King Amon’s descent into Aman (Haman)
Part One: Honing in on the ever malevolent
king Amon
by
Damien F. Mackey
Part One:
Honing in on the ever malevolent
king Amon
by
Damien F. Mackey
“[Amon]
… did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, as did Manasseh his father:
for
Amon sacrificed unto all the carved images which Manasseh his father had made,
and
served them; and humbled not himself before the Lord,
as Manasseh his father
had
humbled himself; but Amon trespassed more and more”.
How could this young king
of Judah have managed to achieve such a degree of wickedness, when, as
according to v. 21: “Amon was
two and twenty years old when he began to reign, and reigned two years in
Jerusalem”?
Not very long a
reign, not very old in years, for Amon to have outpassed his father, Manasseh,
who “reigned in Jerusalem fifty-five years”.
My Revised Amon
My explanation for how
king Amon of Judah was able to amass such an appalling record of “evil
in the sight of the Lord” would be that the count of
his reign had continued into a long period of captivity. I would take as an
example of this king Jehoiachin of Judah, who, having “reigned in Jerusalem three months” before having been taken captive
to Babylon by Nebuchednezzar (2 Kings 24:8-12), continued to have his regnal
years counted there in exile, so that we read further on (25:27): “In
the thirty-seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the year
Awel-Marduk became king of Babylon …”.
King Jehoiachin
is a particularly apt comparison - at least according to my revision - because
he would continue in his evil ways (“trespassed more and more”) culminating in
his rôle as the terrible Haman during the Medo-Persian era. See e.g. my:
But king Jehoiachin now -
in my steps here towards a deeper revision - becomes even more apt given that
his alter ego, Haman,
enables for a virtual name comparison with Amon, leading to my proposed new
identification of (Jehoiachin)-Haman with Amon king of Judah.
Haman is in fact
called Aman (even closer to the name,
Amon) in a version of Tobit 14:10, where he has been confused with Nadab (or
Nadin), which is the correct reading.
{Haman and Nadin, my ‘Holofernes”, belong to two
entirely different eras}
My new
suggestion (Haman = Amon), which does affect certain biblical sequences as we
currently have them (e.g. Amon can now no longer be the father of king Josiah)
- as well as affecting information pertaining to who was the mother of Amon - can be only tentative at this stage.
If Haman is Amon, then
that would account for the origin of the name Haman, which I had previously
imagined must have been Jehoiachin’s Persian name. For instance, the famous
Persian name Achaemenes can be
rendered as Hakhamanish (containing the element haman). Amon itself, though, is very much an Egyptian name, and we
know that pharaoh Necho, at about that time, had a certain influence in naming
young kings of Judah (2 Kings 23:34).
Scholars dearly wish that
they knew more about Amon, given that the Bible dismisses him, qua Amon, in just a few verses. “It
is rather unfortunate that so little is known of the reign of Amon, king of
Judah; for he lived evidently in a critical period”.
However, if Amon has the alter egos that I have proposed for him
in this article, then we can actually know quite a lot about him.
The Jewish Encyclopedia here recalls a Rabbinic comment on the extreme
wickedness of King Amon of Judah:
The fact
that Amon was the most sinful of all the wicked kings of Judah (II Chron.
xxxiii. 23) is brought out in the Talmud (Sanh. 103b) as follows:
(Sanh.
104a)
Ahaz
suspended the sacrificial worship, Manasseh tore down the altar, Amon made it a
place of desolation [covered it with cobwebs]; Ahaz sealed up the scrolls of
the Law (Isa. viii. 16), Manasseh cut out the sacred name, Amon burnt the
scrolls altogether [compare Seder Olam, R. xxiv. This is derived from the story
of the finding of the Book of the Law, II Kings, xxii. 8]; Ahab permitted
incest, Manasseh committed it himself, Amon acted as Nero was said to have done
toward his mother Agrippina. And yet, out of respect for his son Josiah, Amon's
name was not placed on the list of the kings excluded from the world to come.
[End of
quote]
What does gel nicely - according
to my revised view that Amon is Haman - is the situation of death of Amon (2
Kings 21:23): “Amon’s officials conspired
against him and assassinated the king in his palace”, with the situation of
death of Haman (Esther 7:9): “And Harbona, one of the eunuchs that stood
waiting on the king, said: ‘Behold the gibbet which [Aman] hath prepared for
Mardochai, who spoke for the king, standeth in Aman's house, being fifty cubits
high’. And the king said to him: ‘Hang him upon it’.”
