2 Kings 14:23 - Exposition

In the fifteenth year of Amaziah the son of Joash King of Judah —this note of time agrees with those in 2 Kings 13:10 and 2 Kings 45:1, 17, but not with that in 2 Kings 15:1 (see the comment on that passage)— Jeroboam the son of Joash King of Israel began to reign in Samaria, and reigned forty and one years. Josephus says "forty years; Many moderns (Thenius, Bahr, and others) extend the term to fifty-one years. Some suppose that Jeroboam was joint-king with his father in Amaziah's third year, solo king from his fifteenth. But it is better to acknowledge the general confusion of the chronology, and to regard it as uncertain, unless where a synchronism is distinctly made out. Such assured synchronisms are the following:

Numbers which occur once only in ancient writers can seldom be implicitly trusted, since the liability of numbers to corruption is excessive.