The life of St Hezekiah of Judah
Where his father had failed, Hezekiah set himself from the start to rule in a way pleasing to God, reopening and restoring the Temple of Solomon, which had been neglected and left in disrepair, and working systematically to strip the kingdom of the false worship that had taken root there, tearing down the shrines built on the high places, breaking the sacred pillars raised to other gods, and cutting down the wooden images used in their worship.
In one especially telling act, he went further still and destroyed the bronze serpent that Moses himself had made centuries earlier in the wilderness, because by Hezekiah's time the people had begun offering it incense as though it were a god in its own right rather than remembering it for the sign it had once been. Scripture counts him, after David, among the most faithful kings ever to rule in Judah, crediting his reforms with restoring true worship to a kingdom that had drifted far from it under his predecessors. He also strengthened Jerusalem's defenses and directed the digging of a tunnel to bring water from the Gihon spring safely inside the city walls. He died of illness after a long reign, remembered as a king whose devotion reshaped the religious life of his people.
