A City Studies Its Walls and Overlooks Its Maker

Jerusalem sits among valleys, the Kidron, the Tyropoeon and the Hinnom, the last of which gave later Judaism its word Gehenna. Placing this burden among the oracles on Babylon, Moab and Egypt files Jerusalem with the foreign nations. Its people are on the flat roofs, the place to watch a procession or an army.

“Stirs” means shouting, uproar. “Joyous city” is the same word used of Tyre in 23:7, and Zephaniah 2:15 gives it to Nineveh, “the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly”. Jerusalem is described in the vocabulary of the pagan capitals, busy celebrating while its dead lie unwounded.

“Bound by the archers” is most often read “bound without the bow”, captured without a shot fired. When Babylon broke into the city, Zedekiah and his soldiers fled by night and were caught on the plains of Jericho (2 Kings 25:4-6). Sennacherib likewise boasts that Hezekiah’s picked troops deserted him in 701 BC.

“The daughter of my people” is a tender phrase that Jeremiah takes up again and again in his grief (Jeremiah 8:21, 9:1). “Weep bitterly” is literally “be bitter in weeping”. Isaiah asks to be left alone; comfort offered too soon would be a way of not looking at what he sees.

The Hebrew rings with three matching nouns, mehumah, mevusah, mevukhah, “tumult, trampling, turmoil”. “Breaking down the walls” is meqarqar qir, a sound like a wall collapsing, and qir anticipates Kir in the next verse. The cries echo back off the hills that ring the city.

Elam’s archers were famous; Jeremiah 49:35 calls the bow “the chief of their might”. Kir was where Assyria had deported the people of Damascus (2 Kings 16:9). Both served in Assyrian armies. Shields were carried in leather covers on the march and uncovered only for battle.

The choicest valleys are the fertile ground around the city, the Kidron and the plain of Rephaim of 17:5. The horsemen take position at the gate, the siege stance. In 36:2 the Rabshakeh stands with his army at the conduit of the upper pool, close enough to shout his terms over the wall.

“The covering of Judah” is its screen, the ring of fortified towns like Lachish that shielded the capital. “The house of the forest” is Solomon’s hall built on rows of cedar pillars, the House of the Forest of Lebanon (1 Kings 7:2), where he hung three hundred shields of gold (1 Kings 10:17). It had become an arsenal.

The city of David was the oldest part of Jerusalem, the narrow ridge south of the temple. Hezekiah “stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon, and brought it straight down to the west side of the city” (2 Chronicles 32:30), to deny water to the besiegers and keep it for the defenders.

Houses were surveyed to decide which could be sacrificed for stone and space. Excavations in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem have uncovered the Broad Wall, some seven metres thick, dated to Hezekiah’s reign and built straight across the foundations of houses that were knocked down to make room for it.

Hezekiah’s tunnel, over five hundred metres long and cut from both ends, still carries the Gihon’s water to Siloam, and its inscription records the moment the two crews met. “Fashioned” is yatsar, the potter’s verb. In 37:26 God says the same of the Assyrian crisis: “of ancient times... I have formed it.”

Shaving the head and wearing sackcloth were the signs of mourning that Moab performed everywhere in 15:2-3. When the LORD calls Jerusalem to the same grief, it does not come. Joel 1:13 issues the same summons to the priests: “Gird yourselves, and lament.”

The Hebrew is a string of bare verbal nouns, slaying, killing, eating, drinking, a breathless list. “Killing” is shachat, the verb for ritual slaughter, so the feast may have been dressed as a sacrifice. The last line is the feasters’ own words, a toast; the rich fool of Luke 12:19 says much the same to his soul.

“Purged” is kipper, the atonement verb of Leviticus 16. In 6:7 the same verb described Isaiah’s own sin, “thy sin purged”, by a coal from the altar. Here the LORD refuses it: this sin will not be atoned for while they live. “Revealed in mine ears” is the idiom of uncovering the ear, as in 1 Samuel 9:15.

“This treasurer” is contemptuous in Hebrew: “this steward”. Shebna is named with no father, which may mark him as a foreigner or a newcomer. The office “over the house” was the highest post at court, the royal chamberlain (1 Kings 4:6), and the book will give it to Eliakim in 36:3.

In the village of Silwan, facing the city across the Kidron, a rock-cut tomb carries an inscription for “...yahu, who is over the house”, perhaps Shebna under a fuller form of his name. The Hebrew says “here” three times in one breath: what business does this outsider have making himself a monument here?

“Carry thee away with a mighty captivity” is literally “hurl thee, O man, with a hurling”. The word for man is gever, the strong man, said with irony. “Cover thee” may mean to grasp tightly, as one grips an object before throwing it.

“Turn and toss” uses the root of the word for a turban, which was wound tight: God will wind Shebna up like a bundle and bowl him like a ball. The book’s own sequel softens the fall. In 36:3 and 37:2 Eliakim is over the household and Shebna is the scribe, a lesser post; the exile is not recorded.

The speaker changes in mid-verse from “I” to “he”, a common shift in prophetic speech. “State” is ma’amad, the word for the standing of courtiers at their posts, the sight that took the queen of Sheba’s breath away at Solomon’s court (1 Kings 10:5). Shebna’s office is stripped from him.

“My servant” is a title the Old Testament gives to few: Moses, David, Job, and Isaiah himself in 20:3. Eliakim means “God raises up”, and he is raised as Shebna is pulled down. His father Hilkiah is not the high priest of that name who found the book of the law under Josiah, a century later.

Robe and girdle are words used of the priestly vestments in Exodus 28:4 and 39-40, and here the dress of high office. “A father” was a title for a king’s chief minister; Joseph says God “hath made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house” (Genesis 45:8).

A palace key was a heavy wooden bar fitted with pegs, big enough to be carried over the shoulder. The phrase “upon his shoulder” recalls 9:6, where the government rests on the child’s shoulder. Opening and shutting describe control of access to the king, the chamberlain’s real power.

The nail is yated, a peg driven into a wall to hang things on. “Sure” is ne’eman, from the root of amen, the same root as Isaiah’s warning to Ahaz in 7:9, “If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established.” The whole household is pictured seated in honour around him.

“Offspring and issue” are rare words for shoots and side-growth, the whole extended family hanging on one man’s appointment, as family always did on a court official. The flagons are nevalim, jars, the same word elsewhere used for harps. From small bowls to large jars, everything is hung on one peg.

The peg image recurs elsewhere for a leader who holds a people up: Zechariah 10:4 says of Judah, “out of him the nail”, and Ezra 9:8 thanks God for giving the returned exiles “a nail in his holy place”. Here the peg fixed “in the sure place” comes out of the wall, three verbs of falling, and everything on it crashes.