Hezekiah

File:Hezekaih-bronze-serpent.jpg

Hezekiah removes the bronze serpent of Moses from the Temple.

Hezekiah (or Ezekias) (Hebrew: חזקיה or חזקיהו, "God has strengthened") was the 13th king of independent Judah and the son of King Ahaz and Abijah (2 Chronicles 29:1), who was a daughter of a man (who was not the prophet) named Zechariah. (Abijah was also known as Abi (2 Kings 18:1-2).) He reigned twenty-nine years (2 Kings 18:2). He is also one of the kings mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew.

William F. Albright has dated his reign to 715 B.C.E.-687 B.C.E., while E. R. Thiele offers the dates 716 B.C.E.-687 B.C.E. Under either of these chronologies, Hezekiah ruled the southern kingdom of Judah during the conquest and forced resettlement of the northern kingdom of Israel by Sargon's Assyrians. Judah absorbed many refugees from the northern kingdom during Hezekiah's reign, about a hundred years before the destruction of Solomon's Temple by Nebuchadrezzar's Babylonians.

Life

The account of this king in the Hebrew Bible is contained in 2 Kings 18-20, Isaiah 36-39, and 2 Chronicles 29-32. These sources portray him as a great and good king, following the example of his great-grandfather Uzziah. He introduced religious reform, and reinstated the "Yahweh-only" religious tradition favored by the authors of Kings and Chronicles. He attempted to abolish idolatry from his kingdom including going so far as to destroy the "brazen serpent" created by Moses, located at Jerusalem, which had allegedly become an object of idolatrous worship. A great reformation was wrought in the kingdom of Judah in his day (2 Kings 18:4; 2 Chronicles 29:3-36). The author of 2 Kings summarizes his account of Hezekiah with strong praise:

Hezekiah trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him. 6 He held fast to the Lord and did not cease to follow him; he kept the commands the Lord had given Moses. 7 And the Lord was with him; he was successful in whatever he undertook.(18:5)

However, the remainder of the account pains a more checkered picture of Hezekiah's success. His portrayed as victories against the Philistines, but his decision to rebel against Assyria, whose vassal Judah had been, proved disastrous. As a result, "In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah's reign, Sennacherib king of Assyria attacked all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them." (18:13)

Remnants of the broad wall of biblical Jerusalem, built during Hezekiah's days against Sennacherib's siege.

Hezekiah had refused to pay the tribute enforced on his father and entered into a league with Egypt (Isaiah 30; 31; 36:6-9). This led to Sennacherib's invasion, probably c. 701 B.C.E. Hezekiah anticipated the Assyrian invasion, and made at least one major preparation. In an impressive engineering feat, a tunnel 533 meters long was dug in order to provide Jerusalem underground access to the waters of the Spring of Gihon, which lay outside the city. (The work is described in the Siloam Inscription. At the same time, a wall was built around the Pool of Siloam, into which the waters from the spring flowed (Isaiah 22:11). An impressive vestige of this structure is the broad wall in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.

During the invasion, Sennacherib took the important walled city Lachish, and the seige of this city is recorded in an impressive monumental bas relief on view today at the British Museum.

Sennacherib records on his monumental inscription, "The Prism of Sennacherib," how in his campaign against Hezekiah ("Ha-za-qi-(i)a-ú") he took 46 cities in this campaign (column 3, line 19 of Taylor prism), and besieged Jerusalem ("Ur-sa-li-im-mu") with earthworks. Eventually Hezekiah saw Sennacherib's determination, and offered to pay him three hundred talents of silver and thirty of gold in tribute, despoiling the Temple to produce the promised amount (18:14-16).

The Assyrians claimed that Sennacherib raised his siege of Jerusalem after Hezekiah acknowledged Sennacherib as his overlord and paid him tribute. According to one Biblical account, this invasion ended in the destruction of Sennacherib's army, when Hezekiah prayed to God and "that night the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians 185,000 men." Herodotus claimed that the Assyrians had been visited by a plague of mice. A common secular understanding is that the Assyrians were growing tired and sick from the extended siege and did not wish a confrontation with Kush and Egypt at this time; and accepted Hezekiah's offer of tribute as a face-saving measure.

The author of the Books of Kings (19:37) associated this event with Sennacherib's assassination by his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer, but this actually happened seventeen years later. Esarhaddon became the next Assyrian king.

The Bible says that the Angel of the Lord wiped out 185,000 of Sennacherib's troops, and Herodotus acknowledges many deaths (though he claims it was a plague). Not willing to believe in supernatural intervention, many modern historians will tend to go with the story from the Assyrian perspective. However Sennacherib, like Shalmaneser III before him (who claimed victory over the battle of Qarqar in 853, but seems to have had no real hold over the nations), was probably just trying to save face.

Isaiah prophesies to Hezekiah during the kings illness.

