In part one I said to study Hezekiah start with Ahaz his father.  So I followed my own advice and did it again. Ahaz was a “bad” king and the nagging thought of “why” has been with me for several days. In 2 Chronicles it says he starts his reign at the age of twenty and ruled for sixteen years; that makes him 36 when he died. (see my timeline) Hezekiah started ruling when he was 25 so a little math tells us that Ahaz started his family at 11 years old. Maybe now we can start seeing why Ahaz was a mess. His great-grandsons at the end of 2 Chronicles were active very early also. This sort of answered my next question, why was Hezekiah so different? Probably he was not raised around his father instead he may have been raised by his mother’s parents.  Ahab, the king associated with Elijah, did this with his children; it was good business and at least kept part of the family safe in case of attack.

To add a few thoughts about Hezekiah and some things he did and may have done. In Proverbs 25 the heading in my NIV Bible says that these proverbs were copied by Hezekiah’s men but had been written by Solomon. So that adds to his “good” of cleaning and reopening the Temple and helping revival by holding Passover for the first time in over 250 years.

These, as always, are almost impossible to prove but because of the content I think he may have written Psalm 102 and 116 during or after his illness. I give him Psalm 119 just for the scholarly work that went into its writing and the phrase of verse 67, “before I was afflicted.” Psalm 119 is acrostic, which means that a verse or section was written using each letter in their alphabet. Each one of the sections also has eight verses in it, the number of “new beginning.” Something that I noticed several years ago was that if you lined them up and read all of the similar verses they made sense that way also. Example read verse 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 72, 80, 88, 96, 104, 112, 120, 128, 136, 144, 152, 160, 168 and 176 together they make a continuous thought. So you can read the 22 sections or you can read it as 8 sections with 22 verses each. (see Psalm 119 rewritten) See the other Psalms I try to connect with people.

The picture is from http://christianimagesource.com/king_hezekiah_g337-king_hezekiah__image_4_p2265.html