ressed her was "his
ascent by which he went up unto the house of the Lord." This was "the
causeway of the going up," as it is called in the First Book of
Chronicles. We are told of a number of alterations, made in the Temple
furniture and buildings by king Ahaz, and it is said that "the covered
way for the sabbath that they had built in the house, and the king's
entry without, turned he unto (_margin_, round) the house of the Lord,
because of the king of Assyria." That is to say, Ahaz considered that
Solomon's staircase was too much exposed in the case of a siege, being
without the Temple enclosure. This probably necessitated the
construction of a new staircase, which would naturally be called the
staircase of Ahaz. That there was, in later times, such a staircase at
about this place we know from the route taken by the triumphal
procession at the time of the dedication of the wall of Jerusalem under
Nehemiah:--

"At the fountain gate, which was over against them, they went
up by the stairs of the City of David, at the going up of the
wall, above the house of David, even unto the water gate
eastward."

In this case there would be a special appropriateness in the sign that
was offered to Hezekiah. The sign that he would be so restored, as once
again to go up to the house of the Lord, was to be given him on the very
staircase by which he would go. He was now thirty-eight years old, and
had doubtless watched the shadow of the palace descend the staircase in
the afternoon, hundreds of times; quite possibly he had actually seen a
cloud make the shadow race forward. But the reverse he had never seen.
Once a step had passed into the shadow of the palace, it did not again
emerge until the next morning dawned.

The sign then was this: It was afternoon, probably approaching the time
of the evening prayer, and the court officials and palace attendants
were moving down the staircase in the shadow, when, as the sick king
watched them from above, the shadow of the palace was rolled back up the
staircase, and a flood of light poured down on ten of the broad steps
upon which the sun had already set. How this lighting of the ten steps
was brought about we are not told, nor is any clue given us on which we
can base a conjecture. But this return of light was a figure of what was
actually happening in the life of the king himself. He had already, as
it were, passed into the shadow that only deepens into night. As he s