Hezekiah and the Letter Spread Out in the Temple

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Picture a city on a hill, with a wall round it, and on the wall a handful of men who are doing their best to look as if they are not afraid. It is a clear morning. Below the wall, as far as the eye can go, there are tents, and horses, and smoke from a thousand cooking fires, and every so often the sound of metal on metal. It is the largest army that any of those men has ever seen. And a man in the pass below has just stood up in front of it, and cleared his throat.

But that is how the morning went. The night before it, and the fortnight before that, were longer. Let us begin where the trouble began.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is from the Second Book of Kings, chapters eighteen and nineteen, which Christians of both traditions read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few small things, the weather, the wall and the sounds of the city, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

The city is Jerusalem, and the king is called Hezekiah.

Now the Book of Kings has a good many kings in it, and it is honest about most of them. Some are bad, and some are middling, and a few are mostly good with one or two black marks. Of Hezekiah the writer says something very plain and very high. He trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel. There was none like him among all the kings of Judah, after him or before him. He held fast to the Lord, and did not turn away from following him.

That is a lot to say about a man. And what had he done? He had cleared away the high places, the little hilltop shrines where people had been worshipping in ways they should not. He had broken the pillars and cut down the sacred pole. And there was one thing he broke that makes you smile a little, because it was a thing of Moses. Long ago in the wilderness Moses had made a bronze serpent, at the Lord's word, and people who looked at it were healed. But over the centuries the people of Jerusalem had begun to burn incense to it, as if the bronze itself were holy. So Hezekiah took it down and broke it into pieces, and gave it a name, which means, roughly, only a bit of bronze. Good things can be loved wrongly, and a good king knows when to put a good thing back in its place.

So this was a king who was trying to do right. And you might think that if a man tries to do right, the road before him will be smooth. It is not a thing Scripture promises, and Kings does not pretend it does.

Because in the fourteenth year of his reign, the king of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and took them.

Assyria was the great power of that age, away to the north and east, a land of mighty cities and mighty archers, and it had a way of making kings small. Hezekiah's kingdom lay on the road between Assyria and Egypt, which is a poor place to be when great powers are cross. The king of Assyria was named Sennacherib. And his army came down through the cities of Judah one by one, and the stone towns that had stood for centuries went quiet behind their broken gates.

Hezekiah did what a frightened man does first. He tried to buy his way out of it. He sent a message to Sennacherib, who was then at a city called Lachish: I have done wrong; withdraw from me, and whatever you impose on me I will bear. And the king of Assyria named a price: three hundred talents of silver and thirty of gold. That was a great deal. And to find it, Hezekiah gave him all the silver that was in the house of the Lord and in the treasuries of the king's house. And he stripped the gold from the doors of the temple, and from the doorposts that he himself had covered, and gave it to the king of Assyria.

Think of that for a moment. A king who loved the temple, taking the gold off its very doors. It must have been like pulling the buttons off your own coat to pay a debt. And the Book of Kings does not say it worked. A price had been paid, and it did not make the army go away.

Because next comes the army itself.

Sennacherib sends a great force from Lachish to Jerusalem, with three officers whose titles the writer gives, and the middle one is the one who matters. We might call him the field commander, the chief spokesman of the king of Assyria. They come up to the city and take their stand by the conduit of the upper pool, on the highway to the Fuller's Field. It is the place where the city's water ran, an everyday sort of place, where people had washed cloth on a thousand ordinary days. And it was just there that the Assyrian stood and called out for the king.

Hezekiah does not come himself. He sends three men: Eliakim, who is over the household, and Shebna, the secretary, and Joah, the recorder. They go out through the gate and stand down on the ground, in front of the army, and look up at a man who has not had to say please to anybody for a very long time.

And he speaks. He speaks well, and that is the trouble with him. He is a clever man with a great many words, and he knows exactly where to put them.

Say to Hezekiah, he begins, thus says the great king, the king of Assyria: On what do you rest this confidence of yours?

