punishing hand of the Lord, which, even if it might possibly have been overlooked in the calamity that befell the captain who was first sent and his company, could not be misunderstood when a similar fate befell the second captain with his fifty men, sent a third company, in his defiant obduracy, to fetch the prophet. (שׁלשׁים after חמשּׁים is apparently an error of the pen for שׁלישׁי, as the following word השּׁלישׁי shows). But the third captain was better than his king, and wiser than his two predecessors. He obeyed the command of the king so far as to go to the prophet; but instead of haughtily summoning him to follow him, he bent his knee before the man of God, and prayed that his own life and the lives of his soldiers might be spared.
Verses 15-16
Then Elijah followed him to the king (מפּניו, before him, i.e., before the king, not before the captain; and אתו for ??????, see Ewald, §264, b.), having been directed to do so by the angel of the Lord, and repeated to him the word of the Lord, which he had also conveyed to him through his messengers (see 2Ki 1:4 and 2Ki 1:6).
Verses 17-18
When Ahaziah died, according to the word of the Lord through Elijah, as he had no son, he was followed upon the throne by his brother Joram, “in the second year of Joram the son of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah.” This statement is at variance both with that in 2Ki 3:1, to the effect that Joram began to reign in the eighteenth year of Jehoshaphat, and with that in 1Ki 22:52, viz., that Ahaziah ascended the throne in the seventeenth year of the reign of Jehoshaphat, which lasted twenty-five years, and also with the statement in 2Ki 8:16, that Joram of Judah became king over Judah in the fifth year of Joram of Israel. If, for example, Ahaziah of Israel died after a reign of not quite two years, at the most a year and a half, in the eighteenth year of Jehoshaphat; as Jehoshaphat himself reigned twenty-five years, he cannot have died till the seventh year of Joram of Israel, and his son Joram followed him upon the throne. The last of these discrepancies may be solved very simply, from the fact that, according to 2Ki 8:16, Jehoshaphat was still king when his son Joram began to reign so that Jehoshaphat abdicated in favour of his son about two years before his death. And the first discrepancy (that between 2Ki 1:17 and 1Ki 3:1) is removed by Usher (Annales M. ad a.m. 3106 and 3112), Lightfoot, and others, after the example of the Seder Olam, by the assumption of the co-regency. According to this, when Jehoshaphat went with Ahab to Ramoth in Gilead to war against the Syrians, in
