An Invading Army, a Praying King, and a Heart Still Capable of Pride

“After these things, and the establishment thereof” sets the invasion of 701 BC directly after the faithfulness of chapter 31. The Book of 2 Chronicles leaves out what 2 Kings 18:13-16 records, that Hezekiah stripped the temple doors to pay Sennacherib tribute. “Thought to win them” is literally “said to break them open for himself”.

The verse ends mid-sentence, and Hezekiah’s response runs straight on into verse 3. “Purposed” is literally “his face was toward” Jerusalem: the Assyrian king has turned his face on the capital itself, not merely on the fortified towns of the Shephelah.

Hezekiah takes counsel before he takes action, and his officials are recorded as agreeing: “they did help him.” Stopping springs outside the walls was standard siege craft, since an army of tens of thousands needed water every day and brought little of its own.

“The brook that ran through the midst of the land” is most likely the overflow from the Gihon spring running down the Kidron valley. The reported saying is almost a taunt aimed at the enemy: why should the kings of Assyria come and find water waiting for them?

Isaiah 22:9-11 describes the same work less kindly, with houses pulled down to thicken the wall. Archaeologists uncovered a section of city wall about seven metres thick in Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter, dated to this period, which may be the “another wall without.” Millo means “the filling”, probably the stepped terraces holding up the old city.

The open space at the gate was where a city did its public business. “Spake comfortably” is literally “spoke to their heart”, the phrase used in Genesis 34:3 and Isaiah 40:2. Hezekiah’s speech is meant to reach past the ear.

The charge “be strong and courageous” is the one Moses and the LORD gave Joshua (Deuteronomy 31:7, Joshua 1:6), and David gave Solomon (1 Chronicles 22:13). “There be more with us than with him” echoes Elisha at Dothan in 2 Kings 6:16, where the unseen army outnumbers the visible one.

“An arm of flesh” puts Assyria’s power in the category Jeremiah 17:5 warns against trusting. The last clause is quiet but pointed: the people “rested themselves” on the king’s words, a verb meaning to lean one’s weight on something, and the next verses set out to kick that support away.

The parenthesis places Sennacherib at Lachish, Judah’s second city. He was proud enough of that siege to have it carved in relief on the walls of his palace at Nineveh; the panels now hang in the British Museum. Lachish fell, which makes Jerusalem’s survival the sharper contrast.

“Whereon do ye trust?” is the question the whole Assyrian campaign of words turns on, and the verb is the same trust vocabulary Hezekiah used in verse 8. The phrase “abide in the siege” concedes, perhaps unintentionally, that Jerusalem is still holding.

The messengers turn Hezekiah’s water policy against him. The king who denied water to Assyria is accused of arranging his own people’s death “by famine and by thirst.” The quotation they put in his mouth is accurate, and they offer it as if it were self-evidently absurd.

This is the one argument that required some homework. Assyria knew about the removal of the high places and the centralising of worship at “one altar” (31:1), and supposes the LORD must be offended by it. To an outsider, fewer altars could only mean less devotion.

“I and my fathers” reaches back through the Assyrian dynasty: Tiglath-pileser III, Shalmaneser V and Sargon II had between them swallowed Damascus, Samaria and a string of smaller kingdoms within a generation. The boast was not empty; the conclusion drawn from it was.

The rhetoric doubles back on itself in three movements: the nations were utterly destroyed, their gods could not deliver, so how could yours. “Utterly destroyed” is the Hebrew haram, the verb Israel used of its own devoted destruction under Joshua, here turned by the enemy on the nations.

Three verbs pile up, deceive, persuade, believe, and “out of mine hand” appears for the fifth time in three verses. The closing “how much less” treats the LORD as a smaller god than the rest, since his people are few and his altars now reduced to one.

The Book of 2 Chronicles abbreviates rather than repeats: “yet more” compresses the longer speeches of 2 Kings 18 and Isaiah 36. The pairing of “the LORD God” and “his servant Hezekiah” matters, because the attack on the king and the attack on his God are the same attack.

“Rail on” means to taunt or reproach, the Hebrew haraph that Goliath used against the armies of the living God (1 Samuel 17:10). The letter is the one Hezekiah spreads out before the LORD in the temple in 2 Kings 19:14; the Chronicler mentions the writing but not that scene.