And then, one by one, he takes away everything the city might lean on. Do you trust in words, he says, mere words, as if they were counsel and might for war? Do you trust in Egypt? That broken reed of a staff, which pierces the hand of any man who leans on it? He is not wrong about Egypt, as it happens. Then he turns to the very thing Hezekiah has done right. And if you say to me, we trust in the Lord our God, is it not he whose high places and altars Hezekiah has taken away? The Assyrian has understood the cleansing as an insult, because it is the way a man who does not know the Lord would read it.

Then he gets sarcastic. Come now, make a wager with my master. I will give you two thousand horses, if you can put riders on them. And last of all comes the thing he wanted to say all along, the sentence that is meant to land like a stone. Is it without the Lord that I have come up against this place to destroy it? The Lord said to me, Go up against this land, and destroy it.

You can see the cleverness in that. He takes a piece of the truth, that the Lord is in charge of what happens, and he wraps it round a lie. Because nowhere is it written that the Lord told the king of Assyria any such thing. But the men on the wall do not know that for certain, and the words are hanging in the air.

Now Eliakim and Shebna and Joah are in a difficulty. The Assyrian is speaking in Hebrew, the language of the people. And on the wall above them, leaning over the parapet, are the ordinary people of Jerusalem, the bakers and the water-carriers and the old men, and the mothers with children on their hips.

So the three officials say to him, very politely, and with a catch in the voice: Please, speak to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it. Do not speak to us in the language of Judah in the hearing of the people who are on the wall.

Aramaic was the language of diplomats, and the officials could follow it. The people on the wall could not. It was a sensible thing to ask. A king's men are always trying to keep a frightening thing from the ears of the frightened.

And the Assyrian refuses. Has my master sent me to speak these words to your master and to you, and not to the people sitting on the wall, who are doomed with you to eat their own dung and to drink their own urine?

It is not a nice line, and the Bible does not make it nicer. It is the sound of a bully who has found where the soft place is. And then he stands, and he cries out in a loud voice in the language of Judah, so that it rings off the stone: Hear the word of the great king, the king of Assyria! Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to deliver you out of my hand. Do not let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord by saying, The Lord will surely deliver us.

And then, after the threat, a kind of offer, softer and more dangerous. Make your peace with me, and come out to me. Then every one of you will eat of his own vine and his own fig tree and drink the water of his own cistern, until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of grain and wine, a land of bread and vineyards.

It is almost kind. That is what makes it frightening. It is not offering them death. It is offering them a quiet life, somewhere else, if they will only stop trusting in the Lord. And he finishes with a question that is meant to close every door. Who among all the gods of the lands have delivered their lands out of my hand, that the Lord should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?

What do the people do?

And here the Book of Kings gives us a small thing, and I love it. The people were silent, and answered him not a word, for the king's command was, Do not answer him.

Imagine it. Hundreds of frightened people on a wall, with a man shouting insults at them from below, and they do not answer back. They do not shout down at him. They do not argue. They stand there with their mouths shut and their hearts going, and the whole city holds its breath. There are times when the bravest thing a person can do is to say nothing, and let the bully's words go by like a wind, until you have had time to go and ask someone wiser what to do.

And that is exactly what happens next. The three officials go back to the king with their clothes torn, which is what people did then, when they had heard something that was too much to bear. And they tell him what the Assyrian said.

Hezekiah hears it. And he does what the king in the story has been trying to do since the start. He tears his own clothes, and covers himself with sackcloth, and goes up into the house of the Lord.

Do you see where he goes? Not to the armoury, not to the walls, not to count his soldiers. The very doors that he has stripped to pay the Assyrian are still there, a little bare, and he goes in through them and stands in the house.

Then he sends Eliakim and Shebna and the senior priests, also in sackcloth, to the prophet Isaiah, the son of Amoz. And this is the message the king sends. Today is a day of distress, of rebuke and of disgrace. Children have come to the point of birth, and there is no strength to bring them forth. It may be that the Lord your God will hear all the words of the field commander, whom his master the king of Assyria has sent to mock the living God, and will rebuke the words that the Lord your God has heard. Therefore lift up your prayer for the remnant that is left.

