The king of Assyria attacked and defeated forty-six fortified cities of Judah. His brutal advance drove Hezekiah and his small army into the walls of Jerusalem.
Finally, while the Assyrian king himself remained encamped at Libnah, he sent the supreme commander of the empire’s armies to Jerusalem, demanding surrender.
The commander took a stand outside the city gates and cried in the language of Judah: “Has any god of any nation ever delivered his land from the hand of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Tyre and Ashkelon and Ekron? Hezekiah! King Hezekiah! Did the God of Israel save that kingdom? Where are those whom Assyria destroyed a generation ago?”
Hezekiah heard the words. He heard the threat and the scorn both. It was as if Asshur like a bull were stamping the ground outside the city and blasting the sky with his nostrils.
But the king had chosen his course, and now he did not depart from it: he covered himself in the sackcloth of repentance and went into the temple of the Lord, where he spoke softly with the old prophet, Isaiah—these two men together in the low light of ten lamps. There was no other counsel that the king sought except Isaiah’s.
“Ah, prophet, Assyria’s words have mocked the living God,” said the tall king, stooped by age and his heavy meditations. “But you yourself said long ago that God would destroy the pride of that people. Old friend, lift up your prayer for us now.”
Then the king himself turned toward the Debir, the thick darkness within the Holiest Place, and raised his arms and prayed: “O Lord God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, you alone are God of all the kingdoms of the earth: Hear the words which Assyria has uttered, mocking you. Truly, the king of Assyria has laid waste the nations and cast their gods into the fire. But those were no gods at all. They were the work of human hands, wood and stone. Therefore, O Lord our God, come and save us now, so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you, O Lord, are God alone!”
Isaiah, standing bolt upright beside the king, but shorter than he, now spoke. He did not touch the king. Neither man moved. Both continued to face the seat of God, and both kept their voices low, whispering.
“The Lord has heard your prayer,” Isaiah said. “And the Lord has a word for Assyria:
Against whom have you raised your haughty voice? Against the Holy One of Israel! Have you not heard that it was I who planned your triumphs long ago? But I know your sitting down and your going out and your coming in. And because you have raged against me, I will put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth, and I will turn you back the way you came.”
That same night, while Hezekiah and the old prophet were praying in the temple of God, the king of Assyria suddenly struck camp at Lachish and began to ride at breakneck speeds away. Rumors had come to him of rebellion in his court, and a violent spirit of anxiety had entered his soul. He didn’t even wait to tell his supreme commander of the departure.
Early the following morning Hezekiah’s servants found him in the temple and immediately began to shout and chatter. They were amazed by what they had seen.
“My Lord, a hundred and eighty-five thousand troops!” they yelled, their poor eyes gaping.
“The armies around Jerusalem,” they said, “the armies made no noises all night long! At sunlight they still lay sleeping. Not a soldier had awakened.
“Then a little child slipped out of the gates and touched a man on his face and ran back to tell us that he was cold. They weren’t sleeping! They were dead!
“My lord, there are a hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrians lying dead at our door!”
TWENTY-TWO
Jeremiah
I
AFTER THE DEATH of Hezekiah, his son Manasseh rose to the throne and ruled Judah for a long time, forty-five years, during which the kingdom experienced peace.
But this king was not like his father.
A politic, expedient man, Manasseh never withheld tribute from Assyria. All his life he remained an obedient vassal, sending materials for construction in the capital city, Nineveh—even assisting the armies of Assyria against Egypt. Under his reign, Judah enjoyed the protection of the Assyrian bull. Jerusalem sat peacefully upon her hills.
But Manasseh’s obedience gave more than money away, and though the swords of Assyria never invaded Jerusalem, the spirit did—and the worship, and the gods, and the altars of that pagan nation.
Manasseh paid homage to the astral deities of his overlord. He erected their altars in the temple itself. He repudiated the reforms of his father, allowing pagan cults to flourish throughout the land. The sacred prostitutes of Ba’al reappeared. Farmers again sought to guarantee good crops by means of fertility rituals—even within the precincts of the temple which Solomon dedicated to the Lord nearly three hundred years ago. Diviners and magicians like those in Assyria now practiced in Jerusalem—beloved of the nobles there.
And as the voice of the Lord was ignored in the land, so was his covenant. So were his laws.
Woe, said the Lord, but no one heard:
Woe to her that is rebellious and defiled:
her officials are roaring lions;
her judges are evening wolves
who leave nothing till morning.
Her prophets are wanton,
her priests profane the sacred—
No one heard the word of the Lord because prophecy was gagged in Judah, and those who protested were punished. Their blood enriched the soil. A rumor in Judah said that the king had sawed Isaiah to death with a wooden saw.
But Manasseh had marched with Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria. He had seen the wild bull, headstrong and vehement, shatter the defenses of Egypt and drive his armies south to Memphis, which he conquered. Ashurbanipal imposed upon the northern reaches of Egypt, the rich delta of the Nile, an absolute Assyrian authority. Even so, it was not enough. The king of little Judah next watched the king of the cruel empire sweep yet farther south to Thebes. The splendid city of ancient Egypt, that white monument on the upper Nile, more than two thousand years old: Ashurbanipal burned it. He took her princes captive. He carried them back to Nineveh, and he executed them.
