When Hezekiah had heard from his counsellors the report of Rabshakeh's words, he rent his clothes with horror at his daring mockery of the living God (2 Kings 19:4), put on mourning clothes as a sign of the trouble of his soul and went into the temple, and at the same time sent Eliakim and Shebna with the oldest of the priests in mourning costume to the prophet Isaiah, to entreat him to intercede with the Lord in these desperate circumstances.
(Note: “ But the most wise king did not meet his blasphemies with weapons, but with prayer, and tears, and sackcloth, and entreated the prophet Isaiah to be his ambassador. ” - Theodoret.)
The order of the words: Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz, is unusual (cf. 2 Kings 14:25; 2 Kings 20:1; 1 Kings 16:7, etc.), and is therefore altered in Isaiah into Isaiah the son of Amoz, the prophet.
“A day of distress, and of chastisement, and of rejection is this day.” תּוכחה : the divine chastisement. נאצה : contemptuous treatment, or rejection of the people on the part of God (compare נאץ , Deuteronomy 32:19; Jeremiah 14:21; Lamentations 2:6). “For children have come to the birth, and there is not strength to bring forth.” A figure denoting extreme danger, the most desperate circumstances. If the woman in travail has not strength to bring forth the child which has come to the mouth of the womb, both the life of the child and that of the mother are exposed to the greatest danger; and this was the condition of the people here (see the similar figure in Hosea 13:13). For לדה instead of לדת , see Ges. §69, 2 Anm.
Perhaps Jehovah thy God will hear the blasphemies of the living God on the part of Rabshakeh. ישׁמע : hear, equivalent to observes, take notice of, and in this case punish. חי אלהים : the living God, in contrast to the gods of the heathen, who are only lifeless idols (cf. 1 Samuel 17:26, 1 Samuel 17:36). והוכיח is not to be taken in connection with לחרף , as if it stood for להוכיח , “and to scold with words” (Luth., Ges., etc.), but is a perf. rel. or a progressive perfect (Ewald, §234, a .), and the continuation of ישׁמע : “and will chastise (punish, sc. him) for the words which He has heard.” תף ונשׂאת “therefore lift up prayer (to heaven) for the (still) existing remnant, sc. of the people of God;” nearly all Judah having come into the power of Sennacherib since the carrying away of the ten tribes.
Isaiah replied with this comforting promise: Hezekiah was not to be afraid of the blasphemous words of the Assyrian king; the Lord would frighten him with a report, so that he would return to his own land, and there would He cause him to fall by the sword. מלך א נערי , the servants or young men of the Assyrian king, is a derogatory epithet applied to the officials of Assyria. “Behold, I put a spirit into him, so that he shall hear a report and return into his own land.” שׁמוּעה does not refer to the report of the destruction of his army (2 Kings 19:35), as Thenius supposes, for Sennacherib did not hear of this through the medium of an army, but was with the army himself at the time when it was smitten by the angel of the Lord; it refers to the report mentioned in 2 Kings 19:9. For even if he made one last attempt to secure the surrender of Jerusalem immediately upon hearing this report, yet after the failure of this attempt to shake the firmness of Hezekiah his courage must have failed him, and the thought of return must have suggested itself, so that this was only accelerated by the blow which fell upon the army. For, as O. v. Gerlach has correctly observed, “the destruction of the army would hardly have produced any decisive effect without the approach of Tirhakah, since the great power of the Assyrian king, especially in relation to the small kingdom of Judah, was not broken thereby. But at the prayer of the king the Lord added this miracle to the other, which His providence had already brought to pass. - For the fulfilment of the prophecy of Sennacherib's death, see 2 Kings 19:37.
In the meantime Rabshakeh had returned to his king at Libnah (see at 2 Kings 8:22), to which he had gone from Lachish, probably after having taken that fortress.
There Sennacherib heard that Tirhakah was advancing to make war against him. Tirhakah, Θαρακά (lxx), king of Cush, is the Ταρακός of Manetho, the successor of Sevechus (Shebek II), the third king of the twenty-fifth (Ethiopian) dynasty, described by Strabo (xv. 687), who calls him Τεάρκων , as a great conqueror. His name is spelt Tåhålqa or Tåharqo upon the monuments, and on the Pylon of the great temple at Medinet-Abu he is represented in the form of a king, cutting down enemies of conquered lands (Egypt, Syria, and Tepopå , an unknown land) before the god Ammon (see Brugsch, hist. d'Egypte , i. pp. 244,245).