It is a good message, if you listen to it. It is honest. He does not pretend to be brave. He says plainly that it is a day of distress, and that he has no strength. And then he asks for prayer. Not that the prophet will fix it, but that he will pray. Lift up your prayer.

And Isaiah sends the answer back at once. Thus you shall say to your master: Thus says the Lord: Do not be afraid because of the words that you have heard, with which the servants of the king of Assyria have reviled me. Behold, I will put a spirit in him, so that he shall hear a rumour and return to his own land, and I will make him fall by the sword in his own land.

Do not be afraid. It is perhaps the most repeated sentence in all of Scripture, and here it is again, spoken into a city with an army at its gate. And notice that the Lord says that the Assyrian has reviled him. The insult is the Lord's to answer, and not first of all Hezekiah's.

And it begins to happen, just as the prophet said. The field commander goes back, and finds his king fighting at another city, Libnah, because he has heard that the king has left Lachish. And then Sennacherib hears a rumour: that Tirhakah, the king of Cush, an Egyptian ally, has set out to fight against him.

So he sends a letter.

Do you see how it goes? The first time it was a voice at the wall. Now it is something written, which is, in a way, harder. A voice goes by on the wind. A letter can be read again and again, in the middle of the night, and it says the same thing every time.

The messengers bring it to Hezekiah, and the words are very like the earlier words. Do not let your God in whom you trust deceive you by promising that Jerusalem will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria. Behold, you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands, devoting them to destruction. And shall you be delivered? Did the gods of the nations deliver them, the nations that my fathers destroyed, Gozan, Haran, Rezeph, and the people of Eden who were in Telassar? Where is the king of Hamath, the king of Arpad, the king of the city of Sepharvaim, of Hena, or of Ivvah?

It is a list of vanished places. You can almost hear the tone of it, like a man reading out a roll of the dead, and then looking up with a little smile to see what effect it has had.

And what does Hezekiah do with it?

He takes the letter from the hand of the messengers, and reads it. And then he goes up to the house of the Lord, and spreads it out before the Lord.

Let us stop and look at that, because it is the heart of tonight's story, and it is such a small thing to do. He spreads it out.

Picture the king in the dim of the temple, the lamps low, perhaps early in the morning or perhaps late. He has a letter in his hands, a roll or a sheet, whichever it was. He could keep it. He could burn it. He could argue with it. He could show it to his generals and plan. But he lays it open on the floor, or on a table, or in front of him, and he leaves it there, in the sight of God, as if to say: Lord, here it is. This is what they say. I cannot answer it, and I do not want to carry it by myself.

Some people have taken that as a picture of what prayer can be. Not always beautiful words. Sometimes just laying the frightening thing out in the open, and staying near it.

And then he prays, and the Book of Kings gives us the prayer, and it is a fine one. Let us hear it nearly as it is written.

O Lord, the God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, you are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth.

That is how he begins. Before he says a word about Assyria, he says who God is. It puts the army in its place, because next to the one who made heaven and earth, even the greatest army is small.

Incline your ear, O Lord, and hear; open your eyes, O Lord, and see; and hear the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to mock the living God.

Truly, O Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste the nations and their lands, and have cast their gods into the fire, for they were no gods, but the work of men's hands, wood and stone. Therefore they were destroyed.

He is honest. He does not say that Assyria has done nothing. He says that it did what it said, and that those gods were not gods. And then comes the asking, which is short.

So now, O Lord our God, save us, please, from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you, O Lord, are God alone.

That is the whole prayer. Notice what it does not say. It does not say, save us because we are good, though he had been good. It does not say, destroy them. It does not name a method. It asks to be saved, and it gives the reason, that the world might know who God is. A prayer of a man who has set the letter down, and picked up something larger.

And now the answer comes, through Isaiah. The Book of Kings gives it at some length, and it is written like poetry, so we will not read all of it. But hear a little.

Isaiah the son of Amoz sends to Hezekiah, saying: Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Because you have prayed to me concerning Sennacherib king of Assyria, I have heard you.

I have heard you. Four words, and they are the centre of the chapter, as the prayer is. The Lord has heard.

