Context: These two verses are the Chronicler's final theological verdict on the entire monarchy — his post-exilic explanation, delivered to the restored community, of why Jerusalem fell. Before narrating the Babylonian destruction (36:17-21), he compresses centuries of prophetic history into a single indictment: "Again and again the LORD, the God of their fathers, sent word to His people through His messengers because He had compassion on them and on His dwelling place. But they mocked the messengers of God, despising His words and scoffing at His prophets, until the wrath of the LORD against His people was stirred up beyond remedy" (36:15-16). Three notes are decisive. First, the motive of prophetic sending is compassion (חֶמְלָה) — the messengers were mercy, not mere warning. Second, the idiom behind "again and again" (הַשְׁכֵּם וְשָׁלוֹחַ, "rising early and sending") is Jeremiah's signature formula for the whole prophetic succession (Jeremiah 7:25; 25:4), which the Chronicler adopts as his summary of the era. Third, the rejection is total and threefold — mocking, despising, scoffing — and its terminus is wrath "beyond remedy" (עַד לְאֵין מַרְפֵּא): when the messengers of healing are refused, no healing remains. Standing at the close of the Hebrew canon's traditional ordering, this is the OT's own last word on what Israel did with the prophetic-messenger office.
Hebrew Key Terms:
OT-to-OT Development: The Chronicler is consolidating an already-canonical pattern. The Deuteronomic historian had summarized the northern and southern kingdoms the same way: "the LORD warned Israel and Judah through all His prophets and seers... but they would not listen" (2 Kings 17:13-15). Jeremiah supplied the formula the Chronicler quotes — "from the day your fathers came out of Egypt until this day, I have sent you all My servants the prophets, rising early and sending them; yet they did not listen" (Jeremiah 7:25-26; 25:4). And the post-exilic community's own covenant confession sharpened rejection into bloodshed: "they killed Your prophets who had admonished them" (Nehemiah 9:26). Within Chronicles itself the pattern has a proper name: Zechariah son of Jehoiada, stoned in the temple court "by order of the king" (2 Chronicles 24:20-21) — the martyr Jesus later places at the canon's far boundary ("from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah," Matthew 23:35). Isaiah's hardening commission (Isaiah 6:9-10) is this same pattern stated prospectively at a single prophet's call; 2 Chronicles 36:15-16 states it retrospectively over the whole succession.
Connections:
Christological Connection: In its own context the passage teaches three things about the prophetic-messenger office this trajectory traces: the office originates in divine compassion (God sends because He pities His people and His dwelling place); rejection of the messenger is rejection of the Sender (the words despised are "His words"); and persistent rejection exhausts the economy of mediated warning — "beyond remedy" is the Chronicler's terrible terminus, enacted in 586 BC. The verse thus establishes canonically what Isaiah's commission (Isaiah 6:9-10) and Jeremiah's laments embody individually: the suffering, mocked, rejected messenger is not an accident of prophetic biography but the normal shape of the office in a hardened covenant community.
Jesus reads His own mission through exactly this summary. The parable of the tenants (Matthew 21:33-39) is a narrative exegesis of 2 Chronicles 36:15-16: the owner "sent his servants... again he sent other servants, more than the first" — the rising-early-and-sending pattern — and they were beaten, killed, stoned; "last of all, he sent his son." The escalation is structural and explicit: the messengers were servants; Christ is the Son and heir, and His murder is the pattern's climax, not merely its repetition. More striking still, in His lament — "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those sent to her, how often I have longed to gather your children together" (Luke 13:34) — Jesus speaks not from the messengers' side but from the Sender's: the compassion that motivated every sending in 36:15 was His compassion. He is at once the sending Lord across the centuries (cf. Luke 11:49) and the final sent One who absorbs the full violence of the pattern. And where the Chronicler's history dead-ends at wrath "beyond remedy" (לְאֵין מַרְפֵּא), the gospel announces the remedy the prophetic era could not produce: the murdered Son's death becomes the healing — "by His stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5) — so that the very act completing Israel's rejection of God's messengers becomes God's cure for it.
Already/not-yet: the risen Christ re-founds the messenger office in His witnesses, and sends them into the same pattern — "I am sending you prophets and wise men... some of them you will kill" (Matthew 23:34; cf. Acts 7:52, where Stephen dies making this very argument; 1 Thessalonians 2:15). The church's suffering witness belongs to the "already" of the pattern's continuation under the vindicated Son; the "not yet" is the day the longsuffering of the Sender ends and the Owner of the vineyard comes (Matthew 21:40-41) — the final visitation for which every mocked messenger's blood has testified.
Connection Method(s): Redemptive-Historical Progression (primary) — the passage is the OT's own canonical summary of an entire epoch of redemptive history (the era of "many times and many ways," Hebrews 1:1), positioned to show that the prophetic-messenger economy had run its full course and ended in impasse, so that the Son's sending is its necessary next and final stage. Also Typology (Providential Type, Backward-Looking) — the rejected-messenger pattern is a genuine historical prefigurement of the rejected Son: analogical correspondence in essential office-features (sent by compassion, bearing God's words, mocked and killed), full historicity on both sides, demonstrable escalation (servants → Son; pattern → climax), and explicit retrospective interpretation supplied by Jesus Himself in the tenants parable; the forward-pointing element lies in the text's own open wound — "beyond remedy" leaves the history unresolved and waiting. Also Contrast — the passage reveals the inadequacy of the entire mediated-messenger economy: what persistent prophetic sending could not heal, the once-sent Son accomplishes. Anti-default check applied: typology here is not assumed but warranted by Matthew 21:33-39's explicit servants-then-son schema; the primary classification nevertheless remains Redemptive-Historical, since the verse functions in the canon as epoch-summary rather than as a discrete type-event.
Trajectory Table: 078 - Isaiah (Suffering Servant Messenger)