The narrative of Hezekiah's sickness and miraculous recovery is found in 2 Kings 20:1, 2 Chronicles 32:24, Isaiah 38:1. Various ambassadors came to congratulate him on his recovery, among them Merodach-baladan, the king of Babylon (2 Chronicles 32:23; 2 Kings 20:12). Hezekiah is also remembered for giving too much information to Baladan, king of Babylon, for which he was confronted by Isaiah the prophet (2 Kings 20:12-19).

Seals

Two distinct classes of seal impressions have been found in modern Israel relating to King Hezekiah:

• LMLK seals on storage jar handles, excavated from strata formed by Sennacherib's destruction as well as immediately above that layer suggesting they were used throughout his 29-year reign (Grena, 2004, p. 338)

• Bullae from sealed documents, some that may have belonged to Hezekiah himself (Grena, 2004, p. 26, Figs. 9 and 10) while others name his servants (eh-veh-deem in Hebrew, aleph-bet-dalet-yod-mem), all from the antiquities market and subject to authentication disputes (see Biblical archaeology)

Religious reforms

King Hezekiah introduced substantial religious reforms during his reign. They included the following:

• He concentrated worship of Yahweh at Jerusalem, suppressing the shrines to him that had existed till then elsewhere in Judea (2 Kings 18:22).
• He abolished idol worship which had resumed under his father's reign. He destroy the sacred pillars known as "asherim" and also "broke into pieces the bronze serpent which Moses had made, for until that time the Israelites had been offering sacrifices to it." (2 Kings 18:4)
• He resumed the Passover pilgrimage and the tradition of inviting the scattered tribes of Israel to take part in a Passover festival (2 Chronicles 30).

Hezekiahs reforms, attempted to do away with polytheism in his kingdom rerpesented the ascendancy of the "Yahweh only" part in Jerusalem, which had vied for power with less excusivist factions for centuries. Many Judeo-Christian readers believe Hezekiah's reforms laid the foundation for the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions we know today.

Chronological problems

Although it is generally agreed that he reigned in the late eight century B.C.E., there is considerable uncertainty about the precise dates of Hezekiah's reign. First, the Biblical records conflict, as they do for a number of rulers of Israel and Judah. 2 Kings 18:10 dates the fall of the northern capital of Samaria to the sixth year of Hezekiah's reign, which would make 728 B.C.E. the year of his accession. However, verse 13 of the same chapter states that Sennacherib invaded Judah in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah, and the Assyrian records leave little doubt that this invasion took place in 701 B.C.E., which would fix 715 B.C.E. as Hezekiah's initial year.

Another set of calculations show it is probable that Hezekiah did not ascend the throne before 722 B.C.E. By Albright's calculations, the northern kingJehu's initial year is 842 B.C.E.; and between it and Samaria's destruction the Books of Kings give the total number of the years the kings of Israel ruled as 143, while for the kings of Judah the number is 165. This discrepancy has been accounted for in various ways; but every one of those theories must allow that Hezekiah's first six years fell before 722 B.C.E.

Nor is it clearly known how old Hezekiah was when called to the throne. although 2 Kings 18:2 states he was twenty-five years of age. His father (2 Kings 16:2) died at the age of 36; it is not likely that Ahaz at the age of eleven should have had a son. Hezekiah's own son Manasseh ascended the throne 29 years later, at the age of 12. This places his birth in the seventeenth year of his father's reign, or gives Hezekiah's age as 42, assuming he was 25 at his ascension. Some suggest that it is more probable that Ahaz was 21 or 25 when Hezekiah was born (thus suggesting an error in the text), and that the latter was 32 at the birth of Manasseh.

An alternative interpretation of Hezekiah's reign spans 727 B.C.E.-698 B.C.E. with Manasseh co-reigning for some years as a teenager. This attempts to harmonize the reference to Hezekiah reigning during the conquest of Samaria (2 Kings 18:9-10), and assumes the reference to Sennacherib's attack in 701 was either a second campaign or that the reference to it being in Hezekiah's 14th year is a corruption.

House of David Cadet Branch of the Tribe of Judah
Preceded by: Ahaz	King of Judah Albright: 715 B.C.E. – 687 B.C.E. Thiele: 716 B.C.E. – 687 B.C.E. Galil: 726 B.C.E. – 697 B.C.E.	Succeeded by: Manasseh

Resources

• Grena, G.M. (2004). LMLK—A Mystery Belonging to the King vol. 1. Redondo Beach, California: 4000 Years of Writing History. ISBN 0-9748786-0-X. 
• Austin, Lynn. Gods And Kings. ISBN 0-7642-2989-3.  a fictionalized account of Hezekiah's rise to power, Book 1 in Austin's "Chronicles of the Kings" series

External links

• Hezekiah King Of Judah - The King's Calendar
• King Hezekiah from Jerusalem Mosaic
• Hezekiah See all Bible verses pertaining to King Hezekiah
• The Reign Of Hezekiah by John Brug

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Hezekiah  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "Hezekiah"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.