While thirty years passed thus peacefully away so far as foreign relations were concerned, internal changes of all the greater importance were taking place.  Hezekiah ben Ahaz undertook for the first time a thoroughgoing reformation in the cultus of Jehovah.  “He removed the high places, and brake the pillars, and cut down the Ashera, and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made;” so we are told in 2Kings xviii. 4, with a mixture of the general and the special that does not inspire much confidence.  For, e.g., the “high places” which Solomon had raised on the Mount of Olives were not removed by Hezekiah, although they stood quite close to Jerusalem, and moreover were consecrated to foreign deities.  But in every respect there must have been a wide difference between the objects and results of the reformations of Hezekiah and Josiah.  Undoubtedly Hezekiah undertook his reforms in worship under the influence of Isaiah.  Following in the footsteps of Hosea, who had been the first to take and to express offence at the use of images in the worship of Jehovah, this prophet, utilising the impression which the destruction of Samaria had produced in Jerusalem (Isaiah xvii., cf.  Jeremiah iii.), strove to the utmost against the adoration of the work of men’s hands in the holy places, against the Asheras and pillars (sun-pillars), and above all against the ephods, i.e., the idols of silver and gold, of which the land was full.  But against the high places in and by themselves, against the multiplicity of the altars of Jehovah, he made no protest. “( In the Messianic time) ye shall loathe and cast away as an unclean thing your graven images with silver coverings and your molten images overlaid with gold,” he says (xxx. 22); and the inference is that he contemplated the purification of the high places from superstitious excesses, but by no means their abolition.  To this one object 1

******************************** 1.  That is, to the abolition of the images.  Jeremiah’s polemic is directed no longer against the images, but against wood and stone, i.e, Asheras and pillars.  The date of the reformation under Hezekiah is uncertain; perhaps it ought to be placed after Sennacherib’s withdrawal from Jerusalem. ********************************

Hezekiah’s reformation seems to have confined itself,—­an object of much greater primary importance than the destruction of the altars themselves.  Their destruction was a measure which arose simply out of despair of the possibility of cleansing them.

Sargon, king of Assyria, was succeeded in 705 by Sennacherib.  The opportunity was seized by Merodach Baladan of Babylon to secure his independence; and by means of an embassy he urged Hezekiah also to throw off the yoke.  The proposal was adopted, and the king of Judah was joined by other petty kingdoms, especially some of the Philistine towns.  Relations with Egypt were established to secure its support in case of need.  Sennacherib’s more immediate and pressing business in Babylon enabled Palestine to gain some time; but the issue of that revolt made self-deception impossible as to the probable result of the other movement.