Hezekiah Heard His Two Sons Mocking Him and Let Them Slip

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He Married a Woman He Was Afraid to Marry

Hezekiah held out for years, and Isaiah kept coming back at him about it.

The king was not squeamish about marriage in general. He had seen something specific. His own prophetic spirit had shown him the sons he would father, and what it showed him was that their wickedness would be bad enough that their deaths would be better than their lives. A man carrying that around does not hurry to a wedding.

He gave in at the end and married the prophet's daughter, and he went into the marriage with a heavy heart. Two boys came out of it. Rabshakeh was the elder. Manasseh was the younger.

The Road to the House of Study

Hezekiah had inherited a kingdom his father stripped. Ahaz had shut the schools, sealed the Temple doors, and set up altars for foreign gods across Judah, and Hezekiah spent his reign undoing all of it. He reopened the academies. He made study compulsory in every town he held.

He also walked his own children there. They were small, the distance was more than their legs could manage, so he took one on each shoulder and carried them himself, a king going up the street with two boys riding on him.

They talked to each other over the top of his head, the way children do when they have forgotten there is a person underneath.

What They Said About His Head

The first one looked down and said their father's bald head would do nicely for frying fish on.

The second one improved it. That head, he said, would do better as an altar for offering sacrifices to idols.

Hezekiah stopped in the road.

The first boy had insulted him. The second had told him what he intended to be. Altars for foreign gods were the thing his father had planted through the whole country and the thing he had spent his reign pulling down, and the child on his left shoulder had just picked the practice up and turned it into a joke about his father's skull, at an age when he was still too small to walk to school.

He Let Them Slip

The rage came up in him and he let his sons slide off his shoulders.

Rabshakeh hit the ground and died there. Manasseh got up unhurt. It would have been better if the second boy had gone the way the first one did, because he was spared for nothing except murder, idol worship, and the rest of what he did afterward.

Hezekiah went home with one son.

Thistles in the Stead of Wheat

The sages had a set of proverbs for this, because the pattern was old before Hezekiah met it. A righteous man fathers a righteous man, and that is a graft that makes a whole fig tree. A wicked man fathers a wicked man, and what does the beetle bring forth but ticks worse than itself. A wicked man fathers a righteous man, and out of the thorn comes the rose.

And a righteous man fathers a wicked one. For that they had two lines. Thistles will grow up in the place of wheat. Partridges hatch what does not resemble them and raise it anyway.

Manasseh took the throne at twelve and held it fifty-five years, longer than any other king of Judah. He put the high places back up. He built altars for the host of heaven inside the house of the Lord itself, which is to say he did exactly what he had proposed on his father's shoulders, on a larger surface. He filled Jerusalem with blood from one end to the other. When he came for the prophets, one of them was Isaiah, the old man who had pushed his father into that marriage, and whose daughter was his own mother.