Jehoshaphat

Jehoshaphat (Hebrew Yehoshaphat), son of King Asa of Judah and of Azubah daughter of Shilhi, was a king of the ancient Kingdom of Judah in the ninth century BCE. The books of Kings and Chronicles state that he was thirty-five years old when he began to reign in Jerusalem and that he reigned twenty-five years. Absolute calendar years of his birth and death are not independently documented; they are inferred only from biblical reign lengths and later synchronisms with Near Eastern chronology, so precise dates remain reconstructions rather than attested facts. He is portrayed as one of the more faithful rulers of Judah, said to have walked in the ways of his father Asa, sought the God of his father, and taken measures to strengthen Yahwistic worship and royal administration, while the sources also record political compromise with the northern Kingdom of Israel.

The account in 2 Chronicles 17–20 is more expansive than 1 Kings 22. Chronicles describes him as removing some high places and sacred poles, garrisoning the fortified cities of Judah, and sending officials, Levites, and priests through the towns to teach from the book of the law of the Lord. He is also said to have appointed judges in the fortified cities and in Jerusalem and to have charged them to judge in the fear of the Lord. Kings and Chronicles both record a consequential alliance with Israel: Jehoshaphat made peace with Ahab, and the houses were tied by marriage when Jehoshaphat’s son Jehoram married Athaliah of Omri’s house. That alliance drew him into Ahab’s campaign against Ramoth-Gilead, in which Ahab was killed. The Chronicler adds prophetic rebuke of the alliance through Jehu son of Hanani.

Chronicles further relates a crisis in which Moabites, Ammonites, and Meunites advanced against Judah. Jehoshaphat proclaimed a fast, assembled the people at the temple in Jerusalem, and prayed; the narrative states that the attackers turned on one another and that Judah collected the spoils. He later joined Ahaziah of Israel in a shipbuilding venture at Ezion-geber, which the biblical text says was wrecked. He had several sons, among them Jehoram, who succeeded him, as well as Azariah, Jehiel, Zechariah, Azariah, Michael, and Shephatiah, to whom according to Chronicles he gave gifts and fortified cities. The sources state that he died and was buried with his ancestors in the City of David in Jerusalem. His wife is not named in the surviving biblical texts.

Jehoshaphat is remembered in Jewish and Christian tradition as a biblical king rather than as a formally canonized saint of the later Catholic or Orthodox calendars. He has no widely attested distinct feast day, religious order, or list of patronages of the kind attached to post-biblical saints. His name was later given to the Valley of Jehoshaphat associated in the book of Joel with divine judgment, a toponymic and eschatological development separate from the king’s own biography. Historical knowledge of his life depends almost entirely on the Deuteronomistic and Chronistic biblical accounts, which combine administrative, cultic, and theological portraiture; extra-biblical inscriptions do not independently narrate his reign.