The Letter Is Opened Before the Living God

The house of the LORD he enters is the temple whose door gold Hezekiah had himself cut off to pay Sennacherib’s tribute (2 Kings 18:16). Sackcloth was coarse goat-hair fabric worn against the skin; a king wearing it has laid his royal dress aside in public.

For the first time in the book Isaiah is called “the prophet”. In chapter 7 Isaiah had to go out uninvited to meet Ahaz at the same conduit; here the king sends to him, and sends his senior priests dressed for mourning, not merely his ministers.

“Blasphemy” is ne’atsah, contempt, scorn poured on someone. The birth image reverses 26:18, “we have as it were brought forth wind”, and is answered at the book’s end in the same words: “Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the LORD” (66:9).

“Reproach” is charaph, the verb David used of Goliath, who defied “the armies of the living God” (1 Samuel 17:26). Hezekiah twice says “the LORD thy God” to Isaiah rather than “our God”, and “it may be” leaves room for no answer at all. He presumes nothing.

A bare line in the account, and a slow one: after the king’s urgent message, the delegation is simply shown arriving. Hezekiah’s officers are his avadim, his servants, a title of honour at court; the next verse uses a lesser word for the Assyrian king’s men.

“Be not afraid” is what Isaiah said to Ahaz at the upper pool: “Take heed, and be quiet; fear not” (7:4). The Assyrian envoys are na’arei melek, the king’s lads, a word for boys or junior attendants, so the LORD cuts the great king’s spokesmen down to errand runners.

“Blast” is ruach, spirit. The LORD will put a spirit in the king, a disposition or a mood, which then acts on a piece of news. It is the same idea as the spirit sent to deceive Ahab in 1 Kings 22:22: no storm, simply a change inside a man’s head.

Libnah lay in the Shephelah lowlands a few miles north of Lachish; it had once revolted against Judah in Jehoram’s reign (2 Kings 8:22). The shift from Lachish to Libnah suggests that Lachish had already fallen, which the Nineveh reliefs record.

Tirhakah is Taharqa of the Kushite dynasty that ruled Egypt from Nubia, the biblical Ethiopia. He became pharaoh around 690 BC, so in 701 he was probably a young prince at the head of the army, called king here by the title he later held.

The letter at least grants Hezekiah his title, “king of Judah”, which the Rabshakeh never once gave him (36:4). It also quotes the promise itself, “Jerusalem shall not be given into the hand”, as though Assyria knew what the prophet had been saying inside the walls.

“Destroying them utterly” is again the ban verb, hecherim, the word Israel used for devoting a city wholly to God. In the Assyrian mouth it becomes the empire’s own job description, and the question “shalt thou be delivered?” leans entirely on that record.

Several names on this list touch Israel’s own past. Haran is where Abraham’s family settled on the way to Canaan (Genesis 11:31). Gozan on the Habor river is where the northern tribes had been deported (2 Kings 17:6). Eden here is Bit-Adini on the Euphrates, not the garden.

The same cities as 36:19, but this time the letter asks after their kings rather than their gods. Hena and Ivah are obscure; Ivah is probably Avva, whose people were resettled in Samaria and made an idol called Nibhaz (2 Kings 17:24, 31).

The Hebrew says he received “the letters”, plural, and then spread “it” before the LORD, singular: probably one message in several sheets or tablets. Going up to the temple to unroll it is an open act. The document is not answered from the palace but laid out on the floor of the sanctuary.

Hezekiah is the only king in the book whose prayer is given in his own words, here and again in chapter 38. Isaiah records him praying “unto the LORD”; the parallel in 2 Kings 19:15 says “before the LORD”, as though standing in front of the letter he had spread out.

Isaiah’s wording adds “of hosts”, the title that runs through this book, where 2 Kings 19:15 has only “O LORD God of Israel”. “Cherubims” is a double plural, the Hebrew -im with an English s added. The cherubim spread their wings over the ark, the throne where God met Moses (Exodus 25:22).

The requests echo Solomon’s prayer at the temple’s dedication, “that thine eyes may be open toward this house” (1 Kings 8:29). They also answer the idols of Psalm 115:5-6, which have eyes and ears that neither see nor hear. Hezekiah asks the LORD to do what the burned gods could not.

The Hebrew here is awkward, “all the lands and their land”, which the King James evens out to “nations, and their countries”; 2 Kings 19:17 reads “the nations and their lands”. “Of a truth” concedes the point at once. Hezekiah does not pretend the record is false.

Assyrian armies often carried the statues of conquered gods off as captives; reliefs show soldiers bearing them away. Isaiah returns to the scene in 46:1-2, where Bel and Nebo are loaded on weary beasts, and to wood that is half burned and half worshipped in 44:15-17.

