The Reforms of Hezekiah
The narrator's introduction of Hezekiah is among the most positive in the book of Kings. He did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, according to all that David his father had done. He removed the high places — something none of his predecessors in Judah had been willing or able to do — and he broke down the pillars and cut down the Asherah. Then he did something that required unusual theological clarity: he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, because until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it, calling it Nehushtan. The bronze serpent had a long history. Moses had made it in the wilderness when Israel was dying from serpent bites; anyone who looked at it lived (Numbers 21). It was a genuine instrument of God's healing, associated with the exodus generation's deliverance. But it had become an object of worship in its own right. Hezekiah's willingness to destroy a Mosaic artifact — one that had real sacred history — demonstrates the depth of his theological conviction: no object, however legitimate its origin, could be permitted to replace the LORD himself as the object of devotion.
He trusted in the LORD, the God of Israel, so that there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him, nor among those before him. He held fast to the LORD and did not depart from following him, but kept the commandments that the LORD commanded Moses. The narrator gives him the highest commendation available in the book's evaluative framework. And the LORD was with him: wherever he went out, he prospered.
What strikes us about the bronze serpent is that Hezekiah destroyed something that God had actually used. It wasn't a pagan idol with no history; it was Moses' artifact. But it had become an object of devotion rather than a memorial of grace. Hezekiah was willing to call a sacred object Nehushtan — "a piece of bronze" — and break it to pieces. Sometimes faithfulness requires letting go of something that was once genuinely holy but has drifted into something it was never meant to be. That takes a particular kind of theological courage.
Sennacherib's Invasion and Rabshakeh's Speech
The fourteenth year of Hezekiah's reign brought the crisis that would define it. Sennacherib king of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and took them. The Assyrian annals of Sennacherib, discovered in the nineteenth century, confirm this invasion and boast of shutting Hezekiah up "like a bird in a cage" in Jerusalem. Hezekiah sent word to Sennacherib at Lachish: "I have done wrong; withdraw from me. Whatever you impose on me I will bear." He paid him three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold, stripping the silver from the house of the LORD and cutting the gold from the temple doors. But Sennacherib was not satisfied. He sent three senior officials — the Tartan, the Rab-saris, and the Rabshakeh — with a great army to Jerusalem.
The Rabshakeh took a position at the conduit of the upper pool, the very spot where Isaiah had once stood to address Ahaz about the Assyrian threat a generation earlier. He spoke in a loud voice in the hearing of all the people on the wall. His speech was political propaganda of the highest order, combining military intimidation with theological argument. He dismantled every source of confidence Hezekiah might have had:
You are trusting in Egypt — but Egypt is a broken reed that pierces the hand of the one who leans on it. You say you trust in the LORD — but is it not Hezekiah who removed the LORD's high places and commanded Judah to worship only at one altar in Jerusalem? You have neither strategy nor strength. If I give you two thousand horses, could you find riders for them? And finally — has any god of any nation ever delivered his land from the hand of the king of Assyria? The gods of Hamath, Arpad, Sepharvaim, Hena, Ivvah — did they deliver Samaria from me? Do you think the LORD will deliver Jerusalem?
"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?" — 2 Kings 18:35 (ESV)
The royal officials of Judah asked Rabshakeh to speak in Aramaic — the diplomatic language both sides understood — rather than in the Hebrew that the people on the wall could follow. Rabshakeh refused: his master had sent him to speak to the people on the wall, who would eat their own dung and drink their own urine if the siege continued. He called up to the people directly: do not let Hezekiah deceive you; do not trust in the LORD when Hezekiah says the LORD will deliver you. Make peace with me and eat from your own vine and fig tree and drink your own cistern water until I take you to a land like your own.
The people were silent. They did not answer him a word, for the king's command was: "Do not answer him." The officials came to Hezekiah with their clothes torn and reported all that Rabshakeh had said.
We find it significant that Rabshakeh's argument was not entirely wrong. He was right that Egypt was unreliable. He was right that Israel hadn't delivered Samaria. He was right that no other nation's god had stopped Assyria. Everything he said was factually grounded — except the one claim that mattered. He assumed the LORD was like the other gods. That was the one thing he didn't know.
Hezekiah's Prayer and Isaiah's Answer
Hezekiah heard the report and tore his clothes and covered himself with sackcloth and went into the house of the LORD. He sent his senior officials to Isaiah the prophet, clothed in sackcloth, with a message: this day is a day of distress, of rebuke, and of disgrace — like children who have come to the point of birth and there is no strength to bring them forth. Perhaps the LORD your God heard all the words of Rabshakeh and will rebuke him. Isaiah sent back a word of calm assurance: do not be afraid because of the words you have heard, with which the servants of the king of Assyria have reviled me. I will put a spirit in him so that he shall hear a rumor and return to his own land, and I will make him fall by the sword in his own land.
