Exodus 1:22, 2:1-4
Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.” Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the riverbank. And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him.
2 Kings 11:1-2
Now when Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the royal family. But Jehosheba, the daughter of King Joram, sister of Ahaziah, took Joash the son of Ahaziah and stole him away from among the king's sons who were being put to death, and she put him and his nurse in a bedroom. Thus, they hid him from Athaliah, so that he was not put to death.
Matthew 2:13-14
Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt.
In our lesson this week from 2 Kings 11, we read of Queen Athaliah, “that wicked woman” (as 2 Chronicles 24:7 refers to her) determined to consolidate her power and grasp the royal throne in Judah. It says, “she arose and destroyed all the royal family.” That would be the sons of her own son! But the plot is foiled by one of her own daughters. This daughter finds Joash, the youngest son of Ahaziah, and spirits the infant boy away to the inner chambers of the Temple in Jerusalem. Many a rabbi has opined that he was kept in a room above the Holy of Holies. This meddling daughter’s name was Jehosheba.
I want to suggest to you that there’s much packed into that courageous woman’s name. She risked her life to stow away royal contraband. If caught, she would have been toast. She is brave, but it is her name that clues us into the meaning of her mission. The name breaks down thus— Yah = God; and shava = to swear: Jeho–sheba. Colloquially, it would be “God’s Oath.” This is rich…
Remember way back in 2 Samuel 7, God promised King David that he would never take his kingdom away like he did with King Saul. “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever…. Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever.'" (2 Sam. 7:12-13, 16). Note well, “forever” is repeated three times to close in this passage!
This was God’s “oath.” We call this stage of God’s plans the Davidic Covenant. In the perilous darkness of Athaliah’s usurpation, this divine promise looked as if it would not live to see the light of the next day. Yet God is in the business of confounding the expectations of tyrants. Joash is raised under the faithful tutelage of his uncle Jehoida, a priest serving in the Jerusalem temple.
The plot comes to fruition in the seventh year, on the seventh day. (Of course!) Seven-year-old Joash is enthroned in the temple court to great joy. I might add parenthetically, that in contrast to Jehu’s apocalypse in the northern kingdom, there are just two casualties in the south: Athaliah is summarily executed at the horse gate to match her mother’s demise at the hooves of Jehu’s horses. And Mattan, the high priest of the temple of Baal in Jerusalem, is also offed. That’s it. No more.
Jehosheba— “God’s Oath”— is a reminder that God’s promises will never fall. A son of David, Joash comes to the throne in Judah and spends most of his reign rebuilding and cleaning up the temple, which had fallen into disrepair throughout the years of Ahab’s dominance of the cultural and religious landscape in both northern and southern kingdoms. He wasn’t a perfect king, but he started the ball rolling in the right direction. He was an interruption of business as usual with God’s People.
Consequently, the story of Joash is most significant in that it’s telling makes us mindful of another baby boy and young woman bringing the beginnings of salvation and thwarting the murderous designs of another tyrant. That baby boy would be Moses, delivered by his sister Miriam via a bulrush basket upon the waters of the Nile, wrapped in Hebrew cloth. Floated right into the household, and under the nose of Pharaoh himself— the Egyptian “holy of holies,” so to speak. Moses would go on to be used greatly of God, leading his people in the Exodus to the Promised Land, with a connection at the Mount Sinai “hub.”
But the greatest baby rescue operation in Scripture comes not from Moses or Joash, but in the Lord Jesus Christ. King Herod, posthumously named “The Great” for his building prowess, not his niceness— already a paranoid and cruel ruler, was further un-nerved when the magi from the east informed him they were following the star of one who would be born the King of the Jews (cf. Matthew 2). Like Athaliah some 800 years earlier, Herod furiously tries to get rid of the all the possible male candidates for the role of Messiah. We know this sad chapter as “the slaughter of the innocents.”
But we return to “the oath” of God concerning the coming eternal reign of a Son of David will be kept. God sends the Holy Family into Egypt. Later, after Herod’s death, Matthew will declare a messianic prophecy from Hosea fulfilled, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Matt. 2:15). Jesus returns and does everything that first founding generation called “out of Egypt” did not do. He will be a sin-less, faithful firstborn son. He will give his people rest. And he will fulfill the law perfectly.
It turns out that this story of Jehosheba, Jehoida and Joash in 2 Kings 11 is a reminder of how God began to save his particular people out of the slavery of bondage. But mostly, it becomes a foretaste of a greater deliverance from sin and death God has up his sleeves for all humanity in Christ Jesus.
As a footnote for this lesson, the payoff for chewing on these Old Testament stories well is that, in the effort, you get a wider, deeper, and textured serving of the riches of God’s salvation.
Inset Art: “Flight into Egypt” (1923) by Henry Ossawa Tanner
