1. Complication and Revival:
The sublime and mature utterances of Isaiah alone, falling in this time, are sufficient evidence that in Hezekiah's age, Israel reached its golden literary prime. Among the idealists and thinkers throughout the nation a new spiritual vigor and insight were awake. Of their fellowship was the king himself, who emulated the activity of his predecessor Solomon as patron of piety and letters. The compilation of the later Solomonic section of the Proverbs (Pr 25:1-28 through Pr 29:1-27), attributed to the "men of Hezekiah," indicates the value attached to the accumulations of the so-called Wisdom literature; and it is fair to assume that these men of Hezekiah did not stop with compiling, but stamped upon the body of Proverbs as a whole that sense of it as a philosophy of life which it henceforth bears, and perhaps added the introductory section, Pr 1:1-33 through Pr 9:1-18. Nor would a king so zealous for the organization and enrichment of the temple-worship (compare Isa 38:20) be indifferent to its body of sacred song. It seems certain that his was, in all the nation's history, the greatest single agency in compiling and adapting the older Davidic Psalms, and in the composition of new ones. Perhaps this union of collecting and creative work in psalmody is referred to in the mention of "the words of David, and of Asaph the seer" (2Ch 29:30). To Hezekiah himself is attributed one "writing" which is virtually a psalm, Isa 38:20. The custom through all the history of hymnology (in our own day also) of adapting older compositions to new liturgical uses makes uncertain the identification of psalms belonging specifically to this period; still, many psalms of books ii and iii, and especially those ascribed to Asaph and the sons of Korah, seem a close reflection of the spirit of the times. An interesting theory recently advanced (see THIRTLE , Old Testament Problems) that the fifteen Songs of the Steps ("Degrees" or "Ascents," Ps 120:1-7 through Ps 134:1-3) are a memorial of Hezekiah's fifteen added years, when as a sign the shadow went backward on the steps of Ahaz (2Ki 20:8-11), seems to reveal many remarkable echoes of that eventful time. Nor does it seem unlikely that with this first extensive collection of psalms the titles began to be added.
2. Of More Creative Strain:
This literary activity of Hezekiah's time, though concerned largely with collecting and reviving the treasures of older literature, was pursued not in the cold scribal spirit, but in a fervid creative way. This may be realized in two of the psalms which the present writer ascribes to this period. Ps 49:1-20, a psalm of the sons of Korah, is concerned to make an essential tenet of Wisdom viable in song (compare Ps 49:3-4), as if one of the "men of Hezekiah" who is busy with the Solomonic counsels would popularize the spirit of his findings. Ps 78:1-72 in like manner, a Maschil of Asaph, is concerned to make the noble histories of old viable in song (Ps 78:2), especially the wilderness history when Israel received the law and beheld Yahweh's wonders, and down to the time when Ephraim was rejected and Judah, in the person of David, was chosen to the leadership in Israel.
Such a didactic poem would not stand solitary in a period so instructed. As in Wisdom and psalmody, so in the domain of law and its attendant history, the literary activity was vigorous. This age of Hezekiah seems the likeliest time for putting into literary idiom that "book of the law" found later in the Temple (2Ki 22:1-20); which book Josiah's reforms, carried out according to its commands, prove to have been our Book of Deuteronomy. This is not the place to discuss the Deuteronomic problem (see under JOSIAH); it is fair to note here, however, that as compared with the austere statement of the Mosaic statutes elsewhere, this book has a literary art and coloring which seem to stamp its style as that of a later age than Moses', though its substance is Mosaic; and this age of Hezekiah seems the likeliest time to put its rewriting and adaptation. Nor did the new spirit of literary creation feed itself entirely on the past. The king's chastening experience of illness and trial, with the steadfast faith that upbore and survived it, must have been fruitful of new ideas, especially of that tremendous conception, now just entering into thought, of the ministry of suffering. Time, of course, must be allowed for the ripening of an idea so full of involvement; and it is long before its sacrificial and atoning values come to light in such utterances as Isa 53:1-12. But such psalms as Ps 49:1-20 and Ps 73:1-28, not to mention Hezekiah's own psalm (Isa 38:1-22), show that the problem was a living one; it was working, moreover, in connection with the growing Wisdom philosophy, toward the composition of the Book of Job, which in a masterly way both subjects the current Wisdom motives to a searching test and vindicates the intrinsic integrity of the patriarch in a discipline of most extreme trial. The life of a king whose experience had some share in clarifying the ideas of such a book was not lived in vain.
John Franklin Genung