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2 Chronicles 36:5-6 says Nebuchadnezzar bound Jehoiakim in fetters "to carry him to Babylon." Jeremiah 22:18-19 prophesies that Jehoiakim will receive the burial of an ass and be "cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem." The implication of Chronicles is that he was carried off to Babylon; Jeremiah specifies an ignominious burial just outside Jerusalem. Both passages cannot be plainly accurate without rewriting one of them.
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
Cited passages
Jehoiakim was twenty-five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. He did that which was evil in Yahweh his God’s sight. Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up against him, and bound him in fetters to carry him to Babylon.
Therefore thus saith the Lord concerning Jehoiachim .... He shall be buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem. Jeremaih 22:18-19
Cited passages
Therefore Yahweh says concerning Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah: “They won’t lament for him, saying, ‘Ah my brother!’ or, ‘Ah sister!’ They won’t lament for him, saying ‘Ah lord!’ or, ‘Ah his glory!’ He will be buried with the burial of a donkey, drawn and cast out beyond the gates of Jerusalem.”
Examining the tension
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: Genuinely disputed among scholars
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 difficulty here is compounded by the fact that the external and internal record of how Jehoiakim died is genuinely murky, and three biblical traditions diverge. 2 Kings 24:6 reports only that "Jehoiakim slept with his fathers" (wayishkav... im-avotaw) — the conventional formula for ordinary death and dynastic burial — and gives no location and no notice of deportation. The Babylonian Chronicle (BM 21946) documents Nebuchadnezzar's campaign against "the city of Judah" and the capture of its king in his seventh year (March 597 BCE), but that captured king is Jehoiachin, Jehoiakim's son and successor, not Jehoiakim himself, who appears to have died shortly before the city fell. So the cuneiform evidence does not directly settle Jehoiakim's fate, and the three biblical sources fill the gap differently.
2 Chronicles 36:5-6 states that Nebuchadnezzar "bound him in fetters to carry him to Babylon" (le-holikho babelah), juxtaposed immediately with the removal of temple vessels to Babylon. Jeremiah 22:18-19, by contrast, delivers a savage oracle: Jehoiakim will receive "the burial of a donkey" — dragged off and flung beyond the gates of Jerusalem, unmourned. The two pictures are difficult to reconcile: a deportee to Babylon versus a corpse dumped outside the capital.
The apologetic harmonization, defended by Archer and Kaiser, fastens on the grammar of Chronicles. The phrase le-holikho is an infinitive construct expressing purpose: Nebuchadnezzar bound him intending to deport him, without the text asserting the deportation was completed. On this reading Jehoiakim could have died in or near Jerusalem before being carried off, leaving room for the Jeremiah oracle to stand. This is grammatically legitimate — the purpose-infinitive does not entail fulfillment. The contextual weakness is that the Chronicler immediately narrates the temple vessels going to Babylon in the same sentence, building a cumulative impression of a deportation event in which the bound king is naturally included; the casual reader is left believing Jehoiakim went to Babylon, even if the syntax stops short of saying so.
The critical reading, found in Cogan and Tadmor's Anchor Bible II Kings (on the parallel) and developed for Chronicles by Sara Japhet and Ralph Klein, treats the three accounts as competing traditions about an awkward death. Jack Lundbom, in his Anchor Bible Jeremiah, observes that the donkey-burial oracle in Jeremiah 22 is invective whose literal fulfillment is unverified — and the Hebrew Bible preserves prophetic threats that did not come to pass as stated. The Chronicler, writing in the Persian period, likely smoothed the embarrassing Jeremianic tradition by substituting a vaguer fetters-and-deportation notice, while Kings used the neutral death-formula. William Holladay's Hermeneia Jeremiah similarly reads 22:18-19 as a rhetorically charged threat rather than a chronicle of fact.
It is worth noting that 2 Chronicles 36:6 does not actually say Jehoiakim died in Babylon; the question's framing infers it. But even granting the cautious infinitive reading, the texts do not cohere into a single account: Jeremiah's contemptuous unburied-corpse-outside-Jerusalem and Chronicles' fettered-king-bound-for-Babylon pull in incompatible directions, and Kings' peaceful "slept with his fathers" agrees with neither. The harmonization can defuse the narrow claim that Chronicles asserts death in Babylon, but it cannot reconcile the substance of the Jeremiah oracle with the Chronicles narrative or with Kings.
Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable on the grammar of Chronicles, but the three traditions remain in genuine, unresolved tension over Jehoiakim's actual fate.
Sources for this reading