Jehoram, Athaliah, and the Rescued Infant

Jehoram son of Jehoshaphat was married to Athaliah, daughter of Ahab and Jezebel. Once established on the throne, he put all his brothers to the sword, and some of the officers of Israel with them. In his reign Edom revolted, and Libnah revolted.

A letter came to him from Elijah the prophet—the only prophetic letter in Scripture: because you have walked in the way of the kings of Israel and killed your brothers, better men than you, the LORD will strike your people and your house, and you yourself with a severe disease of the bowels. So it was: he died after two years of agony, "and his people made no burning for him as they had for his fathers," and he was not laid in the tombs of the kings.

Ahaziah his son reigned one year. He went to visit the wounded Jehoram of Israel at Jezreel and was caught in Jehu's coup.

Then Athaliah, seeing that her son was dead, "arose and destroyed all the royal seed." The house of David, promised an everlasting throne, was cut down by its own daughter-in-law in a single day. One survived: Jehosheba, sister of Ahaziah and wife of the high priest Jehoiada, took the one-year-old Joash from among the king's sons who were being killed and hid him with his nurse in a bedchamber. For six years he was hidden in the House of the LORD while Athaliah reigned over the land.

For those six years the whole house of David is one child behind a Temple wall, known to a handful of people.

Academic history dates this event differently. In the age of the kings the divergence is not the one familiar from the Persian period, where Seder Olam runs about a hundred and sixty-five years short. Here academic chronology reckons some reigns as overlapping — father and son on the throne together — so its span from the division of the kingdom to the destruction of the Temple comes out nearly three decades shorter. The gap therefore grows: a hundred and thirty-five years at the division, a hundred and fifty-four at Sennacherib, a hundred and sixty-four at the destruction. The anchors of the academic count are external documents: the battle of Qarqar (853), Jehu's tribute on the Black Obelisk (841), the fall of Samaria (722), Sennacherib's campaign (701), Megiddo and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns in the Babylonian Chronicles (609, 605, 597). Both dates appear on the timeline when the divergence layer is on.