The Isiaiah Project: Chapter 38, or, Time and the Fallen King

Greetings. Today we reach what is, I think, the theological climax of Hezekiah's story. As always there is a translation below, and an essay below that. Please enjoy.

1. In those days Hezekiah was deathly ill, and Isaiah the prophet, son of Amoz, came to him. He said to him, ‘so says God: “put your household in order, because you’re dying, and you won’t survive this.”’

2. But Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to God.

3. He said, ‘Oh God, please, remember how I’ve kept walking in your sight, in truth and with a full heart; how I did what was good in your eyes.’ And Hezekiah sobbed heaving sobs.

4. And it happened: God’s proclamation came to Isaiah. It said,

5. ‘Go and say to Hezekiah, so says God, the god of David your father: “I listened to your prayer. I saw your tears. Look: here I am, adding to your days — adding fifteen years.

6. ‘“I will rescue you from the palm of the hand of Assyria’s king — you and this city. I will mount a defense of this city.

7. ‘“This is your sign, from God to you, that God will do this Thing He Proclaimed:

8. ‘“Watch me send the shadow on the sundial, which has gone down on Ahaz’s dial, backwards by ten degrees.”’
And the sun went back by ten of the degrees it had gone down.

9. What Hezekiah, King of Judah, wrote when he was sick but survived his sickness:

10. ‘Me, I said, “at the silent noontide of my days I will go to the gates of the Grave. I have been cheated of the years that were left to me.”

11. ‘I said, “I will not see God, God on the earth among living things; I will not gaze on humanity on earth anymore, among those who inhabit this dying world.

12. ‘“My lifetime has fled from me and been dismantled like a shepherd’s tent. I have rolled my life up like a weaver rolls yarn. He will trim me like a stray thread; from day to night you’ll finish me off.

13. ‘“I chewed over things until the dawn — like a lion, he splintered every one of my bones. From day to night, you’ll finish me off.

14. ‘“Like a crane, like a swallow, I wheedle; I moan like a dove. My eyes grew heavy from setting their sights high — my Master, I’m in anguish; fight on my side.

15. ‘“What proclamation can I make? He said it to me, and he did it too: I will slink on tiptoe through all my years in the bitterness of my soul.

16. ‘“My Master, these are the things by which men live; it is in these things that my spirit finds life. You will revive me, and make me live.

17. ‘“Look: in exchange for peace I got bitterness upon bitterness. But you were in love with my soul, loved it out of the ditch of decay, because you tossed all my sins over your shoulder.

18. ‘“Because the Grave will never give you thanks. Death will never celebrate you. The ones who sink into the abyss will never wait in hope for your truth.

19. ‘“Alive! He is alive who praises you. Like me, today. From father to son they pass on knowledge of your truth.

20. ‘“God was there to save me. And so we will strum my songs on our strings every day we are alive, in the house of God.”’

21. Isaiah had said, ‘have them get a cake made of figs, and apply it to the ulcer, and he will live.’

22. And Hezekiah had said, ‘what is the sign that I will ascend to the house of God?’

Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, was a good man and a good king. But he was born into a time when the weight of sin was already doomed to crush his people. It was the apostasy of Ahaz, Hezekiah's father -- and the gradually increasing decadance of the generations before him -- that had brought Jerusalem to a point of alienation from its God and its traditions. None of that was Hezekiah's fault.

Hezekiah may have wavered somewhat in the face of existential threat. He may have acquiesced to an ill-fated alliance with Egypt. But by and large he was an exemplary king. Pious, devoted, brave: in the previous chapters we saw him face down an Assyrian army that would have made a lesser man capitulate in anguish and terror. Not Hezekiah, whose reliance on God was such that he could move the heart of heaven with his plea for rescue. Thanks to the resolution and fidelity of this man, Jerusalem found respite from the foreign conquest that was to come.

But -- and this must have felt miserably unfair -- the conquest would come anyway. The respite was only temporary; the Jerusalem which Hezekiah loved was to be crushed under wheels set in motion long before he was born.

In this chapter God performs a miracle which recreates, in the miniature symbolism of Hezekiah's own life, a picture of that forestalled inevitability. Seized by a deadly illness, Hezekiah cries out for healing (verse 3) and receives it: he lives to die another day. The imagery here is marvelously apt and subtle: God's sign that Hezekiah will survive his illness is that the shadow on Ahaz's sundial will reverse its course by ten degrees (verse 8). This marker, Hezekiah's father's marker, of the sun's inevitable progress in the sky and the slow advance of the disastrous days, will be supernaturally reversed in its course to buy Hezekiah more time. The only way to bring the shadow backwards on a sundial is to reverse the flow of history, to rewind to an earlier point in the day before letting the sun proceed again on its slow advance toward night.

That this happens on a sundial belonging to Ahaz, the king who sealed Israel's fate, perfectly encapsulates what is going on here on both the personal and on the national level. The faith and resilience of Hezekiah, and the mercy of God, has reversed in some small degree the forces of history which, thanks to Ahaz, must ultimately lead to Jerusalem's ruin. Hezekiah has planted his foot in the rushing river of time, and by the grace of God he has rewound but not arrested its course. The massive and unwieldy machinery of world events, the slow careening of a culture in decline, the desperate perversity of a human race born into sin, must ultimately run to its inevitable conclusion. One man, even the best of men, can only hope to do right in his time and pray with all he has for respite and for grace.

When we embarked on Hezekiah's part of the story, I wrote that this would be where Isaiah grapples with what we now call the "great man" question of history -- the question whether and to what extent one man, alone, can alter the fate of a nation or the world. I think that this miracle, the miracle of the sundial, is Isaiah's considered and definitive answer to that question. We are born into a world of sin, and it is up to the wisdom of God what moment of that world's progress we will find ourselves located in. Perhaps we find ourselves at the peak of our culture, warmly welcomed into life by a god-fearing and just society. Perhaps we have the terrible misfortune of living in an oppressive or a lawless state. Or perhaps, like Hezekiah, we find ourselves at a turning point in the fall of our people which was catalyzed by others who lived before us, and which can ultimately only be rectified by that divine intervention which will cancel the effects of all sin.

In such a situation the best we can hope for is a few more degrees on the sundial. It matters, truly it does, what we do: without Hezekiah's bravery the disaster of exile would have befallen Israel much sooner. That means that years of free life were secured for the Jewish people by this one good and brave king. But as a sick man, though brought back to health, must still die one day, so a nation on the course of decline must ultimately succumb to the forces of sin which, this side of heaven, will bring us all at last into the dust. As for that ultimate and overarching trajectory of the world, there is only one Great Man powerful enough to reverse it. It will be the business of the following chapters to foretell his coming.