Hezekiah's Illness and the Siloam Tunnel

"Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live." Hezekiah turns his face to the wall: "Remember now how I have walked before thee in truth and with a perfect heart." Before Isaiah has left the middle court: "I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears: behold, I will heal thee… And I will add unto thy days fifteen years." "Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered."

"What shall be the sign?" "Shall the shadow go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?" "Let the shadow return backward ten degrees." "And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the LORD: and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz."

Berodach-baladan (Merodach-baladan) son of Baladan, king of Babylon, sends letters and a present. Hezekiah shows the envoys "all the house of his precious things… there was nothing in his house, nor in all his dominion, that Hezekiah shewed them not." Isaiah: "Behold, the days come, that all that is in thine house… shall be carried into Babylon: nothing shall be left." "Good is the word of the LORD… Is it not good, if peace and truth be in my days?" "And how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?"

The Siloam tunnel and inscription

A tunnel 533 m long winds through the rock from the Gihon spring to the Siloam pool. An inscription found inside it in 1880 (now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums) describes the last moments of cutting: "while there were still three cubits to be cut, the voice of a man calling to his fellow… the quarrymen struck, each toward his fellow, axe against axe, and the water flowed from the spring to the pool, 1,200 cubits." The inscription names no king. Its script fits the late 8th or early 7th century BC, and most scholars connect the tunnel with Hezekiah (20:20; 2 Chronicles 32:30). Some radiocarbon and paleographic studies have suggested other dates; the identification is strong but inferred.

The stairway of Ahaz

Hebrew ma'alot means steps or degrees. It may have been a staircase whose shadow marked the time, or a sundial. The Vulgate says "horologium." The text presents a sign; no astronomical explanation has been confirmed, and claims of a lost day or of spacecraft have no evidence.

Merodach-baladan

Marduk-apla-iddina II was a Chaldean who seized Babylon twice (721–710 and 703 BC) against Assyria. An embassy seeking Judah as an ally fits his anti-Assyrian policy, though no Babylonian text records it.