I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 2 Kings 17-18.

In Judah, Hezekiah ascended to the throne. The writer tells us that King Hezekiah was fully devoted to God in everything that he did. He went beyond any of his predecessors by destroying the pagan shrines at which the people worshiped, leaving the Temple in Jerusalem as the only place of worship in the land. I wonder if King Hezekiah recognized the importance of a centralized, unified worship of God from what happened to his north after the fall of Samaria. Or, perhaps, King Hezekiah did this because he desired the people to worship God fully and completely. Certainly everything the Bible tells us about King Hezekiah tells us that he put his faith fully in God.

King Hezekiah rebelled against Assyria at about the same time as King Hoshea of the Northern Kingdom did. Perhaps Hezekiah’s rebellion was what inspired King Hoshea to rebel. In any case, King Hezekiah was able to extend his control over what we now know as the Gaza strip. I must add that the passage does not make clear that King Hezekiah rebelled against Assyria around the same time as King Hoshea. That is just the conclusion I reach from where in the passage it tells that he did and that he would have been unlikely to do so after the fall of Samaria. In any case, several years after taking the people of the Northern Kingdom into exile, the King of Assyria decided to re-exert his authority over Judah. When the King of Assyria invaded Judah King Hezekiah gave him a large payment and offered to resume paying tribute.

The passage does not say so explicitly, but the King of Assyria appears to have decided to take at least some of the people of Judah and settle them elsewhere (and bring others in to replace them as he had in the Northern Kingdom). What exactly was his intention, he sent a large army to Jerusalem in support of his representatives whom he sent to confront King Hezekiah. The Assyrian emissaries initially presented their demands to Hezekiah’s representatives, but they did so in a way which was heard and understood by the people on the walls of Jerusalem. In these initial demands they were respectful of God, suggesting that King Hezekiah could not rely on God because he had insulted Him by tearing down the shrines throughout the land (side note: This suggests, as happens at a few other places in the Old Testament, that the worship at these shrines was not completely idolatrous).

However, when King Hezekiah’s representatives asked them to speak so that the people on the walls would not understand them, the Assyrian emissaries addressed the people of Jerusalem directly. This time they revealed their true attitude towards God. This second statement sounds a lot like the words of a prophet. The emissaries called on the people to choose life instead of death. They told the people that if they accepted the commands of the King of Assyria they would receive many good things. Then the emissaries told the people that God was not powerful enough to save them from the King of Assyria. They claimed dominion over all others for the King of Assyria. As I read this it reminded me of many secular promises of Utopia. When they promised good things for the people if they followed the commands from the King of Assyria (the government they would establish), they did not actually promise anything the people did not already have. They merely promised that after completely disrupting their lives they would make things just as good again. Then they used the fact that the King of Assyria could spare from his army more military supplies than King Hezekiah could field men to use to show how God could not stand against them. They used the argument that just look at the way things are, how could the King of Assyria fail at anything he tried to do. Tomorrow, we will read about how King Hezekiah responded and how that turned out.