Thereupon the whole people of Juda chose one of his sons, Ozias, a boy of sixteen years, to succeed his father Amasias;

he it was who carried out the designs of his dead father by fortifying the harbour of Ailath and restoring it to the possession of Juda.

Sixteen years old he was when he came to the throne, and his reign at Jerusalem lasted fifty-two. His mother’s name was Jechelia, a woman of Jerusalem.

He obeyed the Lord’s will, as faithfully as once his father Amasias did.

As long as Zacharias lived, a man taught by divine visions, Ozias had recourse to the Lord, and as long as he had recourse to the Lord, all went well with him.

He it was that marched out to battle with the Philistines, and laid in ruins the walls of Geth, and Jabnia, and Azotus; and built towns to command Azotus and the Philistines.✻

Such victory God gave him over the Philistines, the Arabs, too, that dwelt in Gurbaal, and the Ammonites;

the Ammonites paid him tribute, and the renown of his many victories reached the very frontiers of Egypt.

It was Ozias, too, that fortified the Corner Gate, the Valley gate, and the other gates on that side of Jerusalem, by building towers over them.

Towers, too, he built out in the desert, and dug cisterns in plenty, for his many herds that grazed both in the lowlands and in the desert solitudes; he had vines, too, and vine-dressers to tend them, in the hill-country and about the town of Carmel; he was a man that loved husbandry.

He had an army of fighting men, marshalled in readiness for battle by the scribe Jehiel and the controller Maasias; and out of all his generals he chose Hananias to command it.

The clan chiefs that led it, all tried warriors, were two thousand six hundred in number;

and the whole force under their command was one of three hundred and seven thousand five hundred fighting men, to maintain the king against his enemies.

For all this great array Ozias provided shield and spear, helmet and breastplate, bows, too, and slings for shooting stones.

At Jerusalem, he contrived engines of many sorts, poised on tower or on wall-corner, that discharged arrows and great boulders. Far spread his fame, such help the Lord gave him, and such greatness.

But this greatness of his made his heart proud, to his own undoing. He slighted the Lord his God; into the temple he would go, and there burn incense at the censing-altar.

Close at his heels the high priest Azarias entered, and eighty priests with him, strong men all,

to withstand the royal will. Not for thee, Ozias, they cried, to burn incense in the Lord’s honour; that is for the priests, the sons of Aaron, that are set apart for this office. Leave this holy place, and profane it no more; thou wilt win no favour from the Lord God by such doings as these.

At this, Ozias turned round in anger, the censer already in his hand with the incense ready for lighting, and began to threaten them. And with that, in the priests’ presence, there in the Lord’s house, by the censing-altar, the mark of leprosy started out on his brow.

No time they lost, Azarias and his fellow priests, that sign once seen, in thrusting out the leper; he himself, feeling the stroke of the Lord’s present judgement, was in haste to be gone.

King Ozias remained a leper till the day of his death, dwelling apart in a house of his own, while his son Joatham had charge of the palace, and heard the complaints of his subjects.

What else Ozias did, first and last, stands recorded by the prophet Isaias, son of Amos.

At last he was laid to rest with his fathers, not among the royal tombs, because he was a leper, but in the same burying-ground. And the throne passed to his son Joatham.