And Hezekiah received the letter of the hand of the messengers, and read it: and Hezekiah went up into the house of the LORD, and spread it before the LORD.
Hezekiah received the letter ... and ... went up into the house of the Lord. Hezekiah, after reading it, hastened into the temple, spread it, in the child-like confidence of faith, before the Lord, as containing taunts deeply affecting the divine honour, and implored deliverance from this proud defier of God and man. The devout spirit of this prayer, the recognition of the Divine Being in the plenitude of His Majesty-so strikingly contrasted with the fancy of the Assyrians as to his merely local power; his acknowledgment of the conquests obtained over other lands, and of the destruction of their wooden idols, which, according to the Assyrian practice, were committed to the flames, because their tutelary deities were no gods; and the object for which he supplicated the divine interposition, that all the kingdoms of the earth might know that the Lord was the only God-this was an attitude worthy to be assumed by a pious theocratic king of the chosen people.