King Manasseh was a realistic, politic man. He saved the stones of his kingdom from destruction. But not the souls.
II
ASHURBANIPAL EXPANDED THE Assyrian empire to its greatest limits east and north and west. He was also its last strong king. There was no strength in Assyria after him.
IN THE YEAR that Ashurbanipal died, a young Judean heard the voice of the Lord speaking directly to him:
Before I formed you in the womb,
I knew you.
Even before your mother bore you,
I consecrated you
and appointed you a prophet
to the nations!
THE YOUNG MAN was barely twenty years old. He lived in the small town of Anathoth, about two miles north of Jerusalem. His father, Hilkiah, was a priest. His family had been priests in Anathoth for more than two hundred years.
At dusk one day Hilkiah called his son into his private room and handed him the white linen he’d been wearing that day while performing duties at the temple in Jerusalem.
“Take it to your mother,” Hilkiah said.
The garment was soaked with blood. A group of shepherds from Hebron had offered forty beasts upon the high altar. Hilkiah had officiated. Now he was hot and tired.
“Tell your mother I’ll need the robe again tomorrow. She has to wash it tonight.”
The young man turned and went out into the tiny courtyard of their house. The sun had set. The patch of sky above him glowed deep violet, as translucent as an amethyst.
Hilkiah called behind him, “Wait a minute! I forgot to show you a tear in the hem—”
The young man froze, his eyes wide with listening. “Jeremiah, come here! A bull kicked free and ripped the hem of my tunic. I want your mother to mend—”
But his son didn’t move. Whatever he was hearing—it was no human voice. The linen h
ad slipped from his fingers. He was raising his right hand, palm outward, to the open air.
“Jeremiah!” Down the center of the young man’s forehead a thick vein stood out, swollen to bursting. All at once he looked to heaven and shouted, “Ah, Lord God! I’m only a child! I don’t know how to speak!”
“What?” Hilkiah called. “What did you say?”
Though he was young, Jeremiah had a lean, wasted body, shoulders so bony they made his skull seem huge and his eyes enormous. Now he covered those eyes with the heels of his hands, and sank to his knees on the bloody linen. His thin chest heaved in silent spasms. He was fighting for air. His eyes rolled toward heaven with a wild appeal. He could not breathe—
“What’s the matter?” Hilkiah was standing in the doorway. “Jeremiah, what’s wrong with you?”
The older man took a step forward—when suddenly his son expelled a great rush of air and slumped to his back on the linen garment, breathing heavily. Hilkiah knelt beside him.
In a little while Jeremiah turned his face to Hilkiah and smiled, bewildered and apologetic. “Father,” he whispered, “the Lord put his hand upon my mouth. He closed it and he opened it again.”
Hilkiah frowned. He began to brush back strands of hair from his son’s wet forehead. “You’re as tired as I am,” he said, “with less strength to stand it.”
Jeremiah blinked his enormous eyes and whispered, “The Lord spoke to me. He said that he has consecrated me a prophet, and that I must speak whatever he commands me.”
Hilkiah dropped his eyes, frowning. He saw the linen garment on the ground and reached for it and pulled, but Jeremiah was lying on it. “I’ll tell you his words,” said Jeremiah, seeking his father’s glance.
But Hilkiah said, “Get up. You’re rubbing my vestment in the dirt.” “Father, these are his words.” Jeremiah sat up. “The Lord said,
Lo, I have put my words in your mouth,
words like fire for people of wood:
This day I place you over the nations,
to tear up, to tear down,
to destroy, to destroy,
in order to build and to plant—”
“Stop it! Stop it! Get up!” Hilkiah the priest was pulling at the linen under his son’s body. “Don’t you know what you’re doing? Stop it!” He took the hem in both hands and gave such a tremendous yank that the little rip opened and the robe tore in two.
“Look at this! Look at this!” Hilkiah cried. He threw the bloody cloth down at Jeremiah, then stomped back into his room. It was very dark now. But no one had yet begun to light the lanterns of the household.
ONCE WHEN JEREMIAH was still a boy, five years old, his father took him to Jerusalem. At noon they happened to be standing in the Potsherd Gate on the southeast side of the city when an old man came and said that King Manasseh had just died.
Jeremiah never forgot the moment. The old man spat and pointed through the gate to a deep valley outside the city wall. “There,” he croaked. He was shaking with anger. “Right down there, in the valley of the Son of Hinnom, the king burned his children on wooden pyres. He sacrificed them. He said it was a sacrifice. It made a sick sweet odor, like the smoke of rotting fruit.”
Suddenly the old man grabbed Hilkiah by the shoulders. “Priest,” he begged, “must I mourn him? Manasseh is dead! But how can we mourn the death of such a king?”
THE DAY AFTER the Lord had called to him, Jeremiah stepped into the courtyard where his mother was boiling water in a clay cooking pot. “Jeremiah?” she said.
