God saves Jerusalem from the Assyrian attack
36
📚Now it happened in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, that Sennacherib king of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah, and took them. 36:1 Chapters 36-39 are about the invasion of Judah by the armies of Assyria in the days of King Hezekiah. Except for Isa 38:9-20 all of this material is found in 2 Kings chapters 18–20, usually in the very same words Isaiah used. See notes there on these important historical events. The growing power of Assyria, its invasion of Judah and its destruction are themes often seen in Isaiah (Isa 7:17-18; 8:4-8; 10:5-12; 14:24-25; 30:31; 31:8). Note on Assyria at 2 Kings 15:19.⚜
2 📚And the king of Assyria sent Rabshakeh from Lachish to Jerusalem to King Hezekiah with a great army. And he stood by the conduit of the upper pool by the highway to the Fuller’s Field. 3 📚Then Eliakim, Hilkiah’s son, who was over the house, and Shebna the scribe, and Joah, Asaph’s son, the recorder, came out to him.
4 📚And Rabshakeh said to them, “Say now to Hezekiah, Thus says the great king, the king of Assyria, What is this hope in which you are trusting? 5 📚I say that you speak of having counsel and strength for war, but they are only empty words. Now in whom are you trusting, that you rebel against me? 6 📚Look, you are trusting in the staff of that broken reed, on Egypt, on which if a man leans, it will go into his hand, and pierce it. So is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who trust in him. 7 📚But if you say to me, ‘We trust in the LORD our God’, is he not the one whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah has taken away, and said to Judah and to Jerusalem, ‘You shall worship before this altar?’ 8 📚Now therefore I urge you to give a pledge to my master the king of Assyria, and I will give you two thousand horses, if you be able on your part to put riders on them! 9 📚How then can you turn away the face of one of the least of the captains of my master’s servants, and put your trust in Egypt for chariots and for horsemen? 10 📚And have I now come up without the LORD against this land to destroy it? The LORD said to me, ‘Go up against this land, and destroy it.’ ”
11 📚Then Eliakim and Shebna and Joah said to Rabshakeh, “Please speak to your servants in the Syrian language, for we understand it, and do not speak to us in the Jews’ language in the hearing of the people who are on the wall”.
12 📚But Rabshakeh said, “Has my master sent me only to your master and to you to speak these words? Has he not sent me to the men who sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own urine with you?”
13 📚Then Rabshakeh stood and called out with a loud voice in the Jews’ language, and said, “Listen to the words of the great king, the king of Assyria. 14 📚Thus says the king, Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to rescue you. 15 📚And do not let Hezekiah make you trust in the LORD, saying, ‘The LORD will surely rescue us. This city will not be delivered into the hands of the king of Assyria.’
16 📚“Do not listen to Hezekiah. For thus says the king of Assyria, Make peace with me by a present, and come out to me, and every one of you eat from his vine, and each from his fig tree, and everyone drink the water from his own cistern, 17 📚until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of grain and wine, a land of bread and vineyards.
18 📚“Beware lest Hezekiah persuade you, saying, ‘The LORD will deliver us.’ Has any of the gods of the nations rescued his land from the hand of the king of Assyria? 19 📚Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? And have they rescued Samaria from my hand? 20 📚Among all the gods of these lands, which are those who have rescued their land from my hand, that the LORD should rescue Jerusalem from my hand?”
21 📚But they kept silent and did not answer him a word, for the king’s command said “Do not answer him”.
22 📚Then Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah, who was over the household, and Shebna the scribe, and Joah, the son of Asaph, the recorder, came to Hezekiah with their clothes torn, and told him the words of Rabshakeh.