2 Kings 20:11 - Exposition

And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord. Though the sign had been promised, Isaiah regarded his own intercessional prayer as not out of place, and "cried unto the Lord," i.e. prayed with energy, that the king's wish might be accomplished. So, though we have God's promise to care for us, and keep us from want ( Matthew 6:25-30 ), yet we must daily beseech him to "give us this day our daily bread." And he brought the shadow ten degrees backward. How this was done, we are not told, and can therefore only conjecture. The earlier commentators imagined that the revolution of the earth upon its axis was actually reversed for a time; but this idea is now generally rejected. It is clear from 2 Chronicles 32:31 that the phenomenon, whatever may have been its cause, was local, "done in the land" of Judah, and not visible elsewhere. Some moderns have suggested an earthquake affecting the gnomon; some a trick on the part of Isaiah; ethers, and the generality, a very abnormal refraction of the sun's rays. An observed instance of something similar, which took place at Metz, in Lotheringia, in the year 1703, is on record. Two scientists, Professor Seyffarth and Mr. J. W. Bosanquet, think that the phenomenon was due to an eclipse, in which the upper limb of the sun was obscured temporarily. In such a case a slight recession of the shadow would certainly take place; but it would scarcely be such as to attract attention from any one but a scientific observer. On the whole, the most probable cause would seem to be refraction, which is accepted by Keil, Bahr, and Kay. By which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz ; literally, on the steps of Ahaz . Sundials were invented by the Babylonians (Herod; 2:109), and were no doubt in use at Babylon long before the time of Hezekiah. They were of various kinds, and in some of them the gnomon was made to cast its shadow upon steps. There are still two dials in India—one at Benares, known as the Manmandir, and the other at Delhi—where this is the case.