected when one manuscript is compared with others. The original text is quite clear. We can be confident about what God has said to us, because none of these potential slips in the copying of manuscripts, letter by letter, word by word, damages the gospel of the forgiveness of sins. And the scribes who copied the text of the Scriptures are the ones who, for many centuries, enabled the gospel to be carried into all the world.

You and I will, like Jotham, close our eyes in the sleep of death one day, and the joyful work of passing God’s word along to children and friends will be passed along to those very children and friends, and the gospel will continue to be believed and preached until Christ comes again.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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