Hezekiah

The account of Hezekiah's reform in the eighteenth chapter of Second Kings is brief and startlingly specific. He removed the high places, the local altars where Judahites had lawfully sacrificed for centuries. He broke the standing stones and cut down the wooden cult pole. And he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, because until then the Israelites had been burning incense to it, and he called it Nehushtan, a piece of bronze.

That last act is unlike anything else in the Hebrew Bible. The bronze serpent belongs to a story in Numbers in which the Lord instructs Moses to make it, and looking at it heals those bitten by snakes in the wilderness. It is therefore an object made at divine command, by Moses, and preserved in the sanctuary, and Hezekiah destroys it because of what people had come to do with it. The reasoning is not that the object was false but that veneration had attached to the thing rather than to what it pointed at, and the name he gives it, reducing it to its material, makes the point.

What the reform meant in practice is the harder question. Concentrating sacrifice in one place removes the local shrine from the village and puts the priesthood, the calendar and the revenue under central control, so the measure is at once theological and political, and modern historians debate how much of it happened under Hezekiah and how much the account projects backwards from the later reform of Josiah. Excavated evidence is suggestive rather than decisive: an altar at Tel Beersheba was dismantled and its stones reused, and the sanctuary at Tel Arad went out of use, but dating either event to a particular king's decree remains contested.

Hezekiah rebelled against Assyria, and in 701 BCE Sennacherib came west to punish it. The Assyrian campaign took the fortified towns of Judah, and the siege of Lachish was carved in relief on the walls of Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh in such detail that archaeologists have matched the reliefs to the excavated siege ramp. Jerusalem itself was invested but not taken. The biblical account in Second Kings and Isaiah says the angel of the Lord struck the Assyrian camp and Sennacherib withdrew; the Assyrian annals, inscribed on clay prisms, describe shutting Hezekiah up in his royal city like a bird in a cage and taking heavy tribute, and conspicuously do not claim to have captured it.

Few reigns of this period can be read against an independent record at all, and fewer still against one written by the enemy. Two further classes of evidence attach to him directly. Jar handles stamped with a royal seal reading belonging to the king and a place name, the lmlk impressions, are concentrated in his reign and are usually read as provisioning for the war. And a clay sealing recovered from excavations beside the Temple Mount and published in 2015 reads, in the paleo-Hebrew script, as belonging to Hezekiah son of Ahaz king of Judah, an object from the king's own administration.

The tunnel is the third. A water channel more than five hundred metres long, cut through bedrock from the Gihon spring to the pool of Siloam, is described in Chronicles as Hezekiah's work, and an inscription found in it records two teams of quarrymen cutting toward each other and meeting in the middle. It was dug to secure the city's water against exactly the siege that came.