Lynn Austin. Song of Redemption. Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 2005.
Song of Redemption is the second novel in Lynn Austin’s Chronicles of the Kings
series. The first three books of the series focus on the righteous
biblical King Hezekiah, who ruled Judah during the eighth century
B.C.E. The last two books are about Hezekiah’s son and successor, the
wicked King Manasseh. See here for my review of the first book of this series, Gods and Kings.
All of Lynn Austin’s books that I have read so far, and this includes her Restoration Chronicles
about post-exilic Israel, deal in some way with the struggle to have
faith, and with people who have different spiritual beliefs. Song of Redemption is no different. And yet, I have to say that Song of Redemption is my favorite of Lynn Austin’s books so far because of how it addresses these issues.
There is Shebna, King Hezekiah’s right hand man, Hezekiah’s tutor
when Hezekiah was a child, an Egyptian and an atheist. Shebna has
little problem supporting Hezekiah’s religious reforms of eliminating
idolatry, encouraging the nation to obey the Torah, and centralizing
worship in Jerusalem. Shebna acknowledges that the Torah has good
values (even though he believes that it has quite a bit of exaggeration
and myth), and he thinks that Hezekiah’s reforms are elevating the
morale of the nation. But Shebna only supports the reforms when they
demonstrate concrete and practical benefit, and, not surprisingly, he is
unwilling to take leaps of faith. When King Hezekiah decides to heed
the prophet Isaiah’s advice on how to deal with the Assyrian invaders by
sitting back and trusting God, Shebna thinks Hezekiah is committing
national suicide! Overall, however, Shebna is a loyal and trustworthy
adviser. He can be blackmailed on account of things that happened in
the first book, and he wavers a bit in his loyalty, but he is a fairly
decent person.
There is Jerimoth, a Northern Israelite. The Assyrians come into his
town, slaughter or maim inhabitants, and capture Jerimoth’s daughter,
Jerusha. When Hezekiah sends a messenger to the north to invite
Northern Israelites to come to Jerusalem and keep the religious
festivals, Jerimoth decides to go, thinking this could influence God to
bring his daughter back to him. In Jerusalem, Jerimoth makes friends
with Hilkiah and Hilkiah’s son, Eliakim, who were in the first book.
Hilkiah encourages Jerimoth to hold on to his faith that God will return
Jerimoth’s daughter to him, but Eliakim thinks that his father is wrong
to encourage Hilkiah in this way: did not Hilkiah pray for his wife and
Eliakim’s mother, and yet she still died? In a beautiful passage,
Hilkiah and Eliakim are arguing about this after Jerimoth had gone to
bed, and Jerimoth comes out and interrupts them. Jerimoth says that it
is his choice to have faith, even if what he is believing does not
appear likely, by human standards.
There is Hephzibah, the wife of Hezekiah. In the first book, she was
discouraged because Hezekiah was ignoring her, preferring his
concubines to her. Hezekiah’s reason was that Hephzibah was given to
him as a result of some political deal his father had made, and that
alienated him from her. When Hezekiah is convicted by the Torah that he
should only have one wife, he puts away his concubines and becomes
committed to Hephzibah alone, and he falls in love with her. Hephzibah
does not particularly care for the Torah, however, and for
understandable reasons. When she loses her baby, she wants for Hezekiah
to hold her and to comfort her, but Hezekiah does not do so because
that would violate the Torah’s purity laws surrounding childbirth. When
Hezekiah tells her that she needs to offer a sin offering after a
certain period of time to be purified, she refuses because she does not
believe that she sinned in childbirth. As the years go by and she does
not give Hezekiah an heir, she is tempted to seek help from the goddess
Asherah. Her mother encourages her in this, saying that she never
bought into all those rules of the Torah, and that she thought that
Asherah was a more suitable deity for women because Asherah understood
women’s issues.
The book has technical details, since it is partly about Hezekiah’s
attempts to build a water tunnel so that Jerusalem could have water
during a potential siege by the Assyrians. What is odd is that the
prophet Isaiah chastises him for relying on the tunnel when he should be
trusting in God, and, even after Hezekiah agrees with Isaiah, Hezekiah
still supports Eliakim’s attempts to finish the tunnel.
The end of the book was a bit anticlimactic: the vicious Assyrians
suddenly leave and head back to Nineveh, without attacking Jerusalem,
and that convinces Shebna that there might be something to Hezekiah’s
God. I wondered if this was how Lynn Austin was depicting the dramatic
story in the Bible about the Assyrians taunting Jerusalem, Hezekiah
pouring his heart out to God, and an angel slaughtering the Assyrians,
and, if so, why she would present that in such a terse, anticlimactic
manner. Did she have a page limit? It looks, though, as if the next
book of the series will be about that dramatic story. I did not
entirely mind Austin presenting the Assyrians leaving and going back to
Nineveh in a low-key (yet surprising) manner, however, for that allowed
the focus to be on Shebna’s religious journey.