The Doors Open, the House Is Cleansed, and the Music Returns

Hezekiah, Hizqiyyahu, means “the LORD strengthens”, carrying the verb hazaq that has run through every reign in the book. His mother is Abi in 2 Kings 18:2. Her father Zechariah might be Isaiah’s trusted witness of that name (Isaiah 8:2), but nothing makes the link certain.

Kings says of Hezekiah that “after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah” (2 Kings 18:5), and gives most of its space to Sennacherib’s invasion. The Book of 2 Chronicles gives him four chapters and spends three of them on the temple and its worship.

“Repaired” is hazaq, the root of the king’s own name. 2 Kings 18:16 records the bitter sequel: years later Hezekiah stripped the gold from “the doors of the temple of the LORD” to pay Sennacherib. The doors he repairs first are the ones he will have to strip.

The “east street” is an open square on the east side, before the temple’s main entrance, since the building faced east. The ministers are gathered outside because the house itself is not yet fit to enter.

“Filthiness” is niddah, the word for the impurity of menstruation (Leviticus 15:19), the strongest term for defilement in the law, which the prophets applied to idols. “Levites” in this speech covers the whole tribe, priests included.

Turning the back on the house was a literal posture: Ezekiel saw men in the temple court “with their backs toward the temple of the LORD, and their faces toward the east”, worshipping the sun (Ezekiel 8:16). “Habitation” is mishkan, the word for the tabernacle.

Hezekiah lists the lamps, the incense and the burnt offerings: the very services Abijah boasted of in 13:11 as proof that Judah had not forsaken the LORD. Two centuries later all of them had stopped.

“Trouble, astonishment, and hissing” is the vocabulary of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 19:8, 29:18). A hissing was the low whistle a passer-by gave at the sight of a ruin. “As ye see with your eyes” appeals to what the listeners already knew.

The captives of 28:8 had been sent home from Samaria, so Hezekiah must mean those taken to Damascus and by Edom (28:5, 17), whom no one returned. Fathers, sons, daughters and wives: every member of a household is named in the loss.

“It is in mine heart” is what David said of building the temple (1 Chronicles 22:7). This is the book’s third covenant of renewal, after Asa’s (15:12) and Jehoiada’s (23:16). Its aim is stated first: that the burning anger may turn.

“My sons” is how a teacher addresses pupils in Proverbs. “Be not now negligent” uses a rare verb for being careless or at ease. The rest echoes Deuteronomy 10:8, where the LORD set Levi apart “to stand before the LORD to minister unto him”.

Levi had three sons, Kohath, Merari and Gershon (Numbers 3:17), and each house sends two men. Mahath, Amasai, Joel and Azariah are all names in the Kohathite line of 1 Chronicles 6:35–36; families reused ancestral names. Eden son of Joah seems to stand beside his father Joah.

Elizaphan was the Kohathite chief of Numbers 3:30, and as Elzaphan he was one of the two cousins who carried the bodies of Nadab and Abihu out of the sanctuary (Leviticus 10:4). His descendants now carry out uncleanness again. Zechariah and Mattaniah represent Asaph’s singers.

With Heman and Jeduthun, all three of David’s musical guilds are present (1 Chronicles 25:1–6). The fourteen names form seven pairs: the three branches of Levi, the house of Elizaphan, and the three choirs. The singers work as cleaners before they sing.

“By the words of the LORD” sets the king’s order under the law’s authority: Hezekiah commands what the LORD has already required. The fourteen named leaders gather their kinsmen, so the work is done by families.

The Kidron valley ran below the temple’s east side and was where Jerusalem’s refuse and unclean things were destroyed; Josiah later burned the Asherah there and scattered its dust “upon the graves of the children of the people” (2 Kings 23:6).

The work moves from outside inward: eight days for the courts, reaching the porch on the eighth, and eight days for the house itself. The sixteenth day of the first month is two days past the fourteenth, the date the law fixed for the Passover.

The report names the altar of burnt offering and the table of shewbread with their vessels, and says nothing of the lampstands or the incense altar, though their neglect was listed in verse 7. Perhaps the report is selective, or those had simply been left in place.

