Hezekiah Cried Forsaken and the Light Kept Its Promise

The Psalm That Begins at the Bottom

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The words do not open a debate. They are the sound of a man who believes the forsaking is real, who addresses God directly in the second person as the one who has abandoned him, who has been crying out in the daytime without answer and in the night without rest. There is no cushioning phrase before it. The psalm opens in freefall.

The rabbis who read this in Midrash Tehillim did not smooth it over. They matched its intensity with a specific historical figure: Hezekiah, king of Judah, one of the most praised kings in the entire rabbinic tradition, standing inside the circle of a siege he could not break.

The King Who Rebuilt What His Father Destroyed

Hezekiah's father Ahaz had shut the doors of the Temple, closed the schools, stripped the altar, and made the worship of foreign gods a state policy. The land of Judah was in covenant default by the time Hezekiah inherited the throne. Hezekiah reversed every one of Ahaz's decisions. He reopened the Temple, reinstituted the Passover sacrifice on a national scale, invited the northern tribes who had survived the Assyrian conquest of Israel to come and celebrate in Jerusalem, and instituted a program of religious education across the kingdom so thorough that the tradition credits him with making Israel literate in Torah from Dan to Beersheba.

He was, by every rabbinic measure, a king of light. And then the Assyrian army came.

Sennacherib at the Walls

The siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 701 BCE is one of the few events from the Hebrew Bible confirmed by independent ancient records. The Assyrian annals describe the campaign. The Book of Kings and the Book of Isaiah both record it from the Judean side. Sennacherib's officer Rabshakeh stood at the walls and called out in Hebrew, directly to the people on the battlements, telling them that their God could not save them because no god had ever stopped Sennacherib before.

Hezekiah received the Assyrian letter laying out the ultimatum, went to the Temple, spread the letter before God, and prayed. The prayer in 2 Kings 19 is direct and stripped of ornament: you are the God who made heaven and earth; the Assyrian kings have destroyed the gods of all the nations because those were not real gods; now save us from his hand so that all the kingdoms of the earth will know that you alone are God.

The rabbis of Midrash Tehillim heard Psalm 22 in that prayer. The man crying out in the daytime without answer was Hezekiah, standing in the Temple spreading the letter across the altar stones, not knowing yet that the answer had already been sent.

Fire and Light From the Same Verse

Midrash Tehillim places Isaiah 10:17 alongside Psalm 22 and asks who is being described: the Light of Israel will be as a fire, and its Holy One as a flame. The midrash reads the Light of Israel as Hezekiah. The fire that burns the briers and thorns of Sennacherib's army is the same light that Hezekiah carried when he reopened the schools and brought the Torah back to Judah. Light and fire are not opposites in this reading. They are the same force in two registers: one that builds up the students in the schools and one that destroys the empire outside the walls.

The angel who struck down a hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrian soldiers in one night did not contradict Hezekiah's prayer. It answered it. The psalm that began at the bottom became a promise of light by the end, and Hezekiah's cry of forsaken became the first word of a story that ended with Sennacherib going home to die at the hands of his own sons.