The Letter Spread Out Before God

Before Josiah, and before the end, there was a king in Jerusalem — and the year the northern kingdom was carried away by Assyria, he was on the throne in the south, watching it happen. His name was Hezekiah, and he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, the way David had. He cleared out the shrines on the hills and smashed the standing stones. He even broke up the bronze snake Moses had made in the wilderness, hundreds of years before — because people had started burning incense to it, and a thing that saves your life can be turned into an idol like anything else. And he trusted the Lord. There was no king like him in Judah, before him or after him.

And in the fourteenth year of his reign, the army of Assyria came. This was the greatest army in the world, and it had already swallowed the ten northern tribes whole. Sennacherib the king came down through Judah and took the fortified cities one after another, until there was only Jerusalem left, standing on its rock with a very frightened city inside it. And Sennacherib sent his officer — the man they called the Rabshakeh — up to the walls with a heavy force, to talk. And he did not talk to the king. He stood outside the wall and shouted up at the ordinary people sitting on it, in their own language, so that everybody could hear him: “This is what the great king says: do not let Hezekiah fool you. He cannot rescue you. And do not let him get you trusting in the Lord, saying, ‘The Lord will certainly rescue us, and this city will never be handed over.’ Come out to me instead, and every one of you will eat from his own vine and drink from his own well, until I come and take you off to a land like your own — a land of grain and wine and bread and vineyards and olive oil and honey. Choose to live, and not to die. Have the gods of any of the nations ever rescued their land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are they? Which god of any country anywhere has saved his land from me — that the Lord should save Jerusalem out of my hand?” And the people on the wall did not say one word back to him, because the king had told them not to answer.

And Hezekiah tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and went into the house of the Lord. And he sent his officials, in sackcloth too, to the prophet Isaiah, and their message was almost too tired to be a prayer: perhaps the Lord your God has heard the things that man said, and perhaps he will answer them. And Isaiah sent back: “This is what the Lord says: do not be afraid of the words you have heard, the words the king of Assyria’s servants have insulted me with. Look — I am going to put a spirit in him, and he will hear a rumor and go home to his own country.” And then Sennacherib sent a letter. He had heard a rumor, exactly as God said he would, and he was leaving — but he sent a letter first, to make sure Jerusalem stayed frightened. And it said: do not let your God fool you the way you are being fooled. No god of any nation has ever stopped me. Not one.

Hezekiah took the letter out of the messengers’ hands and read it — and then he carried it up to the house of the Lord and spread it open in front of God, the way you would spread out a map on a table. And he prayed: “Lord, God of Israel, who sits above the winged creatures — you alone are God, of all the kingdoms of the earth. You made heaven and earth. Turn your ear, Lord, and hear. Open your eyes, Lord, and see. Hear the words Sennacherib has sent to insult the living God. It is true, Lord: the kings of Assyria have destroyed the nations and their lands, and thrown their gods into the fire — because they were not gods at all, only wood and stone, made by people’s hands. So they destroyed them. And now, Lord our God, save us out of his hand — so that every kingdom on the earth may know that you, Lord, are God, and there is no other.” He did not ask to be made great. He asked to be saved, so that everybody would know who God was. And Isaiah sent word to him: “This is what the Lord says about the king of Assyria: he will not come into this city. He will not shoot one arrow into it. He will not set a shield against it or build a ramp up to it. By the road he came, he will go back — and into this city he will not come, says the Lord. I will hold my shield over this city and save it, for my own sake and for the sake of David my servant.”

And that night the messenger of the Lord went out into the camp of the Assyrians, and in the morning a hundred and eighty-five thousand of them were dead. The people in the camp got up early, and there they were: the bodies of the greatest army in the world, lying in the fields outside a city that had not fired one arrow. And Sennacherib king of Assyria packed up and went home to Nineveh — by the road he had come, exactly as Isaiah had said. And some years later, in the temple of his own god, two of his own sons killed him while he was bowing down.

About that same time Hezekiah fell ill, so ill that he was dying. And Isaiah came in and told him plainly: put your house in order, because you are not going to get better. And Hezekiah turned his face to the wall — away from everybody, toward the plaster — and prayed: “Ah, Lord — remember how I have walked in front of you faithfully and with my whole heart, and have done what is good in your eyes.” And he cried and cried. And Isaiah had not even got out of the middle courtyard before the word of the Lord came to him: turn round and go back, and say to Hezekiah, “I have heard your prayer. I have seen your tears. Look — I am going to heal you, and on the third day you will go up to the house of the Lord. And I will add fifteen years to your life.” And Hezekiah, who had just been told he was going to live, asked for a sign — and Isaiah offered him the shadow on the palace stairway: shall it go forward ten steps, or back? And Hezekiah said: it is easy for a shadow to go forward. Let it go back instead. And Isaiah called out to the Lord, and the shadow went back up ten steps on the stairs. Fifteen years. He did not use them all well — there was the day he showed off his whole treasury to some visitors from a place called Babylon, and Isaiah told him quietly that one day everything in that room would be carried off there. But he had asked, and God had heard, and the sun went backwards on a staircase in Jerusalem.