That were with him. — Kings adds, “thirty and two,” referring to what is related in 1 Kings 20:16; 1 Kings 20:24, a matter which the chronicler has not noticed. The Syriac and Arabic supply the number here.
With small or great. — So Kings. Our text is literally, with the small or the great.
They compassed about him. — Or, came round against him. Kings, wrongly, “turned aside against him.” In Hebrew the difference turns on half a letter.
But Jehoshaphat cried out. — Probably to bring his followers to the rescue. (1 Kings 22:32 ends with these words.)
And the Lord helped him; and God moved (literally, incited, “persuaded,” 2 Chronicles 18:1) them... from him. — Drove them away from him. This addition is evidently from the pen of the chronicler himself. It appears that he understood the verb “cried out” in the sense of a cry to God for help, a sense which it often bears, e.g., Psalms 22:6.
How God “drove them off” is explained in the next verse. The captains discovered their mistake and retired.
This perfectly natural event is regarded by the chronicler as providential, and rightly so. Hebrew faith “knows nothing of an order of the world which can be separated even in thought from the constant personal activity of Jehovah.”