Isaiah 36: On Whom Dost Thou Trust?

"Now it came to pass in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah, that Sennacherib king of Assyria came up against all the defenced cities of Judah, and took them. And the king of Assyria sent Rabshakeh from Lachish to Jerusalem unto king Hezekiah with a great army. And he stood by the conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the fuller's field" (36:1–2).

"Thus saith the great king, the king of Assyria, What confidence is this wherein thou trustest?… Lo, thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed, on Egypt; whereon if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it… But if thou say to me, We trust in the Lord our God: is it not he, whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah hath taken away?… the Lord said unto me, Go up against this land, and destroy it" (vv. 4–10).

"Speak, I pray thee, unto thy servants in the Syrian language; for we understand it: and speak not to us in the Jews' language, in the ears of the people that are on the wall" (v. 11). "Then Rabshakeh stood, and cried with a loud voice in the Jews' language… Make an agreement with me by a present, and come out to me: and eat ye every one of his vine, and every one of his fig tree… Hath any of the gods of the nations delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria?" (vv. 13–18).

"But they held their peace, and answered him not a word: for the king's commandment was, saying, Answer him not" (v. 21).

What Isaiah leaves out

Isaiah 36–37 runs almost word for word with 2 Kings 18:13–19:37, with one large difference: Isaiah has nothing corresponding to 2 Kings 18:14–16, where Hezekiah sends to Lachish ("I have offended"), pays 300 talents of silver and 30 of gold, and strips the gold from the temple doors. Sennacherib's annals also report tribute (30 talents of gold, 800 of silver). Isaiah's version presents Hezekiah only as the king of faith. See "Jerusalem Besieged, 701 BC."

"In the fourteenth year"

If the campaign is 701 BC, Hezekiah's fourteenth year means he became king about 715 BC. But 2 Kings 18:1, 9–10 dates his accession to the third year of Hoshea of Israel (about 727/726 BC) and Samaria's fall to his sixth year. Scholars propose a coregency with Ahaz, an error in one of the numbers, or a dating of the illness (38:5, "fifteen years") that produced the number. The chronology of Judah's kings is a known problem; the site lists it rather than forcing a solution.

The Rabshakeh's speech

Rab-shaqeh is an Assyrian title, "chief cupbearer," a high official (2 Kings 18:17 adds the Tartan, commander-in-chief, and the Rabsaris, chief eunuch). Scholars have shown that the speech's themes fit Assyrian royal rhetoric: the claim that the enemy's own god sent the king, mockery of untrustworthy allies, offers of pleasant deportation, lists of conquered cities (P. Machinist; C. Cohen). That makes it historically plausible as the kind of thing an Assyrian envoy said. It does not make the text a transcript; it is a narrative composed by Judean writers, perhaps from memory and tradition.

Aramaic and Hebrew

"Syrian" (aramit) is Aramaic, by the 8th century the language of diplomacy across the Assyrian empire; "the Jews' language" (yehudit) is the Hebrew of Judah. This is one of the earliest references to Aramaic as an international language, and the officials' request shows that ordinary soldiers did not understand it.