The name Sharezer, meaning “prince of fire” or “protect the king,” carries a dark and dramatic weight within the historical records of the Old Testament. It is a name forever linked to the sudden, violent collapse of imperial pride and the execution of divine judgment against those who dared to defy the living God. Most notably, it belongs to an Assyrian royal prince who committed the ultimate act of treason, but it also appears within the post-exilic restoration as a leader seeking instruction for a reforming nation.
To understand the contrasting testimonies associated with this name, we examine the two distinct men who bore it into the scriptural record.
Every Individual Named Sharezer
- Sharezer the Son of Sennacherib (The Assassin Prince): A royal prince of the Assyrian Empire. After his father, King Sennacherib, blasphemed Jehovah and witnessed his massive army of 185,000 soldiers annihilated in a single night by the angel of the Lord, the disgraced king returned to Nineveh. While Sennacherib was worshipping in the temple of his false god Nisroch, Sharezer and his brother Adrammelech fulfilled a chilling prophecy of judgment by striking their own father down with the sword, subsequently fleeing into the mountains of Armenia (2 Kings 19:37; Isaiah 37:38).
- Sharezer of Bethel (The Restoration Leader): A prominent leader sent by the returned remnant during the post-exilic reconstruction of the nation. In the fourth year of King Darius, Sharezer stood as part of an elite delegation sent from Bethel to the house of the Lord in Jerusalem. His mission was to pray before the Lord and inquire of the priests and prophets whether the nation should continue to observe the ritual fasts of mourning that had been established during the seventy years of Babylonian captivity (Zechariah 7:2-3).
Whether executing an unintended decree of divine wrath within the pagan temples of Nineveh or seeking the precise, uncompromised will of God for a newly restored remnant, each man named Sharezer occupied a specific slot in the geopolitical and spiritual history of Israel.