Both deaths occurred violently, at the hands of officials, in the
palace (house) of the offender.
In the case of Amon, we get the added note that (2 Kings 21:24): “Then the people of the land killed all who had plotted against King
Amon …”.
The “land”, I believe, is Susa, and the Jews (now assisted by the
Persian king) are in the midst of a major conflict, yet unresolved, with their
enemies. So it may not be surprising to learn that there was a retaliation for
the death of Amon-Haman, who had many friends and allies (Esther 5:10-11): “But
dissembling his anger, and returning into his house, [Haman] called together to
him his friends, and Zares his wife. And he declared to them the greatness of
his riches, and the multitude of his children, and with how great glory the
king had advanced him above all his princes and servants”.
A concluding note
New problems arise from
this radical new proposal about King Amon of Judah, which places him much later
in time than is usually accepted for him. I have already admitted this above.
These problems will be elaborated upon, and hopefully addressed, as this series
progresses.
Part Two:
Some implications of Amon’s being
Jehoiachin-Haman
“Jehoiachin
was eighteen years old when he became king, and he was king [reigned] three months in Jerusalem. His mother’s
name was
Nehushta
daughter of Elnathan from Jerusalem”.
2 Kings 24:8
At the end of Part
One
I noted that “new problems arise from this radical new proposal about King Amon
of Judah, which places him much later in time than is usually accepted for
him”. These “problems” are not insignificant.
First of all, this deeper revision
must affect the sequence of the latter kings of Judah as currently set out in 2
Kings, 2 Chronicles, etc.
For instance, Amon can no
longer be the father of Josiah as recorded in various places. E.g.:
2 Kings 21:24;
2 Chronicles 33:25;
Jeremiah 1:2;
Zephaniah 1:1;
Matthew 1:10.
And, considering that the
royal sequence is also set out in the New Testament, in Matthew 1:6-11, then
the Genealogy of Jesus Christ as we currently have it must be affected as well.
According to another version of Matthew 1:10 (ESV), though, Josiah was the son
of “Amos”, not Amon: “… Hezekiah [was] the father of Manasseh,
and Manasseh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josiah …”.
Bible Gateway
adds the note to this: “Matthew 1:10 Amos
is probably an alternate spelling of Amon; some manuscripts Amon;
twice in this verse”.
In actual fact, the names “Amos” and “Amon” are two
entirely different names.
The fact that “Amos” can appear instead of “Amon” may give me
some hope now for thinking that there is a certain leeway for rejecting Amon as
the father of Josiah.
And, perfectly in accord with my revised view that King
Amon of Judah was also the wicked Haman of the Book of Esther is Abarim’s
association of these two names:
Associated
Biblical names
Other related problems
that arise from my deeper revision are the different ages and reign lengths
attributed to the supposedly two kings, but whom I am identifying as one, plus
three different female names ‘claiming the right’ to be the king of Judah’s
mother:
2 Kings 21:19: “Amon was twenty-two years old
when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem two years. His mother’s name was Meshullemeth daughter of Haruz; she was from Jotbah”.
2 Kings 24:8: “Jehoiachin
was eighteen years old when he became
king, and he was king [reigned] three months in
Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Nehushta
daughter of Elnathan from Jerusalem”.
Esther 3:1: “After these events, King Xerxes honored Haman son of Hammedatha …”, she being queen
Hamutal (Hammutal) of 2 Kings 23:30 according
to my revision.
Part Three:
Re-casting the sequence of Judaean kings
“Now
after this he (King Manasseh) built a wall without the city of David, on the
west side of Gihon, in the valley, even to the entering in at the fish gate,
and compassed about Ophel, and raised it up a very great height, and put
captains of war in all the fenced cities of Judah.”
2nd Chronicles 33:14
With King Amon of Judah
identified in this present series with Haman of the Book of Esther - described
as a “king” in Queen Esther’s prayer (14:10), “to magnify forever a mortal king” - and whom I have previously
identified with King Jehoiachin (var. Coniah) of Judah, and hence having now
detected a duplicating sequence embedded in our various lists of Judaean kings,
it becomes necessary to attempt to re-cast the royal list without any such duplications.
