Hezekiah's Religious Reforms

The event

Hezekiah began his reign with immediate, decisive action: in the very first month of his first year he reopened the doors of the Temple, which Ahaz had shut, and had the priests and Levites consecrate themselves and remove every unclean thing his father had allowed inside. He then invited the whole nation — Judah and the remnant of Israel alike — to a great Passover celebration in Jerusalem, the first observed on this scale since the days of Solomon.

Hezekiah's reforms went further than any king since David: he removed the high places, smashed the sacred pillars, cut down the Asherah poles, and even destroyed the bronze serpent Moses had made in the wilderness, because the people had begun burning incense to it as an idol. Scripture's verdict is emphatic: "He trusted in the LORD, the God of Israel, so that after him there was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor among those who were before him."

These reforms weren't cosmetic housekeeping — they were a wholesale return to covenant faithfulness after Ahaz's compromises, and they set the spiritual foundation Judah would need for the crisis that was about to arrive from Assyria.

Dating

Hezekiah began his reforms in his first year (2 Chronicles 29:3); on Thiele's chronology his sole reign began 716/715 BC, placing the reforms c. 715 onward. A well-known difficulty: 2 Kings 18:13 calls Sennacherib's 701 BC campaign Hezekiah's '14th year,' which some scholars take to date his accession to 727/726 BC (putting the reforms in the mid-720s). The standard evangelical resolution (McFall) posits a coregency with Ahaz from 729 BC, with the '14th year' counted from the 715 sole reign.

Scripture references

• 2 Kings 18:1-8
• 2 Chronicles 29-31