Sennacherib sent a letter directly to Hezekiah. Hezekiah went up to the house of the LORD and spread it before the LORD. Then he prayed — and the prayer is the theological center of the whole account. He began with the nature of God: "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." He acknowledged what Rabshakeh had said was factually true about the other nations' gods: they were wood and stone, the work of human hands, and of course Assyria had destroyed them. But the LORD was different. And he asked not for his own deliverance but for something larger: "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."
Isaiah sent Hezekiah the word of the LORD at length: the virgin daughter of Zion despises you and laughs you to scorn, O Sennacherib; against whom have you raised your voice and lifted your eyes on high? Against the Holy One of Israel. By the multitude of your chariots you have gone up to the heights of Lebanon — but I dried up the Nile with the sole of my foot; have you not heard that I determined it long ago? You are the instrument of my hand against Israel. But because of your rage against me, I will put my hook in your nose and turn you back on the way by which you came.
That night the angel of the LORD went out and struck down 185,000 in the Assyrian camp. When people arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies. Sennacherib broke camp and went back to Nineveh. He was killed by his sons with the sword while worshiping in the house of his god Nisroch. The Assyrian annals do not record the disaster — as military propaganda, they never do — but later Assyrian records confirm that Sennacherib was murdered by his sons, confirming the basic historicity of the biblical account.
We keep coming back to the act of spreading the letter before the LORD. Hezekiah received a threat that detailed every reason Jerusalem would fall. And he took the letter, literally, and laid it open before God. That image — a king spreading an enemy's words before God rather than responding in kind or strategizing alone — is one of the most quietly profound acts of prayer in the Hebrew Bible. He wasn't telling God what to do. He was showing God what had been said and letting God respond.
Hezekiah's Illness and Recovery
In those days Hezekiah became mortally ill. Isaiah came to him and said: "Set your house in order, for you shall die; you shall not recover." Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed: "O LORD, please remember how I have walked before you in faithfulness and with a whole heart." He wept bitterly. Before Isaiah had gone out of the middle court, the word of the LORD came to him: go back and tell Hezekiah that the LORD has heard his prayer and seen his tears; he will heal him; on the third day he shall go up to the house of the LORD. He will add fifteen years to his life and deliver him from the hand of the king of Assyria. The sign given was that the shadow on the sundial of Ahaz went back ten steps.
God saw his tears. That phrase sits quietly in the text. A king wept against a wall, alone, facing a death sentence. And God saw the tears and reversed the sentence. Not because the prayer was eloquent. Because the weeping was real.
The Babylonian Envoys and the Warning
When Hezekiah recovered, the king of Babylon sent envoys with letters and a present — because he had heard that Hezekiah had been sick. Hezekiah welcomed them. He showed them everything in his treasure house — silver, gold, spices, precious oil, the house of his armor, all that was found in his storehouses. There was nothing in his house or in all his realm that Hezekiah did not show them.
Isaiah came to the king: "What did these men say? And from where did they come?" Hezekiah told him. Isaiah said: "What have they seen in your house?" Hezekiah told him. Isaiah delivered the word:
"Behold, the days are coming, when all that is in your house, and that which your fathers have stored up till this day, shall be carried to Babylon. Nothing shall be left, says the LORD. And some of your own sons, who will come from you, whom you will father, shall be taken away, and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon." — 2 Kings 20:17–18 (ESV)
Hezekiah received this word and said: the word of the LORD that you have spoken is good. For he thought: why not, if there will be peace and security in my days? The response has been read as contentment, as acceptance, or as the troubling self-interest of a man who cared more about his own era than his descendants'. The text simply records it without verdict, allowing the reader to sit with the discomfort.
What strikes us about this ending is the contrast with the prayer for deliverance from Assyria. When Hezekiah prayed about the Assyrian threat, he asked for deliverance so that all the kingdoms of the earth would know that God alone is God. When he received the prophecy about Babylon, he said: at least there will be peace in my days. The first prayer reached outward. The second response reached inward. Even the best kings, at the end of the day, were still only human. The Babylonian envoys came carrying warmth and gifts from a distant kingdom — and Hezekiah showed them everything. The nation that would carry it all away saw it first because of that hospitality.
Last updated: March 3, 2026.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.