How long did Jotham reign?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The two data points sit two verses apart in the same chapter. 2 Kings 15:32-33 gives Jotham the formal regnal notice of the Deuteronomistic framework: he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem. 2 Kings 15:30 dates the assassination of Pekah and the accession of Hoshea over Israel to "the twentieth year of Jotham the son of Uzziah." A king credited with a sixteen-year reign cannot have a twentieth regnal year. The figures are internally incoherent as they stand.

The complication is genuinely entangled with the broader chronological knot of the period. Verse 30's synchronism is anomalous in another way: Hoshea's coup is elsewhere and more naturally dated to the reign of Ahaz, Jotham's son and successor (cf. 2 Kings 17:1, which synchronizes Hoshea's accession to Ahaz's twelfth year). So "the twentieth year of Jotham" appears to count Jotham's notional years past his death and into Ahaz's reign — a reckoning the surrounding text never explains.

Edwin Thiele's celebrated reconstruction resolves this, as it resolves most of Kings' regnal snarls, by positing a coregency. On Thiele's scheme Jotham was installed as co-regent over his leprous father Uzziah/Azariah (2 Kings 15:5 has Jotham "over the household, judging the people" while Uzziah was quarantined), and his "years" could be counted from that earlier point; a twentieth year measured from the coregency would fall after his sixteen-year sole reign and overlap Ahaz. Andrew Steinmann develops this in detail. The strength of the proposal is that 2 Kings 15:5 does explicitly describe Jotham governing during his father's incapacity, so a Jotham coregency is not invented from nothing.

But the coregency cannot do the specific work required here. Verse 5 places a regency at the front end of Jotham's career, between him and Uzziah; the twentieth-year datum requires extending Jotham's count at the back end, past his death, into Ahaz's reign — a different and unattested operation. The text nowhere authorizes counting "years of Jotham" beyond the sixteen it assigns him. Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor in the Anchor Bible accordingly read 15:30 as a secondary editorial synchronism, a late gloss inserted to coordinate Israelite and Judahite data, which the glossator failed to reconcile with the formal notice in 15:33. Marvin Sweeney concurs that the synchronistic chronology of this stretch of Kings shows the seams of editorial coordination layered onto older source figures, preserved without smoothing. The phrase may also reflect simple interference from Pekah's own twenty-year reign reported in 15:27 — a plausible source for a stray "twentieth year."

The critical reading thus does not need to deny that Jotham had a coregency; it denies that any attested reckoning convention extends his regnal count to a twentieth year. The bare textual data are: sixteen years officially assigned, a twentieth year referenced in a synchronism that elsewhere belongs to Ahaz. The likeliest explanation is editorial, not chronological — a redactor's arithmetic that the final text never harmonized.

Where the critical reading lands: a genuine numerical inconsistency, most economically explained as a late synchronistic gloss; the coregency harmonization rescues it only by importing a back-extended reckoning of Jotham's years that the text neither states nor implies.