Hezekiah

Hezekiah was the king of Judah who stopped paying tribute to Assyria after Sargon II died, cut a tunnel through the rock of Jerusalem to bring the Gihon spring inside the walls against the siege he knew would come, and was, in Sennacherib's own account of 701 BC, shut up in his city like a bird in a cage while forty-six of his walled towns were taken; the Assyrian army went home without taking Jerusalem, for reasons the Bible attributes to an angel and Herodotus to mice, and the survival made the city and its temple what they became. He came to the throne about 715, the son of Ahaz, who had made Judah an Assyrian vassal to save it from Israel and Damascus. The books of Kings and Chronicles credit him with the reform that concentrated worship in the temple, destroyed the high places and the bronze serpent of Moses, and kept a Passover to which the remnant of the northern kingdom, destroyed in 722, was invited. The rebellion came when Sargon died in battle in 705 and the empire's vassals rose together; Hezekiah joined Egypt and the Philistine cities, imprisoned the king of Ekron who would not, and prepared. There was the tunnel, five hundred and thirty-three metres through the rock with an inscription at the meeting point where the two gangs heard each other's picks, the broad wall across the western hill, the storage jars stamped for the king. Sennacherib came in 701, took Lachish in a siege his palace reliefs show room by room, and sent his officers to the walls of Jerusalem to shout in Hebrew at the defenders. Hezekiah paid thirty talents of gold and three hundred of silver, the Assyrian annals say, and kept his throne and his city. Isaiah was at his court and told him, when he showed the Babylonian envoys his treasury, what Babylon would one day carry off. He died about 687 and his son Manasseh undid the reform for fifty-five years. The tunnel still runs and the inscription is in Istanbul.

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