Hezekiah's Cry of Abandonment Became a Promise of Light

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" It is the cry of a man who believes it might be true.

Psalm 22 begins at the bottom. Not troubled, not uncertain, not questioning from a position of faith shaken by doubt. It begins with abandonment as a lived reality, articulated in the second person, addressed directly to the God who is not answering. This is not the beginning of a debate. It is the sound of a person in free fall.

The rabbis of Midrash Tehillim, that ancient Palestinian collection of interpretations on the Psalms assembled across several centuries of the Common Era, refused to read this verse in a vacuum. They reached into the prophetic literature for context and found a verse in Isaiah that they placed alongside it: "The Light of Israel will be as a fire, and its Holy One as a flame" (Isaiah 10:17). Two texts, two registers, one question: who is being described?

One reading that Midrash Tehillim preserves connects the Light of Israel to Hezekiah, the righteous king of Judah who ruled in the eighth century BCE. Hezekiah is one of the most praised kings in all of rabbinic literature. He rebuilt the schools that his wicked father Ahaz had destroyed. He instituted a program of religious reform across Judah. And then, at the height of his power, the Assyrian army under Sennacherib surrounded Jerusalem.

The account of Sennacherib's assault in the Ginzberg tradition is one of the most dramatic military narratives in all of rabbinic literature. One hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrian soldiers, the text says, dead in a single night. An angel moved through the camp and they did not survive until morning. Hezekiah woke at dawn to a liberation he had not fought for with any weapon of his own. The army that had surrounded his city was simply gone (2 Kings 19:35).

But before the liberation came the cry. Hezekiah's prayer to God during the Assyrian siege is a real document, preserved in Isaiah 37 and 2 Kings 19. He spread the Assyrian king's letter before God in the Temple and asked: do you see what they are doing? Are you watching? What the midrash hears in Psalm 22 is that same desperation, that same lived experience of abandonment that a person feels when the armies are massed outside and God has not yet acted.

The Assyrian threat under Sennacherib was not vague or hypothetical. The Assyrian king had already destroyed Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom, in 722 BCE. He had deported the ten tribes. He had demonstrated that he was willing and capable of exactly what he was threatening to do to Jerusalem. Sennacherib in battle was the most formidable military force in the ancient Near East. When Hezekiah prayed "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me," he was praying against a specific, documented, fully operational army camped outside his walls.

The Ginzberg tradition preserves a remarkable detail about Hezekiah's response to the crisis: he did not mobilize the army. He went to the Temple. He spread Sennacherib's threatening letter before God like a legal document and said, in effect, read this. God, the tradition says, read it. And then acted. The one hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrian soldiers who died in that single night died because Hezekiah brought his crisis to the right address.

The Isaiah verse that the midrash places alongside the Psalm provides the answer, but not immediately. "The Light of Israel will be as a fire" is a future tense promise. It describes what God will be when God acts. The light has not yet appeared. The fire has not yet consumed the army. Hezekiah is in the gap between the cry and the answer.

The Ginzberg collection and the Midrash Aggadah tradition both understand this gap as a theological location, not just a narrative pause. The experience of abandonment is real. It is not corrected by arguing that God was always present. It is addressed by the tradition's insistence that the light comes, specifically to the darkness that most deserves it. Hezekiah's Judah, surrounded by Assyria, was exactly that kind of darkness.

Psalm 22 ends not where it begins. It moves through the abyss to praise, through the cry of abandonment to the declaration that God has not despised the affliction of the afflicted, "neither has he hidden his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard" (Psalm 22:24). The midrash holds both ends of the Psalm together with the Isaiah verse in the middle, forming a structure: the cry, the promise of light, the hearing.

Hezekiah cried from inside the siege. The light came in the night. The morning showed the army gone. And the Psalm he inhabited, without knowing it, was already written.