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Catholic Commentary
The Reign of Jotham of Judah
32In the second year of Pekah the son of Remaliah king of Israel, Jotham the son of Uzziah king of Judah began to reign.33He was twenty-five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Jerusha the daughter of Zadok.34He did that which was right in Yahweh’s eyes. He did according to all that his father Uzziah had done.35However the high places were not taken away. The people still sacrificed and burned incense in the high places. He built the upper gate of Yahweh’s house.36Now the rest of the acts of Jotham, and all that he did, aren’t they written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?37In those days, Yahweh began to send Rezin the king of Syria and Pekah the son of Remaliah against Judah.38Jotham slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers in his father David’s city; and Ahaz his son reigned in his place.
2 Kings 15:32–38 describes the reign of Jotham of Judah, who ruled for sixteen years and was commended for doing right in God's eyes, yet failed to remove high places where worship occurred outside the Jerusalem Temple. The passage concludes by noting that God began to send the Syrian and Israelite kings against Judah as judgment, establishing the context for divine discipline in the following reign.
A king can be personally faithful and still fail if he tolerates the "high places" — the private compromises he refuses to dismantle.
Verse 37 — The Beginning of Judgment. The most theologically charged moment in the passage: "Yahweh began to send Rezin the king of Syria and Pekah the son of Remaliah against Judah." Note the verb — began. The threat is not yet fully unleashed, but the divine permission is already in motion. This will escalate dramatically in the reign of Ahaz (2 Kgs 16), culminating in the Syro-Ephraimite War. God uses foreign powers as instruments of discipline — not because He abandons His people, but because covenant unfaithfulness has consequences (Deut 28:25). The high places of verse 35 and the encroaching armies of verse 37 are not unrelated.
Verse 38 — Death and Succession. The standard burial formula — "slept with his fathers" and interred "in David's city" — affirms Jotham's place within the Davidic lineage and the covenant community. But the final word is "Ahaz his son reigned in his place," and the reader familiar with 2 Kings 16 knows that Ahaz will be one of Judah's worst kings, introducing Assyrian cults into the Temple itself. Jotham's reign is thus a brief plateau of relative faithfulness between the decline of Uzziah and the collapse under Ahaz.
Catholic tradition reads the Books of Kings not merely as dynastic history but as a sustained theological meditation on the relationship between fidelity, worship, and covenant blessing. Several threads of Catholic teaching illuminate this passage distinctively.
Worship and Integrity: The Catechism teaches that "worship is inseparable from what one believes and what one does" (CCC 2061, cf. CCC 1070). Jotham's compromise on the high places illustrates what the Church calls semi-fidelity — an incomplete conversion that holds back the fullness of covenant life. St. Augustine, in De Vera Religione, warns that mixed or divided worship corrupts the whole: "our heart is restless until it rests in Thee." Jotham's personal righteousness could not substitute for the structural reform of Israel's worship.
The Role of the Queen Mother: The mention of Jerusha in verse 33 connects to the Catholic theology of the gebirah (queen mother), a theme developed by scholars like Edward Sri. The queen mother held intercessory authority in the Davidic court (cf. 1 Kgs 2:19), prefiguring Mary's role as Queen Mother of the New Davidic Kingdom. Her priestly lineage through Zadok further enriches this connection.
Providence and Judgment (v. 37): The Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum affirms that God acts through human history to accomplish His saving purposes (DV 2). God's use of Rezin and Pekah as agents of discipline reflects what the Catechism calls God's "permissive will" (CCC 311–313) — He does not cause evil, but He permits human and political consequences to unfold as a call to repentance. St. John Chrysostom (Homilies on Romans) saw such divine chastisements as medicinal, not punitive in a vindictive sense: they are invitations to return.
Typological Reading: Jotham ("Yahweh is perfect") is a type of the faithful but incomplete leader — one who preserves but does not fully renew. Only Christ, the true Davidic King, removes every "high place" of divided allegiance and gathers all worship into Himself (cf. Jn 4:21–24).
Jotham's story speaks with uncomfortable directness to the Catholic who is "basically faithful" — who attends Mass, lives morally, perhaps builds and funds worthy religious projects — but maintains private "high places": habitual sins left unconfessed, compromised relationships never addressed, intellectual commitments quietly at odds with Church teaching. The high places were not shrines to demons; they were places where real worship happened, but worship that had not been fully surrendered to God's ordering.
The lesson is this: personal virtue and institutional generosity cannot compensate for structural unfaithfulness in one's interior life. Jotham builds a gate for the Temple while the people sacrifice elsewhere, and judgment still comes. For us, the Sacrament of Reconciliation is precisely the means by which "high places" are dismantled — not by our own effort alone, but through submission to the priestly ministry Christ has instituted. Catholics today might ask: what areas of my life have I kept outside the Temple? What compromises have I quietly normalized because "overall I'm doing well"? Jotham's reign ends, the armies are already gathering — the time to act is not Ahaz's reign but now.
Commentary
Verse 32 — Synchronization with the Northern Kingdom. The narrator anchors Jotham's accession to the second year of Pekah of Israel, a technique the Books of Kings use consistently to weave both kingdoms into a single providential history. Pekah himself came to power through assassination (2 Kgs 15:25), and his kingdom is already in moral and political freefall. By placing righteous Jotham alongside corrupt Pekah, the historian invites a contrast: the Davidic line in Jerusalem still holds, however imperfectly, to the covenant.
Verse 33 — Basic Regnal Data. Jotham begins at twenty-five and reigns sixteen years (roughly 740–732 BC). His mother Jerusha, daughter of Zadok, is deliberately named — a pattern in Kings for Judahite queens that underscores their formative influence on the king and, through the queen-mother (the gebirah), their role in the royal court. The name "Jerusha" means "possession" or "inheritance," and Zadok's lineage suggests a priestly connection, lending Jotham's household a tone of covenantal legitimacy.
Verse 34 — The Qualified Commendation. "He did that which was right in Yahweh's eyes" is the highest honor the Deuteronomistic historian bestows, but it is immediately qualified: Jotham follows his father Uzziah. This is significant because Uzziah, despite being broadly faithful, was struck with leprosy for usurping priestly functions in the Temple (2 Chr 26:16–21). The praise of Jotham is thus calibrated — he is better than the wicked northern kings, faithful within the Davidic tradition, but not in the mold of the reformers Hezekiah or Josiah.
Verse 35 — The Persistent Failure: The High Places. This is the hinge verse of the passage. The high places (bamot) were hilltop shrines, often predating Israel's settlement, where sacrifices and incense offerings were made outside the Jerusalem Temple. Their persistence was not necessarily full-blown paganism in every instance — many Israelites may have believed they were worshipping Yahweh there — but they represented a failure of cultic centralization mandated by Deuteronomy 12. Jotham's inability or unwillingness to dismantle them is a structural spiritual failure that cannot be compensated for by personal piety. Yet amid this failure, we are told he "built the upper gate of Yahweh's house" — a concrete act of devotion to the Temple, likely the northern gate mentioned in Ezekiel 9:2. This architectural investment is spiritually ironic: the king beautifies God's house while permitting worship to be fragmented across the countryside.
Verse 36 — The Chronicle Formula. The appeal to "the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah" is a recurring citation formula in Kings, acknowledging that the canonical account is selective and that a fuller royal archive once existed. Theologically, it reminds the reader that history is being interpreted, not merely reported — the narrator's purpose is catechesis, not comprehensive biography.