Hezekiah
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)
Hezekiah vs. Sennacherib
However, the remainder of the account pains a more checkered picture of Hezekiah's success. He is portrayed as victorious 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)
The period in question witnessed the rise of Assyria as the dominant power in the region. The northern Kingdom fo Israel feel to Assyria in 722 B.C.E., exiling large numbers of its people and replacing them with Assyrian populations. Many Israelites also fled to Judah during this time. Hezekiah, perhaps believing himself invulnerable to the fate of Israel on account of his pious devotion to Yahweh, 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.
The seige 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 own inscription how in his campaign against Hezekiah ("Ha-za-qi-(i)a-ú") he took 46 cities in this campaign, and besieged Jerusalem ("Ur-sa-li-im-mu") with earthworks.
Because Hezekiah, king of Judah, would not submit to my yoke, I came up against him, and by force of arms and by the might of my power I took 46 of his strong fenced cities; and of the smaller towns which were scattered about, I took and plundered a countless number... Hezekiah himself I shut up in Jerusalem, his capital city, like a bird in a cage, building towers round the city to hem him in, and raising banks of earth against the gates, so as to prevent escape... Then upon Hezekiah there fell the fear of the power of my arms, and he sent out to me the chiefs and the elders of Jerusalem with 30 talents of gold and 800 talents of silver, and divers treasures, a rich and immense booty...
The biblical version of the same event, while looking at it from a very different viewpoint, confirms Sennacherib's account rather precisely, although it gives a lower figure from the amount of silver demanded than Sennacherib does:
The king of Assyria exacted from Hezekiah king of Judah three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold. So Hezekiah gave him all the silver that was found in the temple of the Lord and in the treasuries of the royal palace. At this time Hezekiah king of Judah stripped off the gold with which he had covered the doors and doorposts of the temple of the Lord, and gave it to the king of Assyria.(18:14-16).
In any event, the seige was lifted. The Bible notes (Kings 19:9) that this happened soon after the Assyrians learned of an Egtyptian force marching to Jerusalem's relieft. While Sennacherib claims he lifted his siege of Jerusalem after Hezekiah acknowledged him as his overlord and paid him tribute, one biblical describes the Assyrian invasion ended miraculously through God's intervention. In this version of the story, Hezekiah goes to the Temple of Jerusalem and prays God's deliverance from Sennacherib's seige. Isaiah the prophet soon send a message prophesying that:
- He will not enter this city or shoot an arrow here.
- He will not come before it with shield or build a siege ramp against it.
- By the way that he came he will return; he will not enter this city, declares :the Lord.
As a result, the narrator of Kings reports: "That night the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians 185,000 men." While this reports may seem utterly fanciful to most moder readers, it should be noted that the historian Herodotus claimed that the Assyrians indeed withdrew from their campaing after having been visited by a plague of mice. On explanation of the events describes is therefore that the Assyrians were growing tired and sick from the extended siege and Judah's Egyptian and Kushite allies were still fresh. Thus, the Assyrians accepted Hezekiah's tribute—even if it included only 300 talents of silver instead of 800 and Sennacherib claimed—and withdrew without capturing catpure Jerusalem.
The author of the Books of Kings (19:37) associated the Assyrian withdrawal event Sennacherib's assassination by his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer. However, this actually happened seventeen years later.
Hezekiah's illness
The narrative of Hezekiah's sickness and miraculous recovery is found in 2 Kings 20 2 Chronicles 32 Isaiah 38. The accounts are in some respects identical, having apparently been copied from one source to another word for word.
Seriously ill from an infected boil, Hezekiah receives a visite from the prophet Isaiah, who gives him dire news. "This is what the Lord says: Put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover." However, Hezekiah prays in tears to God, who takes therefore takes mercy on him. Isaiah then predicts that Hezekiah will recover, prophesying as well that God will cause the sun to move backward as a sign that Hezekiah's life has been prolonged. Isaiah 38 preserves a psalm of thanksgiving from Hezekiah, which concludes:
- The Lord will save me, and we will sing with stringed instruments
- all the days of our lives in the temple of the Lord.
Isaiah then cures Hezekiah by applying a poultice of figs to the infection.
The story takes an unfortunate turn, however. Various ambassadors come to congratulate Hezekiah on his recovery, among them Merodach-baladan, the heir-apparent of Babylon (2 Chronicles 32:23; 2 Kings 20:12). Hezekiah not only welcomes the ambassadors, but shows them his treasures and storehouses. Isaiah sees this a terrible mistake, prophesying that "Everything in your palace... will be carried off to Babylon... And some of your descendants... will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon." (Isaiah 39:11)
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).[1]
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.
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)
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 |
Notes
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- 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
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