Put Your House in Order

In those days was Hezekiah sick unto death. And the prophet Isaiah the son of Amoz came to him, and said unto him, Thus saith the Lord, Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live.

-- II Kings 20: 1 (KJV)

The prophet Isaiah can sure pack a lot of quintessentially biblical phrasing into one verse. Here the Judean king Hezekiah is "sick unto death," so Isaiah advises him to "Set thine house in order."

The idea isn't novel to Isaiah -- we've been told in Second Samuel that Ahitophel "put his household in order" before hanging himself. But Isaiah's hortatory version is the better remembered -- "put your house in order" is almost always a piece of advice, not a description. What Isaiah means, roughly, is "make sure your property will be properly disposed of when you die." What we mean today is more figurative: "your life is a mess, so do something about it."

As it turns out, the Lord hears Hezekiah weeping and wailing and allows him another fifteen years to live, mostly so that he can continue resisting Assyrian assaults on Jerusalem. Granted this respite, Hezekiah foolishly neglects to put his house in order. So, as Isaiah correctly foresees, the Babylonians and not Hezekiah's sons will inherit the king's treasures. Worse, those sons "shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon" (II Kings 20: 18). Rather harsh punishment for bad household management, you'd think.

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!