(Note: According to Jul. Afric. (in Syncell. i. p. 139, ed. Dind.) he reigned eighteen years, according to Euseb. (in Syncell. p. 140) twenty years. Both statements are incorrect; for, according to an Apis-stele published by Mariette, the birth of an Apis who died in the twentieth year of Psammetichus fell in the twenty-sixth year of Tirhakah, so that the reign of Tirhakah may be supposed to have lasted twenty-eight years (see Brugsch, l.c. p. 247). But the chronological conclusions respecting the date of his reign are very uncertain. Whereas M. v. Niebuhr ( Gesch. Ass. p. 72) fixes his expedition against Sennacherib in the thirty-seventh aer. Nab ., i.e., 710 b.c., and the commencement of his reign over Egypt in 45 aer. Nab ., i.e., 702 b.c., and assumes that he marched against Sennacherib before he was king of Egypt, which is apparently favoured by the epithet king of Cush, not of Egypt; Brugsch ( l.c. p. 292) has given the year 693 b.c. as the commencement of his reign. It is obvious that this statement is irreconcilable with the O.T. chronology, since the fourteenth year of Hezekiah, in which Sennacherib invaded Judah, corresponds to the year 714 or 713 b.c. These diversities simply confirm our remark (p. 411), that the chronological data as to the kings of Egypt before Psammetichus cannot lay any claim to historical certainty. For an attempt to solve this discrepancy see M. v. Niebuhr, pp. 458ff.)
- On hearing the report of the advance of Tirhakah, Sennacherib sent ambassadors again to Hezekiah with a letter (2 Kings 19:14), in which he summoned him once more to give up his confidence in his God, and his assurance that Jerusalem would not be delivered into the hands of the king of Assyria, since the gods of no other nation had been able to save their lands and cities from the kings of Assyria who had preceded him. The letter contained nothing more, therefore, than a repetition of the arguments already adduced by Rabshakeh (2 Kings 18:19.), though a larger number of the lands conquered by the Assyrians are given, for the purpose of strengthening the impression intended to be made upon Hezekiah of the irresistible character of the Assyrian arms. - To offer a successful resistance to Tirhakah and overcome him, Sennacherib wanted above all things a firm footing in Judah; and for this the possession of Jerusalem was of the greatest importance, since it would both cover his back and secure his retreat. Fortifications like Lachish and Libnah could be quickly taken by a violent assault. But it was very different with Jerusalem. Salmanasar had stood before Samaria for three years before he was able to conquer it; and Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem for two years before the city was starved out and it was possible to take it (2 Kings 25:1.). But as Tirhakah was approaching, Sennacherib had no time now for so tedious a siege. He therefore endeavoured to induce Hezekiah to surrender the city quietly by a boastful description of his own power. Instead of ויּשׁלח ויּשׁב (2 Kings 19:9), we have in Isaiah ויּשׁלח ויּשׁמע , “when he heard this he sent,” which is probably the more original, and indicates that when Sennacherib received the intelligence he sent at once (Drechsler).
ישּׁיאך אל : “let not thy God deceive thee,” i.e., do not allow yourself to be deceived by your confidence in your God. לאמר , to say, i.e., to think or believe, that Jerusalem will not be given, etc. To shatter this confidence, Sennacherib reminds him of the deeds of the Assyrian kings. להחרימם , to ban them, i.e., by smiting them with the ban. The verb החרים is chosen with emphasis, to express the unsparing destruction. הנּצל ואתּה : and thou shouldst be saved? - a question implying a strong negative.
“Have the gods of the nations delivered them?” אתם is not a pronoun used in anticipation of the object, which follows in וגו גּוזן (Thenius), but refers to כּל־הארצות in 2 Kings 19:11, a specification of which is given in the following enumeration. Gozan may be the province of Gauzanitis in Mesopotamia, but it may just as well be the country of Gauzania on the other side of the Tigris (see at 2 Kings 17:6). The combination with Haran does not force us to the first assumption, since the list is not a geographical but a historical one. - Haran (Charan), i.e., the Carrae of the Greeks and Romans, where Abraham's father Terah died, a place in northern Mesopotamia (see at Genesis 11:31), is probably not merely the city here, but the country in which the city stood. - Rezeph ( רצף ), the Arabic rutsâfat , a very widespread name, since Jakut gives nine cities of this name in his Geographical Lexicon, is probably the most celebrated of the cities of that name, the Rusapha of Syria, called ̔Ρησάφα in Ptol. v. 15, in Palmyrene, on the road from Racca to Emesa, a day's journey from the Euphrates (cf. Ges. Thes . p. 1308). - “The sons of Eden , which (were in Telassar ,” were evidently a tribe whose chief settlement was in Telassar. By עדן we might understand the בּית־עדן of Amos 1:5, a city in a pleasant region of Syria, called Παράδεισος by Ptol. (v. 15), since there is still a village called Ehden in that locality (cf. Burckhardt, Syr . p. 66, and v. Schubert, Reise , iii. p. 366), if we could only discover Telassar in the neighbourhood, and if the village of Ehden could be identified with Παράδεισος and the Eden of the Bible, as is done even by Gesenius on Burckhardt, p. 492, and Thes . p. 195; but this Ehden is spelt ‛hdn in Arabic, and is not to be associated with עדן (see Rob. Bibl. Res . pp. 586, 587). Moreover the Thelseae near Damascus (in the Itin. Ant . p. 196, ed. Wess.) is too unlike Telassar to come into consideration. There is more to be said in favour of the identification of our עדן with the Assyrian Eden , which is mentioned in Ezekiel 27:23 along with Haran and Calneh as an important place for trade, although its position cannot be more certainly defined; and neither the comparison with the tract of land called (Syr.) ma‛ād e n , Maadon, which Assemani ( Biblioth. or . ii. p. 224) places in Mesopotamia, towards the Tigris, in the present province of Diarbekr (Ges., Win.), nor the conjecture of Knobel that the tribe-name Eden may very probably have been preserved in the large but very dilapidated village of Adana or Adna , some distance to the north of Bagdad (Ker Porter, Journey , ii. p. 355, and Ritter, Erdk . ix. p. 493), can be established as even a probability. תּלאשּׂר , Telassar , is also quite unknown. The name applies very well to Thelser on the eastern side of the Tigris ( Tab. Peut . xi. e), where even the later Targums on Genesis 10:12 have placed it, interpreting Nimrod's Resen by תלסר , תלאסר , though Knobel opposes this on the ground that a place in Assyria proper is unsuitable in such a passage as this, where the Assyrian feats of war outside Assyria itself are enumerated. Movers ( Phöniz . ii. 3, p. 251) conjectures that the place referred to is Thelassar in Terodon , a leading emporium for Arabian wares on the Persian Gulf, and supposes that Terodon has sprung from Teledon with the Persian pronunciation of the תל , which is very frequent in the names of Mesopotamian cities. This conjecture is at any rate a more natural one than that of Knobel on Isaiah 37:12, that the place mentioned in Assemani ( Bib. or . iii. 2, p. 870), (Arabic) tl b - ṣrṣr , Tel on the Szarszar , to the west of the present Bagdad, is intended. - With regard to the places named in 2 Kings 19:13, see at 2 Kings 18:34.
Hezekiah's prayer. - 2 Kings 19:14. Hezekiah took the letter, read it, went into the temple and spread it out before Jehovah, to lay open its contents before God. The contents of the letter are given in 2 Kings 19:10-13 in the form of the message which the ambassadors delivered to Hezekiah from their king, because the ambassadors communicated to Hezekiah by word of mouth the essential contents of the writing which they conveyed, and simply handed him the letter as a confirmation of their words. ספרים , like litterae , means a letter; hence the singular suffix attached to ויּפרשׂהוּ , whereas in the case of ויּקראם , which stands nearer, the suffix follows the number of the noun to which it refers. The spreading out of the letter before God was an embodiment of the wish, which sprang from a child-like and believing trust, that the Lord would notice and punish that defiance of the living God which it contained. What Hezekiah meant by this action he expressed in the following prayer.
In opposition to the delusion of the Assyrians, he describes Jehovah, the God of Israel, as the only God of all the kingdoms of the earth, since He was the Creator of heaven and earth. הכּרבים ישׁב (see at 1 Samuel 4:4 and Exodus 25:22) indicates the covenant-relation into which Jehovah, the almighty Creator and Ruler of the whole world, had entered towards Israel. As the covenant God who was enthroned above the cherubim the Lord was bound to help His people, if they turned to Him with faith in the time of their distress and entreated His assistance; and as the only God of all the world He had the power to help. In Isaiah, צבאות , which is very rare in historical prose, but very common in prophetical addresses, is added to the name יהוה , and thus Jehovah at the very outset is addressed as the God of the universe. On the meaning of צבאות , see at 1 Samuel 1:3. On האלהים הוּא אתּה , see 2 Samuel 7:28 and 1 Kings 18:39.
The accumulation of the words, “bow down Thine ear, Jehovah, and hear; open, Jehovah, Thine eyes and see, and hear the words,” etc., indicates the earnestness and importunity of the prayer. The plural עיניך by the side of the singular אזנך is the correct reading, since the expression “to incline the ear” is constantly met with (Psalms 17:6; Psalms 31:3; Psalms 45:11, etc.); and even in the plural, “incline ye your ear” (Psalms 78:1; Isaiah 55:3), and on the other hand “to open the eyes” (Job 27:19; Proverbs 20:13; Zechariah 12:4; Daniel 9:18), because a man always opens both eyes to see anything, whereas he turns one ear to a person speaking. The עינך of Isaiah is also plural, though written defectively, as the Masora has already observed. The suffix in שׁלחו , which is wanting in Isaiah, belongs to אשׁר , and refers with this to דּברי in the sense of speech: the speech which Sennacherib had made in his letter.
