In the twelfth year of Joram the son of Ahab, king of Israel did Ahaziah the son of Jehoram king of Judah begin to reign. He is called Jehoahaz, and said to be the youngest son of Jehoram, 2 Chronicles 21:17.

Reign of Ahaziah of Judah (cf. 2 Chronicles 22:1-6). - Ahaziah, the youngest son of Joram, ascended the throne in the twenty-second year of his age. The statement in 2 Chronicles 22:2, that he was forty-two years old when he became king, rests upon a copyist's error, namely, a confusion of כ twenty with מ forty. Now, since his father became king at the age of thirty-two, and reigned eight years, Ahaziah must have been born in the nineteenth year of his age. Consequently it may appear strange that Ahaziah had brothers still older than himself (2 Chronicles 21:17); but as early marriages are common in the East, and the royal princes had generally concubines along with their wife of the first rank, as is expressly stated of Joram in 2 Chronicles 21:17, he might have had some sons in his nineteenth year. His mother was called Athaliah, and was a daughter of the idolatrous Jezebel. In 2 Kings 8:26 and 2 Chronicles 22:2 she is called the daughter, i.e., grand-daughter, of Omri; for, according to 2 Kings 8:18, she was a daughter of Ahab. Omri, the grand-father, is mentioned in 2 Kings 8:26 as the founder of the dynasty which brought so much trouble upon Israel and Judah through its idolatry.

In the twelfth year of Joram the son of Ahab king of Israel did Ahaziah the son of Jehoram king of Judah begin to reign.

8:25-29 Names do not make natures, but it was bad for Jehoshaphat's family to borrow names from Ahab's. Ahaziah's relation to Ahab's family was the occasion of his wickedness and of his fall. When men choose wives for themselves, let them remember they are choosing mothers for their children. Providence so ordered it, that Ahaziah might be cut off with the house of Ahab, when the measure of their iniquity was full. Those who partake with sinners in their sin, must expect to partake with them in their plagues. May all the changes, troubles, and wickedness of the world, make us more earnest to obtain an interest in the salvation of Christ.