Son of Josiah and last king of Judah (597-586 BC) before the Babylonian Exile.
Family Tree Timeline Open King List
(Generation 29)
Also known as Mattaniah, Zedekiah was the third of Josiah's sons to reign in the closing decades of the Judah (the others before were Jehoahaz and Jehoiakim).
Zedekiah had come to the throne at a difficult time in the history of the nation. For the past quarter of a century three superpowers—Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt—had fought a winner takes all fight for supremacy in the region. In the north Assyria had been fighting for its life against the onslaught of the Babylonians when Egypt decided to come to its aid (hoping that, by having the two keeping one another on their toes) the south (i.e., Palestine and Syria) would be open to her influence. Josiah had attempted to stop Neco, the king of Egypt's march up north but was killed in the battle, and Zedekiah's eldest brother, Jehoahaz, had succeeded to the throne. By the time Egypt arrived in the north, however, Assyria was already wiped out. Marching back south, Neco had taken Jehoahaz hostage and replaced him with a second brother, Jehoiakim, just to show who is in power. Soon afterwards, however, the Babylonians—having now consolidated their power up north—marched south to deal with Egypt as well as to make the kingdoms in the south subject to them. Jehoiakim, as king of Judah, quickly submitted and was left in peace to rule for eleven uneventful years. But he did not enjoy being a Babylonian vassal, and Egyptian propaganda was rife. Fatefully, he decided to throw off the yoke of Babylon. What could anyone expect except that Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, should march against him? What happened next is uncertain. It seems Jehoiakim may have died (possibly assassinated) before the arrival of the Babylonian army, and was succeeded by his son, Jehoiachin. On his arrival in Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar took Jehoiachin prisoner (but he was well treated, cf., 2 Ki 25:27-30) and replaced him with Zedekiah instead (and changing his name from Mattaniah to Zedekiah; again, so everyone knows who is boss).
Zedekiah—twenty-one years old when he came to the throne—was a spineless man, easily swayed by ill-counsel, and endowed with little of the spiritual and moral statue of his father. Of the 53x his name appears in the OT, 46 appear in the book of Jeremiah, to whom he was a wretched pain in the neck. He would ask Jeremiah to enquire of the Lord only then to fall back on his word. The king is famously compared by Yahweh as "like the poor fights, which are so bad that they cannot be eaten . . . I will make them abhorrent and an offence to all the kingdoms of the earth, a reproach and a byword, an object of ridicule and cursing, wherever I banish them" (Jer 24:8-9). Encouraged by false prophets who predicted that God would soon break the yoke of Babylon, Zedekiah was sore tempted to rebel, but was repeatedly warned by Jeremiah not to do so (27, 37). The itch to rebel became uncontrollable in his ninth year when he finally gave in. The Babylonian army soon arrived and placed Jerusalem under siege, starving the population for two years and reducing those within to the terrifying horrors documented in the book of Lamentations. On the "the ninth day of the fourth month of the eleventh year" the walls were breached and the slaughter and destruction of Jerusalem begun.
Zedekiah and his family managed to escape but were soon overtaken by the pursuing Babylonians and taken prisoners near Jericho. Brought before Nebuchadnezzar in the city of Riblah, Zedekiah was forced to witness the execution of his three sons, then his own eyes were blinded before being shackled and taken prisoner to Babylon where he died (though the fact is not mentioned in Scriptures).
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