Hezekiah Heard His Sons Plot Blasphemy While Carrying Them

On the Road to Study

Hezekiah was carrying his sons to the house of study. The boys were small enough to ride on his shoulders, one on each side, their weight familiar on a walk he had taken many times. He had married against a dark prophecy, had been warned that the sons born from this marriage would be wicked, had been told by Isaiah that his own father's pattern might repeat through his children. He had made the marriage anyway. He was taking the children to learn Torah as early as they could be taught. He was doing everything a righteous father does.

The boys were talking to each other over his head.

The Conversation He Heard

One of them looked down at his father's bald head and said it would do nicely for frying fish. The other one-upped him: it would do nicely as an altar for offering sacrifices to idols.

The first suggestion was contempt. The second was theology. These were young children, too small to walk the distance to the house of study, already rehearsing the men they intended to become. The first boy was mocking his father. The second boy had named his destination: idol worship, the practice of offering sacrifices at forbidden altars, the exact thing his grandfather Ahaz had normalized throughout Judah before Hezekiah spent his entire reign destroying it.

Hezekiah stopped walking. The boys were still on his shoulders when he heard it. The thing he had feared for years, the prophecy he had tried to outrun by taking them to study, had announced itself in his own sons' voices above his head.

What Happened When He Set Them Down

He set them down, or they slipped, or the combination of his rage and their position produced the fall. The account is not entirely clear on whose action caused it. Rabshakeh, the elder of the two, died from the fall. Manasseh survived.

The tradition draws no explicit line from Rabshakeh's name to the Assyrian officer who had stood outside Jerusalem's walls and shouted that God could not save the city. But the name is there, shared between Hezekiah's son and the man who had been Sennacherib's mouthpiece. The tradition does not explain this. It records both without connecting them and lets the shared name sit there, unremarked.

The Son Who Survived to Rule

Manasseh became king of Judah at twelve years old, after Hezekiah died. He reigned for fifty-five years, the longest reign in Judah's history, and in those decades he dismantled nearly everything his father had built. He rebuilt the high places Hezekiah had torn down. He reintroduced Baal worship. He set up asherah poles throughout the kingdom. He practiced divination and used sorcerers. He reinstated the Moloch rites, the passing of children through fire, the very practice that had nearly killed Hezekiah in infancy and that Hezekiah's mother had circumvented with salamander blood.

He also killed righteous people. The tradition says he killed Isaiah. He filled Jerusalem with innocent blood from end to end.

Late in his life, after the Assyrians took him captive to Babylon, Manasseh prayed and repented. God heard him and allowed him to return to Jerusalem, where he removed the foreign altars and repaired some of what he had broken. The tradition debates whether his repentance was genuine and whether a man of his record could earn it. He died in Jerusalem.

What the Carrying Forward

Hezekiah had rebuilt the entire apparatus of Torah observance in Judah from the ruins his father left. He had reopened every school, preserved every sacred text, mandated study across the entire kingdom. He had carried his sons to the house of study himself, personally, on his shoulders. He had done everything a righteous father could do.

The prophecy he had tried to avoid by not marrying in the first place, the prophecy Isaiah had overruled by telling him his obligations were not negotiable, came true anyway. His son was what his son was going to be. What Hezekiah had built with decades of work, Manasseh had fifty-five years to take apart.