Then the word turns on the Assyrian, a long word, a proud man brought low. Whom have you mocked and reviled? Against whom have you raised your voice and lifted your eyes to the heights? Against the Holy One of Israel! The king of Assyria had boasted that with the great number of his chariots he had gone up to the heights of the mountains, to the far recesses of Lebanon, and cut down its tallest cedars. And the Lord says, Have you not heard that I determined it long ago? I planned from days of old what now I bring to pass.

And then comes a line that has always stayed with those who read it. I know your sitting down and your going out and coming in, and your raging against me. Because you have raged against me and your complacency has come to my ears, I will put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth, and I will turn you back on the way by which you came.

A hook and a bit. It is the language of someone leading a great animal that thinks it is wild. And whatever else it means, it says that the Assyrian, for all his power, was never as free as he thought.

Then there is a sign for Hezekiah, a very homely one. And this shall be the sign for you: this year you shall eat what grows of itself, and in the second year what springs from that. Then in the third year sow and reap, and plant vineyards, and eat their fruit.

Think what that means. The fields of Judah had been trampled by an army. Nobody had planted properly, and nobody could. And the Lord says: you will eat what comes up by itself this year, and next year again what comes from that, and then you will be back to ordinary farming. It is a promise of slow, quiet mending. Not a promise that everything will be at once as it was, but that the land will have a third year, and that someone will be there to reap it.

And the prophet goes on, in words that have comforted many people since. The surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downward and bear fruit upward. For out of Jerusalem shall go a remnant, and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors. And then, about the king of Assyria himself: He shall not come into this city or shoot an arrow there, or come before it with a shield or cast up a siege mound against it. By the way that he came, by the same he shall return, and he shall not come into this city, declares the Lord. For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.

For my own sake, and for the sake of my servant David. The Lord keeps a promise he made long before.

And now the night.

Here the Book of Kings is brief, and I want to be careful, because it does not tell us more than it tells us. It says: And that night the angel of the Lord went out and struck down a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians. And when people arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies.

That is all it says about the night. It does not describe it. There is no light in the sky and no sound of wings. It is the same quiet way that Scripture often tells its largest things, a few plain words, and the reader is left to stand there. Whatever it was that happened in that camp, the writer tells us that the Lord did it, and that his angel went out. We do not need to add anything, and we will not.

It is a hard verse, because it is about many deaths, and we do not make light of them. They were men, and it is not a verse to be glad over. Even so, the book wants us to see something plain: that the city that was shut up was not given up. The wall held, because the one who stands behind a wall is greater than the one who stands in front of it.

Then comes the morning. Think of the men on the wall of Jerusalem, the same handful who had looked down on the great army, and who had kept silent when they were shouted at. They come to the parapet at first light, and look out over the plain, and they see no smoke. They see no horses. Where the camp had been, there is only trampled ground, and a stillness that hurts the ears.

And Sennacherib, king of Assyria, departed and returned home and lived at Nineveh.

That is how the Book of Kings puts it, with a kind of dryness that I think is deliberate. He packed up, and he went home. The book adds, just in one line, that some years later, when he was worshipping in the house of his god, two of his sons struck him down with the sword. But that is another night, and not a cheerful one, and we will leave it where it lies.

Now, there is something I would like to tell you, which is not in Scripture but which is in a clay prism in a museum. It is called the Taylor Prism, a six-sided barrel of baked clay covered in tiny wedge-shaped writing. It was made on the orders of Sennacherib himself, and it tells the story of his campaigns in the land of Judah, in his own proud words. He boasts that he took forty-six of Hezekiah's fortified cities and a great number of villages. And then he says of Hezekiah himself, that he shut him up in Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage.

A bird in a cage. And that is where it ends. The prism does not say that he captured Jerusalem. It does not say that he took Hezekiah away in chains, as Assyrian kings were glad to boast of doing with other rulers. The record of the proudest man in the east stops at the wall. And what the prism does not say is, in its own way, a witness to what the Book of Kings says.

