We can now conjecturally reproduce the circumstances. It was afternoon, and the palace had already cast the upper steps of the staircase into shadow. The sick king, looking longingly towards the Temple, could see the lower steps still gleaming in the bright Judean sunshine. It was natural therefore for him to say, when the prophet Isaiah offered him his choice of a sign, "Shall the shadow go forward ten steps, or back ten steps?" that it was "a light thing for the shadow to go down ten steps: nay, but let the shadow return backward ten steps." It would be quite obvious to him that a small cloud, suitably placed, might throw ten additional steps into shadow.
It will be seen that we are left with several details undetermined. For the staircase, wherever constructed, was probably not meant to act as a sundial, and was only so used because it chanced to have some rough suitability for the purpose. In this case the shadow will probably have been thrown, not by a properly constructed gnomon, but by some building in the neighbourhood. And as we have no record of the direction of the staircase, its angle of inclination, its height, and the position of the buildings which might have cast a shadow upon it, we are without any indication to guide us.
When the queen of Sheba came to visit king Solomon, and saw all his magnificence, one of the things which specially impressed 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 sang himself after his recovery—
"I said, In the noontide of my days I shall go into the gates of the grave:
I am deprived of the residue of my years.
I said, I shall not see the Lord, even the Lord in the land of the living:
I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of the world."
But now the light had been brought back to him, and he could say—
"The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day:
The father to the children shall make known Thy truth.
The Lord is ready to save me:
Therefore we will sing my songs to the stringed instruments
All the days of our life in the house of the Lord."