Rabshakeh Mocked Zion and the Shadow Climbed Back Up the Steps

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The Herald at the Wall

Sennacherib, king of Assyria, had already been paid. In the fourteenth year of Hezekiah's reign the king of Judah had emptied his treasury to buy quiet, three hundred talents of silver and thirty of gold, and Sennacherib had taken all of it. Then he sent his army anyway.

At the head of it came Rabshakeh, and he arrived not with a battering ram but with his voice. He stood below the walls of Jerusalem where every farmer and water-carrier crowded the ramparts to watch, and he spoke in their own Hebrew so that none could miss a word. "Your God cannot save you," he shouted up at them. "Your allies in Egypt are a broken reed that will run into the hand of any man who leans on it. Surrender, or we will take you by force." He lifted his hand against Zion and blasphemed the God of Israel in his pride, boasting that no god of any nation had ever kept its city out of Assyrian hands.

Hezekiah's officers called down to him. Speak Aramaic, they begged, the tongue of courts and treaties, so the common people on the wall would not understand and lose heart. Rabshakeh only filled his lungs and shouted louder.

The King in Sackcloth

Inside the city the people heard him and were appalled at his pride. They writhed like a woman in the grip of labor and doubled over in fear of him. And Hezekiah, heir to the ways of David, stripped the royal purple from his shoulders, wrapped himself in sackcloth, and threw his body flat on the ground before God.

He sent to the prophet Isaiah. The answer came back without hesitation. The Assyrian would fall without a single battle joined, without one arrow loosed from the wall, and Sennacherib himself would go home to die by the sword in his own land.

Sennacherib heard of the prophecy and answered it with a letter. In it he called Hezekiah a fool for trusting a God who could not lift a hand. The king read it through. Then he rolled it closed, carried it up into the Temple, and spread it open before God. The insult now lay where the One it named could read every word of it.

The Morning the Camp Fell Silent

That night nothing marched. No siege tower rolled forward, no ladder touched the stone. Something moved through the Assyrian tents in the dark, and it was not a soldier.

By the time the sun rose over the plain, a hundred and eighty-five thousand men lay dead in their bedrolls. Captains, commanders, the whole weight of the army that had roared under the walls at dusk, gone in the space of one night without a wound anyone could name. The camp made no sound at all.

Sennacherib rode out of the silence alone and did not stop until he reached Nineveh. He did not rule there long. His own sons, Adrammelech and Seraser, cut him down inside the temple of his own god while he bowed in it, and every word Isaiah had spoken stood fulfilled to the letter.

The Sickbed and the Childless King

The deliverer did not stay well for long. Not many days after the camp emptied, Hezekiah fell into a sickness that bent the strongest king in the east flat on his bed. The physicians came, looked, and gave him up. They had no cure for what was draining the life out of him, and they said so to his face. What broke him was not the fever. It was the thought of dying with no son to take his throne, the line of David stopped dead in his own body.

He turned his face to the wall and wept, and out of the weeping he begged God for more time. Isaiah came again, and the message he carried was almost past believing. In three days the illness would lift. The king would rise from the bed and live another fifteen years.

Hezekiah could not hold it. He asked for a sign.

The Shadow Climbed the Steps

Isaiah did not argue. He asked the king what proof he wanted. Hezekiah lay where he could see the great stepped dial that measured the daylight by a falling line of shadow, and the shadow had already crept down ten of its steps toward evening. "Make it go back," the king said. "Let the shadow climb the ten steps it has come down."

Isaiah prayed. The shadow stopped, hung, and reversed. Step by step it climbed back up the face of the dial, the light returning to stone it had already left, the hour unmaking itself while the whole city could look up and count. Time bent backward over the bed of a dying man to keep a single promise.

On the third day Hezekiah rose. He walked out of the sickroom on his own feet, up to the Temple, and gave thanks in the house where he had once laid an enemy's letter open before God. In his days the sun had stood still, and the standing had bought fifteen years for the king.