We should not make too much of that. There are things in the Assyrian record and things in the Bible that scholars still argue about, such as how many campaigns there were, and what exactly the payment was. We are only telling you that a king who wrote down his victories in clay wrote that he had shut the king of Judah up in his city, and that he did not write that he went in.

And there is one more thing in Jerusalem, in stone this time, which the Book of Kings mentions in one short line, and Chronicles says a little more about. Before the army came, Hezekiah had seen to the city's water. A tunnel was cut through the rock, so that the spring outside the walls could flow to a pool inside them. Workmen began digging from both ends, and met in the middle. An inscription found in that tunnel says so: that the hewers struck pick against pick, and the water flowed from the spring to the pool. It is a tunnel you can still walk through today, in the dark, with the water about your ankles. A king who prayed was also a king who dug a tunnel, and the Bible does not set those against each other. He prayed as if it all depended on God, and he dug as if it all depended on him, and neither made the other smaller.

And now the story slows, as the night does.

Let us go back to the wall once more. The sun is up on the stones of Jerusalem. Down in the lanes there is the first noise of an ordinary day, someone drawing water, someone scolding a child, a door that sticks and is shoved open with a shoulder. The three officials are standing together near the gate, and none of them is quite sure what to say. Eliakim, who looks tired. Shebna, who has tucked a pen behind his ear out of habit. Joah, the recorder, who will have to write down all of this and does not know where to begin.

And up in the house of the Lord, a letter lies where a king left it. Perhaps someone has picked it up. Perhaps it lies there still, just as he spread it out, and the light is coming through the door and falling across the writing, and the words that frightened a whole city a day ago are only ink on a sheet.

Hezekiah is not much in the story after this, in these two chapters. He had done what a man can do. He had told the truth about being afraid. He had laid the thing out in front of the one who could do something about it. He had asked, and he had waited, and he had been heard.

If you are lying there in the dark tonight, and there is some letter of your own on your mind, some frightening thing that comes round again each time you close your eyes, a message you cannot answer, a number you cannot make add up, a worry that says the same words every time, you might think of the king in the temple. You do not have to answer it tonight. You do not have to be brave about it. You only have to put it down, open, in front of the one who is bigger than it, and say what he said: Lord, here it is. And then you may sleep.

Now, some notes for the curious, before we go.

Everything we have told you comes from the Second Book of Kings, chapters eighteen and nineteen, which the Isaiah scroll tells again in chapters thirty-six and thirty-seven, with small differences of wording. The Second Book of Chronicles, chapter thirty-two, tells a shorter version, and mentions the stopping of the springs outside the city. In some Bibles Second Kings is numbered Fourth Kingdoms, and you may meet it by that name.

What is Scripture, and told straight, is Hezekiah's reform, the Assyrian invasion, the payment taken from the temple, the field commander's speech at the upper pool, the request for Aramaic and the refusal, the silence of the people, the king in sackcloth, the message to Isaiah and Isaiah's reply, the letter, the king spreading it before the Lord, the prayer, the word of the Lord through Isaiah, the sign of the third year, the angel of the Lord and the hundred and eighty-five thousand, and Sennacherib's return to Nineveh.

What we have not claimed as fact is what the book does not say. It does not say how the night happened. Some old readers have wondered whether it was a plague, and the Greek writer Herodotus tells a different story about mice, but those are guesses and later tales, and we have left them out. We have also not tried to settle how this campaign fits the others in the Assyrian records, which is a matter for the historians. The sentence about the prism is simply what the prism says, as it is generally read.

What we invented are the weather, the clear morning, the sounds of the city, the Aramaic being polite and shaky, what the three officials may have felt, the pen behind the ear, the light across the letter, and the picture of the king in the dim of the temple. None of it is in the book, and none of it changes a single thing the book says. We have also said that Isaiah is a saint in both traditions, which is so, and that is all we have claimed for him tonight.

That's the story of Hezekiah and the letter for tonight. The holy prophet Isaiah is remembered by the Orthodox Church on the ninth of May, and in the Roman Martyrology on the sixth of July. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And may the Lord who heard a king in his distress hear you tonight, may his angels guard your sleep, and may you wake to a morning of peace. Goodnight, and God bless.

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