“Cast away” is zanah, to reject, the verb David used when he warned Solomon, “if thou forsake him, he will cast thee off for ever” (1 Chronicles 28:9). Ahaz had cast off the vessels; the Levites bring them back and set them before the altar.

Rising early is the mark of urgency in Hebrew narrative, as with Abraham on the morning he set out for Moriah (Genesis 22:3). The “rulers of the city” are its leading officials, who now climb to the temple behind their king.

Seven of each kind is a lavish, complete offering. The law asked for one young bull for a sin of the whole congregation (Leviticus 4:14) and one goat for a ruler (Leviticus 4:23). The three purposes, kingdom, sanctuary and Judah, cover the dynasty, the building and the people.

“Sprinkled” is zaraq, to dash or throw the blood against the altar’s sides, as for a burnt offering (Leviticus 1:5). The verse repeats the action for each kind of animal, bullocks, rams, lambs, as if counting them onto the altar one by one.

The goats are held back from the rest and brought out separately, because they are the sin offering. Leviticus 4:15 has the elders lay their hands on the bull offered for the congregation’s sin; here king and congregation together lay hands on the goats.

“Made reconciliation” is hitte, to purge of sin, from the same root as “sin offering”; “atonement” is kipper. Burnt offering and sin offering together are the pair offered for the whole people on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16:24). The reach of the rite is set by the king’s explicit order.

Only here does Scripture say the temple music was commanded through Gad and Nathan as well as David. Gad was the seer of the census plague (1 Chronicles 21:9), Nathan the prophet of the covenant (1 Chronicles 17). Cymbals, psalteries and harps are the three instruments of 1 Chronicles 15:16.

“The instruments of David” are those David made for praise (1 Chronicles 23:5). Amos 6:5 attacks idle revellers who “invent to themselves instruments of musick, like David”, so David’s reputation as an instrument maker was proverbial. The trumpets stay with the priests, as in Numbers 10:8.

“The song of the LORD” is shir YHWH, the phrase the exiles use in Psalm 137:4, “How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?” The music begins at the moment the fire takes the burnt offering.

A whole burnt offering of this size would take hours to burn, and the Hebrew uses participles, worshipping, singing, sounding, for continuous action. The congregation stays prostrate while the choir sings over them.

The king bows in the court, the opposite of Uzziah, who pushed past the priests into the house (26:16). “All that were present with him” includes the officials of verse 20. Worship at the end repeats the worship during.

Asaph is called “the seer”, a prophet in his own right. Twelve psalms bear his name (Psalms 50 and 73–83). “The words of David, and of Asaph” suggests that a collection of psalms under their names was already in use in Hezekiah’s day.

“Consecrated yourselves” is literally “filled your hand”, the ordination idiom for priests (Exodus 29:9). Thank offerings, todah, were peace offerings largely eaten by the worshippers. The burnt offerings, wholly burned, were left to those “of a free heart”, the willing.

Seventy bullocks, a hundred rams and two hundred lambs, all burnt entirely. The congregation’s gifts outnumber the king’s twenty-eight animals of verse 21 more than tenfold.

“Consecrated things” here means the holy offerings that were eaten, peace offerings for the feast. Six hundred oxen and three thousand sheep dwarf the burnt offerings of verse 32, which suggests a large public meal in the courts.

Leviticus 1:6 has the worshipper flay his own burnt offering, but by this period it was work for the clergy. Levites taking on priestly labour in an emergency will recur at Josiah’s Passover (35:11). The comparison with the priests’ readiness is the Book of 2 Chronicles’ own, and it is not flattering.

Drink offerings of wine went with each burnt offering (Numbers 15:1–10). “Set in order” is tikkon, from kun, the verb of preparing that failed Rehoboam in 12:14. The phrase marks the full restoration of the daily service.

“God had prepared the people” uses the same verb kun again: what Jehoshaphat’s people lacked in 20:33 is now God’s own work. “Suddenly” is pitom, the word for the unexpected, a surprise even to those who had worked for it.