Uzziah and Jotham: Towers, an Earthquake, and a Threshold Not Crossed

Uzziah (also called Azariah) reigned fifty-two years. As long as he sought God he prospered: he fought the Philistines and the Arabs, built towers in Jerusalem and in the wilderness, hewed cisterns, kept much cattle, farmers and vinedressers — "for he loved the soil." The army was organised in divisions, and on the towers and corners he set "engines, cunningly devised, to shoot arrows and great stones." His name spread far.

And then it is said: "when he grew strong, his heart grew proud to his own ruin." He went into the Temple to burn incense on the altar of incense. Azariah the priest followed him in with eighty priests, men of courage, and stood against the king: it is not for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the LORD, but for the priests, the sons of Aaron; go out of the sanctuary. The king raged with the censer in his hand — and in that moment tzaraat broke out on his forehead. The priests thrust him out, and he hurried out himself. Until the day of his death he lived in a separate house, cut off from the House of the LORD, while his son governed the land.

To those same years belongs an earthquake long remembered: Amos dates his prophecy "two years before the earthquake," and Zechariah, two and a half centuries later, still says: "you shall flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of Uzziah."

Jotham reigned sixteen years and did what was right before the LORD — "only he did not enter the Temple of the LORD." One sentence, and it contains his whole biography: the son had seen how pride ends, and kept to the threshold. He rebuilt the upper gate of the Temple, strengthened the wall of Ophel, built towns in the hill country and forts in the woods, defeated the Ammonites and took tribute from them in silver, wheat and barley.