“The Jews’ speech” is Judean Hebrew. 2 Kings 18:26 records that Hezekiah’s officials asked the envoys to speak Aramaic, the diplomatic language, so the soldiers on the wall would not follow, and the Rabshakeh raised his voice in Hebrew all the more. The stated aim was to take the city by fear.

The verse gives the Book of 2 Chronicles’ own verdict on the speeches: they spoke of the God of Jerusalem “as against the gods of the people of the earth.” “The work of the hands of man” is the prophets’ phrase for idols (Isaiah 37:19, Psalm 115:4).

Isaiah appears here for the only time in the account of the siege, and the verse gives him the title “the prophet”, joining him to the king in prayer. 2 Kings 19 separates the two, with Hezekiah praying and Isaiah sending an answer; here they cry to heaven together.

No number is given, where 2 Kings 19:35 counts 185,000. The Book of 2 Chronicles is interested in who fell: the valiant, the leaders, the captains. “They that came forth of his own bowels” means his own sons; Sennacherib was killed around 681 BC, twenty years later, a gap the verse folds into one sentence.

“Guided them on every side” may better read “gave them rest on every side”, as the Septuagint and Vulgate take it, the same rest granted to Asa and Jehoshaphat (14:7, 20:30). Either way “the hand of Sennacherib” is answered: the hand he boasted about eight times has been emptied.

Gifts come “unto the LORD” and presents to the king, a pairing that keeps worship and diplomacy distinct. “Magnified in the sight of all nations” is the same exaltation given Solomon (1 Chronicles 29:25), and sets up the danger of verse 25.

The illness gets one sentence where 2 Kings 20 and Isaiah 38 give it a chapter. The sign is not described; the other accounts make it the shadow going back ten steps on the dial of Ahaz, and Isaiah 38 preserves the psalm Hezekiah wrote after he recovered.

“Rendered not again according to the benefit” is a failure to repay in kind, the vocabulary of gratitude owed. “His heart was lifted up” is the phrase used of Uzziah at 26:16, whose pride ended in leprosy; the reader who remembers him fears the worst.

The Hebrew makes the humbling reflexive: he brought himself low from the height of his heart. Jerusalem joins him. The wrath is postponed rather than cancelled, “in the days of Hezekiah”, a limit that 2 Kings 20:19 records Hezekiah finding a relief.

The treasuries list runs from silver to “shields”, which sits oddly among luxuries; some scholars emend the Hebrew to a word for costly objects. Chronicles gives this wealth to God in verse 29, where 2 Kings 20:13 shows it becoming the display that invites Babylon.

“Corn” is the King James word for grain of any kind, usually wheat or barley. Stamped jar handles reading lmlk, “belonging to the king”, have turned up by the thousand in Judah from this reign, most likely from exactly such royal storehouses.

“God had given him substance very much” names the source of the wealth before anything is said about how it was handled. The cities here may be new foundations or refortified towns, needed after the Assyrian campaign had wasted much of the countryside.

This is Hezekiah’s Tunnel, cut about 533 metres through rock from the Gihon spring to the Siloam pool. A Hebrew inscription found inside in 1880 records the two gangs of diggers meeting in the middle, pick against pick. 2 Kings 20:20 mentions the conduit too.

The envoys came from Merodach-baladan, who was organising revolt against Assyria. “The wonder that was done in the land” is probably the sign of verse 24; Babylon took an interest in the heavens. “God left him, to try him” is one of Scripture’s rare statements that God withdrew in order to reveal what was already there.

“His goodness” translates hasadaw, his acts of covenant loyalty, the same word used of Josiah at 35:26. The cited source, “the vision of Isaiah the prophet”, matches the heading of the Book of Isaiah (1:1), whose chapters 36 to 39 carry much of Hezekiah’s reign.

“The chiefest of the sepulchres” is literally the ascent of the tombs, perhaps an upper row, perhaps the most honoured place. The Talmud and later Jewish tradition remember Hezekiah as among the best of Judah’s kings. His son follows at twelve years old (33:1) and undoes almost all of it.