Let us turn again the
Genealogy of Jesus the Messiah in Matthew 1, to that part of Matthew’s list
from King David to Jeconiah (= Amon) (vv. 7-11):
David was the father of Solomon …
Solomon the father of Rehoboam,
Rehoboam the father of Abijah,
Abijah the father of Asa,
Asa the father of Jehoshaphat,
Jehoshaphat the father of Jehoram,
Jehoram the father of Uzziah,
Uzziah the father of Jotham,
Jotham the father of Ahaz,
Ahaz the father of Hezekiah,
Hezekiah the father of Manasseh,
Manasseh the father of Amon,
Amon the father of Josiah,
and Josiah the father of Jeconiah ….
As has often been pointed
out, four known kings (Ahaziah, Joash, Amaziah and Jehoiakim) are missing from
Matthew’s list here, making it seem to many to be artificially constructed.
D. M. Williams, for
instance, will wonder about three of these missing Judaean kings, in his “A word on the skipped generations in
Matthew’s genealogy”:
But in addition to the striking features of the
schema, there are some nettlesome ones as well: namely, Matthew has to skip a
few kings in order to make the second block of fourteen “work” (compare, for
instance, 1:8-9 with 1 Chronicles 3:11-12–what happened to Ahaziah, Joash and
Amaziah?) and the final block, if you count, actually only has thirteen
generations. One question which came up in our study yesterday was
basically What are we to make of this? Are we now resting our faith on a
lie? If Jesus was not born precisely forty nine generations after
Abraham, is our faith in vain?
[End of quote]
I have wondered especially
about the omission of the mighty kings, Joash and Amaziah, who, though they
erred, do not appear to have been so consistently bad as, say, Ahaz, or
Manasseh, who are included in the list. But, in the end, I had acquiesced to
arguments connecting them with the Omride queen, Athaliah - although that would
apply more directly to king Jehoram (who was married to her, 2 Kings 8:18), who
is not omitted from the list.
But now, with duplications
recognised (if I am on the right track), there is no longer need for Joash and
Amaziah to be excluded from the list. {Though I can accept, perhaps, that their
predecessor Ahaziah might be omitted as constituting a ‘lost generation’}.
Taking the first ten
generations in the list, I would like to suggest the following emendations (in
bold print):
David was the father of Solomon …
Solomon the father of Rehoboam,
Rehoboam the father of Abijah,
Abijah the father of Asa,
Asa the father of Jehoshaphat,
Jehoshaphat the father of Jehoram,
Jehoram the father of Joash,
Joash
the father of Amaziah,
Amaziah
the father of Uzziah,
Uzziah the father of Jotham,
Jotham the father of Ahaz,
Ahaz the father of Hezekiah ….
Ten generations now
enlarged to twelve.
Conventionally, we still
have yet four generations left (a total of 12+4 = 16), which would spoil
Matthew’s neat sequence of fourteens:
Hezekiah the father of Manasseh,
Manasseh the father of Amon,
Amon the father of Josiah,
and Josiah the father of Jeconiah ….
We now, therefore, have 2
generations too many.
However, with Amon now
folded into Jeconiah (or Jehoiachin) as according to this series, and with Amon
no longer recognised as the father of Josiah, but rather one named “Amos” thus being
recognised, then, finally - and what I have long wondered about - Hezekiah can
now be identified with his mirror-image Josiah.
Manasseh now becomes the
wicked Jehoiakim, another of those kings who has been left out of Matthew’s
genealogical list.
And “Amos”, the father of
Josiah, becomes Ahaz, the father of Hezekiah.
The name Amos, or Amoz, is
only a consonant different from Ahaz.
This would therefore be my
emended list:
Hezekiah [=Josiah] the father of Manasseh
[=Jehoiakim],
Manasseh the father of Amon =Jehoiachin] ….
Fourteen generations.
If Manasseh were
Jehoiakim, then that would explain, for one, why the prophet Jeremiah names
Manasseh as the reason for the Babylonian enmity (Jeremiah 15:4): “I
will make them abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth because of what
Manasseh son of Hezekiah king of Judah did in Jerusalem”, even though Jehoiakim
was just as evil and was, conventionally speaking, far closer in time to the
Babylonian troubles than was Manasseh.
Again it would
explain the strong tradition of the prophet Isaiah’s being martyred during the
reign of king Manasseh.
“Michael A.
