Catholic Commentary
Regnal Summary of Jehoiakim
36Jehoiakim was twenty-five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Zebidah the daughter of Pedaiah of Rumah.37He did that which was evil in Yahweh’s sight, according to all that his fathers had done.
2 Kings 23:36–37 records that Jehoiakim became king of Judah at age twenty-five and reigned for eleven years, installed as a vassal by Pharaoh Neco after his brother's deposition. The historian declares that Jehoiakim did evil in God's sight, perpetuating the covenant unfaithfulness of his predecessors and reversing the reforms of his father Josiah.
Jehoiakim had every advantage—royal birth, a godly father, living prophets—and squandered them all by choosing the world's way over God's, leaving behind only two verses of condemnation.
Typological and Spiritual Senses: In the typological register, Jehoiakim functions as an anti-type of the faithful Davidic king, a figure of the leader who has access to divine covenant and wisdom yet chooses worldly accommodation instead. The Church Fathers saw in the unfaithful kings of Judah a type of the soul that has received baptismal grace but surrenders it to the world. The brevity of the summary — a whole life and reign compressed into two verses — also carries its own spiritual weight: a life lived in defiance of God is, in the final accounting, reducible to very little.
Catholic tradition brings several distinctive lenses to this passage. First, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "sin creates a proclivity to sin; it engenders vice by repetition of the same acts" (CCC 1865). Jehoiakim's recapitulation of his fathers' evil is precisely this dynamic writ large on a dynastic and national scale — the accumulation of unrepented sin, generation upon generation, corrupting the covenant community from within.
Second, Catholic social teaching — rooted in prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah who condemned Jehoiakim specifically — finds in his reign a paradigm case of the ruler who inverts the divine mandate. Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum and subsequent social encyclicals consistently affirm that political authority is a participation in God's governance and is ordered toward the common good and justice. Jehoiakim's building of his palace through forced, uncompensated labor (Jer 22:13) and his killing of the prophet Uriah (Jer 26:23) represent the perversion of that authority.
St. Augustine, in The City of God, contrasts the two cities — one built on love of God, the other on love of self — and the kings of Judah, particularly those condemned by the Deuteronomist, serve as his examples of rulers who chose the earthly city. Jehoiakim is the embodiment of the amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei — love of self even to contempt of God.
Third, the maternal lineage detail invites reflection on the Catholic understanding of family and formative influence. The gebirah tradition, honored in Catholic Marian theology (where Our Lady is the Queen Mother of the New David), here stands as a foil: the queen mother who forms a king in vice rather than virtue.
Jehoiakim had every structural advantage: a royal lineage, a covenant inheritance, the example of his saintly father Josiah, and the voices of living prophets like Jeremiah speaking directly to him. He still chose evil. This is a challenge to contemporary Catholics who rely on the graces of their baptism, their Catholic education, or their family piety as a kind of spiritual insurance policy while making habitual compromises with injustice, dishonesty, or indifference to the poor.
The two-verse summary of his reign is a sobering exercise in memento mori. How will your life be summarized? The Deuteronomistic historian is not interested in Jehoiakim's private feelings or good intentions — only in what he actually did in relation to God and the covenant community. Catholics are called to an examination of conscience that is similarly concrete: not "do I mean well?" but "what have I actually done, and whom have I actually served?" The pattern of sin begetting sin — "according to all that his fathers had done" — is also a call to break cycles of family dysfunction, cultural accommodation, and inherited vices through conversion and sacramental grace, rather than letting them pass on to the next generation.
Commentary
2 Kings 23:36 — The Regnal Formula: The opening formula — age at accession, length of reign, and the mother's name — is the standard Deuteronomistic historian's template, appearing in virtually every regnal notice from 1–2 Kings onward. Yet each detail carries weight. Jehoiakim was twenty-five years old: he was a man of full adult formation, not a child swept along by advisors, when he began to lead the covenant people. His eleven-year reign (609–598 BC) was no brief aberration; it was an extended period of opportunity squandered.
The naming of his mother, Zebidah daughter of Pedaiah of Rumah, is typical of the Deuteronomistic interest in maternal lineage. In Israelite and Judahite royal culture, the queen mother (gebirah) held significant influence over court life and the formation of the king's character. The specific mention of her hometown, Rumah (likely in the northern Galilee region), may subtly suggest foreign or at least peripheral cultural influences entering the royal household — a detail not without significance given the syncretistic tendencies of the reign.
It is critical to note that Jehoiakim was not Josiah's natural successor by primogeniture. The people of the land had chosen his younger brother Jehoahaz (2 Kgs 23:30), but Pharaoh Neco deposed Jehoahaz after only three months and installed Jehoiakim in his place, even changing his birth name from Eliakim (2 Kgs 23:34). Jehoiakim was thus a vassal-king, a puppet of Egypt, whose very enthronement was tainted by foreign imperial manipulation. This background — deliberately left implicit in these verses but established moments earlier in the chapter — casts a long shadow over everything that follows.
2 Kings 23:37 — The Moral Verdict: The historian's judgment is characteristically blunt and formulaic: "He did that which was evil in Yahweh's sight, according to all that his fathers had done." This is among the harshest possible verdicts in the Deuteronomistic framework. The qualifying phrase "according to all that his fathers had done" is not mere repetition; it constitutes a theological claim about moral inheritance and the accumulation of covenant guilt. Jehoiakim did not merely sin in isolation — he recapitulated and perpetuated a dynasty of infidelity.
The content of Jehoiakim's evil is documented elsewhere in Scripture and is particularly vivid in the prophetic books. Jeremiah condemns him for burning the prophetic scroll (Jer 36), for oppressing the poor while building himself a lavish palace (Jer 22:13–17), and for shedding innocent blood (2 Kgs 24:4). The book of Daniel places his defeat and the beginning of the exile in his third year. In the immediate Deuteronomistic context, his reign stands in the starkest possible contrast to that of his father Josiah — the great reformer — whose death at Megiddo (2 Kgs 23:29–30) immediately precedes this passage. Josiah had "turned to Yahweh with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might" (2 Kgs 23:25); Jehoiakim reverses every one of those reforms.