The prophet Isaiah met King Hezekiah outside Jerusalem. The meeting was not a diplomatic visit. Isaiah carried a message from God: Hezekiah's children would do evil.
Hezekiah did not argue with the prophecy. He tried instead to outmaneuver it. "Then," he said to Isaiah, "give me your daughter in marriage. If my descendants come through your bloodline — through a prophet's line — perhaps the evil can be averted, perhaps my prayers will reach heaven through you."
The marriage was made, and the prayers were heard.
The midrash adds a second, stranger action Hezekiah took as king. Solomon — his ancestor, the wisest of the kings — had composed a book of healing, a compendium of medical prescriptions so effective that anyone who consulted it would be cured of any illness. The book had been preserved and used for generations. Hezekiah, looking out at his people, gave an extraordinary order: he had the book burned.
Why? Gaster's Exempla (no. 234, 1924) preserves the rabbinic explanation, which is blunt. Because the people, healed so easily by Solomon's prescriptions, had stopped praying. Illness came; they opened the book, took the cure, and recovered — without ever turning their face toward Heaven. What was meant as a gift had become a shield against the very relationship it was supposed to serve.
Hezekiah understood that even good medicine, if it replaces prayer, has become a kind of idol. So he burned it. The sages praised him for it. Sometimes the holiest act is to remove the solution that makes people forget to ask.