“What, mother?”
She said, “Would you take the pot from the coals and set it over by the oven?” Then she rose up and went out into the street. The clay pot had two handles with which it might be carried, even heavy and hot. Just as Jeremiah reached for them, the word of the Lord came, saying, Jeremiah, what do you see?
He said, “I see a boiling pot, facing away from the north.”
The Lord said, Out of the north evil shall break forth against this land. I am calling the kingdoms of the north to set their thrones against Jerusalem and all the cities of Judah. I will utter judgments for all their wickedness in forsaking me.
But you, Jeremiah, gird up your loins and tell them what I command you. Do not be dismayed by them. Behold, I make you an iron pillar against the whole land. They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail, for I am with you to deliver you!
“Jeremiah!” his mother was crying. “Jeremiah! I have always kept that pot purified! Why are you defiling it?”
The young man looked down and saw that he had tipped the big pot over, spilling the water, dousing the coals, making a mud of the ground between the flagstones.
AFTER MANASSEH DIED, his son Amon was elevated to the throne; but the new king changed nothing of his father’s policies, whether inside the kingdom or outside of it. He continued to pay tribute to Assyria and to honor its gods. Indeed, all the gods of Canaan and those beyond the river were welcomed and worshiped in Judah.
Then, at the end of a bare two years, King Amon was assassinated. An old man appeared in the windows of the king’s palace, crying, “He is dead! The wicked son of a wicked king is dead! Wash out the temple now!”
But even while the old man was croaking victory from the upper window, three landowners rushed into the palace and came upon him from behind. They slashed his throat and threw his body down to the pavement between the palace and the temple gate. In less than a week these landowners and others like them crowned Amon’s eight-year-old son the king of Judah. The boy’s name was Josiah. And while he was yet a boy, he was docile and watchful. Others made decisions for him.
But during the twelfth year of his reign, Josiah no longer thought of himself as a boy. He had seen enough of the nations to make decisions for himself, and he began to act like a king. In that year Josiah marched an army north to Samaria and then to Megiddo, cities that once had belonged to old Israel. He entered them, declared them to be under his control, and marched south along the coast of the Great Sea, annexing territory and building a fortress south of Joppa, west of Jerusalem.
Then in the thirteenth year of his reign, when Josiah was twenty-one years old, two signal events occurred: Ashurbanipal died in Nineveh; and, after sixty years of divine silence, there appeared in Jerusalem a prophet of the Lord.
He was a young man, though his body was cadaverous and his skull so domed that he looked ravaged. He had a coarse thicket of hair, and his voice was a whining reed which no one could shut out. Suddenly this man was standing in the Potsherd Gate, facing into Jerusalem, delivering an oracle of the Lord in a nasal wail:
What wrong did your fathers find in me
that they went so far from me?
I brought you to a plentiful land, to
enjoy its fruits,
but when you came you defiled my land,
and made my heritage an abomination!
The people of Jerusalem said, “Who is this? What does he know about heritage and survival and history and reality?”
Yet even while they murmured against him they gathered in the gate and listened. He was passionate. He was dramatic and somewhat frightening. He leaped about while he spoke, sometimes strutting, sometimes bending double with pain.
Now he whirled away from the city and pointed down to the valley below, crying:
For the sons of Judah have done evil in my sight. They have set their abominations in my holy house. They have built a high place in the valley of the Son of Hinnom, there! There! In that place they have burned their sons and their daughters with fire. Therefore, the days are coming, when it will no longer be called the valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the valley of Slaughter! For they will bury bodies in that valley because there shall be no room elsewhere! The dead bodies of this people will be food for the birds and the beasts. In the cities of Judah I will silence the voice of mirth and the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride; for the land shall become a waste.
The prophet paused. He turned
and looked at the audience in the gate. Some had covered their ears against his voice; others seemed genuinely shaken; others merely shrugged.
“Who is this ranter?” said an official in the king’s service. This was Shaphan, the royal secretary. “Who are his people?”
Certain men from Anathoth heard him and answered. “His name is Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah the priest.”
“I know Hilkiah,” Shaphan said. “A dependable man. It never occurred to me that he would lose control in his own house!”
“No, sir! It’s not his fault.”
“But you said this is his son.”
“Yes, his youngest. A strange boy. No one has ever been able to teach him obedience.”
“Jeremiah. Then he has always been like this?”
“Ever since he was a boy, he brooded. He wouldn’t talk for days, then he’d get up in the courtyard and scream that the almond tree had told him secrets. Until this year he was just an embarrassment. Now he’s angry. Now he screams in the streets of Jerusalem.”
“And that bothers you.”
“Yes, it bothers us! He says he’s a prophet! Who made him a prophet?”
Shaphan the royal secretary studied the men from Anathoth. “Why are you so passionate about this Jeremiah?” he said.
“If he keeps prophesying like this,” they said, “we will kill him with our own hands.”
“I believe you mean it,” said Shaphan. “But who are you? How do you know this fellow so well?”
The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel Page 42