Knibb writes: "The Martyrdom of Isaiah is a Jewish work which has come
down to us as part of a larger Christian composition known as the Ascension of
Isaiah".”
http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/ascensionisaiah.html Un-mentioned
in the Bible in connection with king Manasseh, qua Manasseh, this incident can (I think) be related to the
martyrdom of the prophet Uriah (var. Urijah) during the reign of Jehoiakim
(Jeremiah 26:23): “And they fetched forth Urijah out of Egypt, and brought him
to Jehoiakim the king; who slew him with the sword, and cast his dead body into
the graves of the common people”.
Uriah now
becomes Isaiah.
Incidentally,
the prophet Uriah was “fetched forth” from Egypt by an “Elnathan” (v. 27), who
may well be the same as the father of king Jehoiachin’s mother, “Nehushta daughter
of Elnathan” (2 Kings 24:8): “His mother’s name
was Nehushta daughter of Elnathan …”.
Unlike king Amon/Jehoiachin, who
evolved into Haman, and who “humbled not himself before the Lord [but who] trespassed more and more”, his
similarly long-reigning (in captivity) father, king Manasseh/Jehoiakim,
thankfully, “had humbled himself” (2 Chronicles 33:22, 23).
The conversion of King Manasseh is told in vv.
11-13:
Therefore the Lord brought against them the army
commanders of the Assyrian king; they captured Manasseh with hooks, shackled
him with chains, and transported him to Babylon. In his
distress, he began to appease the Lord, his God. He humbled himself abjectly
before the God of his ancestors, and prayed to him. The Lord let himself be
won over: he heard his prayer and restored him to his kingdom in Jerusalem.
Then Manasseh knew that the Lord is indeed God.
As we read at the beginning, king Manasseh began the
rebuilding and fortifying of Jerusalem.
I would tentatively identify king Manasseh/Jehoiakim
with the “Sheshbazzar prince of Judah” of Ezra 1:8: “Cyrus
king of Persia brought these out in the charge of Mithredath the treasurer, who
counted them out to Sheshbazzar the prince of Judah”.
“Sheshbazzar” would of course
have been the king’s Babylonian name, given to him in captivity. As we do not
hear any more about Sheshbazzar, he, now aged (if he were Manasseh), may well
have died not long afterwards – or simply left the overseeing of the remaining
building work to younger men.
Part Four:
Who was the actual mother of King Amon
of Judah?
“After
these events, King Ahasuerus honored Haman son of Hammedatha …”.
Esther 3:1
Having alter egos for King Amon of Judah,
whilst serving to solve certain problems according to the findings of this
series, also adds a few complications as I noted in Part Two:
“Other related problems
that arise from my deeper revision are the different ages and reign lengths
attributed to the supposedly two kings, but whom I am identifying as one, plus
three different female names ‘claiming the right’ to be the king of Judah’s
mother:
2 Kings 21:19: “Amon was twenty-two years old
when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem two years. His mother’s name was Meshullemeth daughter of Haruz; she was from Jotbah”.
2 Kings 24:8: “Jehoiachin
was eighteen years old when he became
king, and he was king [reigned] three months in
Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Nehushta
daughter of Elnathan from Jerusalem”.
Esther 3:1: “After these events, King Ahasuerus honored Haman son of Hammedatha …”, she being queen
Hamutal (Hammutal) of 2 Kings 23:30 according
to my revision”.
Actually, I have
already partly solved the problem of ‘three mothers’ for the one king here by
indicating that the otherwise unattested “Hammedatha”, of whom Haman was the “son”,
was the same as the Jewish queen, Hammutal (or Hamutal).
For Hamutal was
not the biological mother of the king, but was the mother of his uncles:
“There is only one Hamutal in the
Bible, and she is the mother of kings Jehoahaz and Zedekiah of Judah (2 Kings
23:31, 24:18, Jeremiah 52:1)”.
{That
these kings could have more than the one name is attested by Zedekiah
originally having been Mattaniah (2 Kings 24:17)}
As
to whether either Meshullemeth
(above), said to be the mother of Amon, or Nehushta (above), said to be the mother of (Amon’s alter ego) Jehoiachin, was the actual
biological mother, I have not looked into the matter yet deeply enough to make
any sort of judgment.
One possibility to be considered is that Meshullemeth and Nehushta
were the same person, though with different patronymics due to possible
differentiation between father and grandfather.
But, whatever may be the case, we have easily managed to reduce
three ‘mothers’ to two.
Differing ages and reign lengths: Amon … twenty-two years old … he reigned in Jerusalem two years; Jehoiachin … eighteen
years old … he … [reigned] three months in Jerusalem, can readily be accounted for by
co-regency.
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