Hezekiah Opened the Ark and Pointed at the Tablets

The envoys came up the road from the east with their gifts wrapped in cloth, and the gatekeepers of Jerusalem watched them climb. Word had run ahead. The king of Babylon had sent men to the city, and the men of the city wanted to know why. Sickness had nearly taken Hezekiah a little while before. He had turned his face to the wall and wept and prayed, and fifteen years had been added to his life. Now a far empire had heard about it and sent a delegation to acknowledge the power that could do such a thing.

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The power they meant was God. The honor belonged to God. Hezekiah, standing in his hall while the envoys bowed and laid out their letters, did not feel it that way. He felt the bowing as bowing to him. He felt the long journey of these men as a journey made to see him. Something swelled in his chest that had nothing of prayer in it, and he decided the visitors should see what kind of king they had come to flatter.

The King Spread Out His Treasures

He called for a meal and seated the foreigners at his table. He sat his wife among them, which a man of his fathers' faith would not have done lightly with men out of a heathen court. The wine went around. The talk warmed. When the eating was finished, Hezekiah rose and walked them through his house.

He showed them the silver and the gold. He showed them the storehouses heavy with spices and oil. He showed them the armory and the shields stacked along the walls. He brought out the trophies he had stripped from the camp of Sennacherib, the Assyrian who had besieged the city and lost a hundred and eighty-five thousand men in a single night to the angel of the Lord. Those were not his victories to display. He displayed them.

He did not stop there. He showed them a stone of magnetic iron that pulled metal toward itself as if it were alive. He showed them a strange pale ivory, rare and costly, fetched from far off. He showed them honey gone as solid as stone. There was nothing in his house and nothing in all his rule that he did not open and set in front of their eyes. The envoys looked, and nodded, and remembered. Men who measure empires were measuring this one room by room.

He Opened the Holy Ark

Then he led them to the thing no foreigner had reason to see. He brought them into the sanctuary, past the treasuries of the kings of Judah, to the Aron Kodesh, the holy Ark, the gold-covered chest that had gone in front of his people through the wilderness with the two stone Tablets of the Law inside it. The room would have gone quiet around it. This was the seat of the covenant, the most guarded object in the kingdom, and a man did not open it to satisfy the curiosity of strangers.

Hezekiah opened it.

He let the emissaries lean in and look at the tablets, the writing cut into stone by the finger of God. Then he raised his hand toward them and spoke, and the words turned the holiest thing in the world into a charm on a wall. "With the help of these," he told them, "we make war and we win." He pointed at the covenant and called it his weapon. He took the sign of God's faithfulness and handed it to outsiders as the secret of his army.

The Prophet Came to the Door

The envoys went home with everything they had seen folded into memory. Into the hall came Isaiah, who had never been gentle with kings and had no softness to spare now.

He asked plain questions, the way a man does when he already knows the answers and wants the other man to hear himself say them. What did those men say. Where did those men come from. Hezekiah answered that they had come from a far country, from Babylon. Isaiah asked what they had seen in the house. The king, who had hidden nothing from them, could hide nothing from the prophet either. They had seen everything, he said. There was nothing in his stores he had not shown them.

There was a moment there when he could have said he was wrong. He did not take it. He answered the prophet from a height, the way he had walked the envoys through the treasuries, and the answer settled the matter.

The Sentence Handed Down

Was it not enough, God asked him, that you showed them the treasures of the kings of Judah and the treasures of the Holy of Holies. You opened the Ark for them. You showed them the tables, the work of My hand.

By your life, He said, they will come up and take it. All of it. Everything in your house and everything your fathers stored up before you, carried off to Babylon, and not a thing left behind.

And in place of the tables of the Law, they will take your sons.

Hezekiah heard the sentence handed down on his children and on his city, and what he answered was not a plea. He said the word of the Lord was good. He was thinking that there would be peace and safety in his own days. The disaster was set for later, for sons not yet grown, for a generation he would not live to see. He had wept for his own life when it was threatened. He did not weep now for theirs.

The Sons Who Went in Place of the Tablets

The men who bowed in his doorway sent their grandsons to empty the house, and the boys of Hezekiah's own line went east in chains to serve in the palace of the king of Babylon. They were made eunuchs there. Hananiah and Mishael and Azariah, and Daniel with them, and none of them ever had a child.

They kept the sabbaths in that palace anyway. To those men, God promised a memorial and a name inside His own walls, better than sons, better than daughters, a name that would not be cut off. Their ancestor had opened the Ark to impress a delegation and had traded the tablets for his sons. The sons got the everlasting name. He got peace in his own days.