2 Chronicles26chapter 26

This is the most technically detailed reign in Chronicles. He rebuilt Eloth on the Gulf of Aqaba, reopening the southern sea trade; broke down the walls of Gath, Jabneh, and Ashdod on the Philistine plain; and built towns in Philistine territory. Ammon paid tribute, and his name spread as far as Egypt.

The building programme reads like an infrastructure report. Towers at the corner gate, the valley gate, and at the angle of the wall in Jerusalem; towers out in the desert; and many cisterns hewn from rock, because he had large herds in the lowland and on the plateau. Cutting a cistern out of limestone and sealing it with plaster is how anyone kept livestock in dry country, and doing it at scale is a state project.

He is also credited with farming: husbandmen and vinedressers in the hills and in the fertile land, for the text says simply that he loved the soil.

The most discussed detail is the war engines invented by skilful men and set on the towers and the corners, to shoot arrows and great stones. Some scholars read the Hebrew as describing protective structures for archers rather than machines; the plain reading is early artillery, and Assyrian reliefs of the period do show siege engines in use.

Then the fall. Only priests descended from Aaron burned incense in the holy place; the king went in with a censer anyway, and eighty priests followed him in to stop him. The disease broke out on his forehead while he stood there arguing, and he was hurried out. He lived the rest of his life in a separate house, cut off from the house of the LORD, with his son running the government, and he was buried in a field belonging to the royal tombs rather than in them. A stone plaque from a later century, found in Jerusalem, reads: 'Hither were brought the bones of Uzziah, king of Judah — do not open.'