“Thou art the LORD, even thou only” is the confession that becomes the refrain of chapters 40 to 48: “I am the LORD, and there is none else” (45:5, 6, 18). What Hezekiah asks the kingdoms to learn is what the second half of the book will be spent declaring.

The parallel in 2 Kings 19:20 has the LORD say “I have heard”; Isaiah’s text leaves those words out and goes straight to the answer. Isaiah sends the reply instead of bringing it, and he ties it explicitly to the prayer: “Whereas thou hast prayed.”

“The virgin, the daughter of Zion” pictures the city as a girl no conqueror has taken. “Shaken her head at thee” is literally “behind thee”: she jeers at his back as he retreats. The oracle is written from the far side of the outcome, as though the army were already leaving.

“The Holy One of Israel” is Isaiah’s own title for God, used about twenty five times in the book and seldom anywhere else. Lifting the eyes on high is the posture of pride the book has already promised to bring down: “The lofty looks of man shall be humbled” (2:11).

Kings from Gilgamesh on boasted of felling cedars in Lebanon, and Assyrian inscriptions keep the habit. “His Carmel” is carmel as a common noun, garden land or orchard. Chapter 14 had the fir trees rejoicing when Babylon’s king fell: “no feller is come up against us” (14:8).

Where the King James reads “the besieged places”, matsor, many take the word as a poetic name for Egypt, “all the rivers of Egypt”, meaning the Nile’s channels. Sennacherib never reached Egypt; his son Esarhaddon did in 671 BC. The boast runs ahead of the facts.

“Hast thou not heard” returns as the refrain of 40:21 and 40:28, “Have ye not known? have ye not heard?” “Formed” is yatsar, the potter’s verb, used for God forming the man from dust (Genesis 2:7). Assyria’s campaigns were shaped on another’s wheel.

Houses had flat roofs of packed earth, where grass sprang up after rain and withered in the first hot wind; Psalm 129:6 uses the same picture. The conquered cities fell not because Assyria was strong but because their people were already grass, the image 40:6-8 applies to all flesh.

“Abode” is literally “thy sitting down”, and with “going out” and “coming in” it maps a man’s whole day, as Psalm 139:2-3 does: “Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising.” The king who read the world as his to survey is himself watched.

Assyrian reliefs show captives led by cords fastened to rings through the lips or nose, and Esarhaddon’s victory stele from Zincirli shows two kneeling prisoners roped that way. The treatment Assyria gave its captives is now promised to Assyria’s king, and he is turned like a beast of burden.

“Such as groweth of itself” is safiach, the word Leviticus 25:5 uses for the aftergrowth of a sabbath year, when the fields were left unsown. The sign is addressed to Hezekiah; his father Ahaz had been offered a sign and refused to ask one (7:11-12).

The picture goes back to 6:13, where Israel is a felled tree whose stump holds a holy seed, and to 27:6, “Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit.” “Escaped” is peletah, the survivors of a disaster, the word used of the few who got away.

“The zeal of the LORD of hosts shall do this” repeats word for word the line that ends the promise of the child in 9:7. “Out of Jerusalem shall go forth” recalls 2:3, “out of Zion shall go forth the law”; this time what goes forth is a people.

“Cast a bank” is to pile a solelah, an earth and stone ramp heaped against a wall so that battering rams can be rolled up it. The Assyrian ramp at Lachish survives and is the oldest siege ramp yet found. None of the four actions of a siege will happen at Jerusalem.

The verse picks up the end of verse 29, “turn thee back by the way by which thou camest”, and repeats from verse 33, “shall not come into this city”. “Saith the LORD” is ne’um YHWH, the signature formula of an oracle, closing the promise like a seal.

“For mine own sake” returns in 43:25, “blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake”, and in 48:11. “My servant David” points back to the promise of 2 Samuel 7; before the servant of chapters 42 to 53 appears, the title rests on the king.

“A hundred and fourscore and five thousand” is 185,000. Herodotus (2.141) preserves an Egyptian version, in which Sennacherib’s army is ruined overnight when field mice gnaw its bowstrings and shield straps. “Dead corpses” doubles the Hebrew pegarim metim, bodies, dead ones, as they are found at dawn.

Three verbs, departed, went, returned, hurry him off the page. Nineveh is named for the first time in the book; Sennacherib made it his capital and built there what he called his “palace without rival”. He lived another twenty years, dying in 681 BC.

Nisroch is otherwise unknown and may be a garbled form of Nusku or Ninurta. Babylonian records confirm that Sennacherib was murdered by a son in a revolt. “Armenia” is Ararat in the Hebrew, the kingdom of Urartu, the same name as the mountains where the ark rested (Genesis 8:4).