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stricken, hastened thence. So the king, whose heart had been lifted up to the utter
forgetfulness of the help hitherto given him by Jehovah until he dared the uttermost
sacrilege, descended living into the grave in the very moment of his greatest pride. Till
death released him he was a leper, dwelling outside the city, separated - "in a house of
sickness " - or, as others have rendered the expression, with perhaps greater probability,
in "a house of separation" (comp. Leviticus 13:46; Numbers 5:2; 2 Kings 7:3) Cut off
from access to the house of the Lord, where he had impiously sought to command, and
debarred from all intercourse with men, the kingdom was administered by Jotham, his
son - for how long a period before the death of Uzziah it is impossible to determine. His
punishment followed him even into the grave. For, although he was "buried with his
fathers," it was "in the field of the burial which belonged to the kings," probably the
burying ground of the members of the royal family; he was not laid in the sepulcher
where the kings of Judah rested; "for they said, He is a leper."*
- The view here taken is that of Rashi and other Rabbinical commentators.
Of the record of his deeds by Isaiah, to which the sacred text refers (2 Chronicles 26:2),
no portion has been preserved. Although the activity of the prophet began during the
reign of Uzziah (Isaiah 1:1; 6:1), yet, considering that it extended into that of Hezekiah,
Isaiah must have been still young,* when the leprous king died. Jewish legend has fabled
much about the stroke that descended on the sacrilegious king. In his clumsy manner of
attempting to account for the directly Divine by natural causes, Josephus** connects the
sudden leprosy of the king with that earthquake (Amos 1:1) of which the terrible memory
so lingered in the popular memory as almost to form an era in their history (Zechariah
14:4, 5).
- Some critics have suggested that he was then only about twenty years of age.
** Ant. 9. 10, 4.
In that earthquake, which Josephus describes, he tells us: "a rent was made in the Temple,
and the bright rays of the sun shone through it, and fell upon the king's face, insomuch
that the leprosy seized upon him immediately." Other Jewish writers strangely identify
the death of Uzziah referred to in Isaiah 6:1, with the living death of his leprosy, and the
earthquake with the solemn scene there pictured. Yet this application of theirs is certainly
true when they rank Uzziah with those "who attained not what they sought, and from
whom was taken that which they had" (Ber. R. 20).
(^)