After the challenge, to observe the blasphemies of Sennacherib, Hezekiah mentions the fact that the Assyrians have really devastated all lands, and therefore that it is not without ground that they boast of their mighty power; but he finds the explanation of this in the impotence and nothingness of the gods of the heathen. אמנם , truly, indeed - the kings of Asshur have devastated the nations and their land. Instead of this we find in Isaiah: “they have devastated all lands and their (own) land” - which is evidently the more difficult and also the more original reading, and has been altered in our account, because the thought that the Assyrians had devastated their own land by making war upon other lands, that is to say, had depopulated it and thereby laid it waste, was not easy to understand. “And have cast their gods into the fire, for they are not gods, but works of human hands, wood and stone, and have thus destroyed them.” Hezekiah does not mention this as a sign of the recklessness of the Assyrians (Knobel), but, because Sennacherib had boasted that the gods of no nation had been able to resist him (vv. 12, 13), to put this fact in the right light, and attach thereto the prayer that Jehovah, by granting deliverance, would make known to all the kingdoms of the earth that He alone was God. Instead of ונתנוּ we have in Isaiah ונתון , the inf. absol.; in this connection the more difficult and more genuine reading. This also applies to the omission of אלהים (2 Kings 19:19) in Isaiah 37:20, since the use of Jehovah as a predicate, “that Thou alone art Jehovah,” is very rare, and has therefore been misunderstood even by Gesenius. By the introduction of Elohim , the thought “that Thou Jehovah art God alone” is simplified.
The divine promise. - 2 Kings 19:20, 2 Kings 19:21. When Hezekiah had prayed, the prophet Isaiah received a divine revelation with regard to the hearing of this prayer, which he sent, i.e., caused to be handed over, to the king. שׁמעתּי (2 Kings 19:21) is omitted in Isaiah, so that וגו התפּלּלתּ אשׁר is to be taken in the sense of “with regard to that which thou hast prayed to me,” whilst שׁמעתּי (I have heard) elucidates the thought and simplifies the construction. The word of the Lord announced to the king, (1) the shameful retreat of Sennacherib as a just retribution for his mockery of the living God (2 Kings 19:21-28; Isaiah 37:22-29); (2) the confirmation of this assurance through the indication of a sign by which Hezekiah was to recognise the deliverance of Jerusalem (2 Kings 19:29-31; Isaiah 37:30-32), and through the distinct promise, that the Assyrian would neither come into the city nor besiege it, because the Lord was sheltering it (2 Kings 19:32-34; Isaiah 37:33-35). In the first part the words are addressed with poetic vivacity directly to Sennacherib, and scourge his haughty boastings by pointing to the ridicule and scorn which would follow him on his departure from the land.
“The virgin daughter Zion despises thee, the daughter Jerusalem shakes the head behind thee.” By daughter Zion, daughter Jerusalem, we are not to understand the inhabitants of Zion, or of Jerusalem, as though בּת stood for בּנים or בּני (Ges., Hitzig, and others); but the city itself with its inhabitants is pictorially personified as a daughter and virgin, and the construct state בּת־ציּון is to be taken, like פּרת נהר , as in apposition: “daughter Zion,” not daughter of Zion (vid., Ges. §116, 5; Ewald, §287, e .). Even in the case of בּתוּלת the construct state expresses simply the relation of apposition. Zion is called a “virgin” as being an inviolable city to the Assyrians, i.e., one which they cannot conquer. Shaking the head is a gesture denoting derision and pleasure at another's misfortune (cf. Psalms 22:8; Psalms 109:25, etc.). “Behind thee,” i.e., after thee as thou goest away, is placed first as a pictorial feature for the sake of emphasis.
This derision falls upon the Assyrian, for having blasphemed the Lord God by his foolish boasting about his irresistible power. “Whom hast thou despised and blasphemed, and against whom hast thou lifted up the voice? and thou liftest up thine eyes against the Holy One of Israel.” Lifting up the voice refers to the tone of threatening assumption, in which Rabshakeh and Sennacherib had spoken. Lifting up the eyes on high, i.e., to the heavens, signifies simply looking up to the sky (cf. Isaiah 40:26), not “directing proud looks against God” (Ges.). Still less is מרום to be taken adverbially in the sense of haughtily, as Thenius and Knobel suppose. The bad sense of proud arrogance lies in the words which follow, “against the Holy One of Israel,” or in the case of Isaiah, where אל stands for על , in the context, viz., the parallelism of the members. God is called the Holy One of Israel as He who manifests His holiness in and upon Israel. This title of the Deity is one of the peculiarities of Isaiah's range of thought, although it originated with Asaph (Psalms 78:41; see at Isaiah 1:4). This insult to the holy God consisted in the fact that Sennacherib had said through his servants (2 Kings 19:23, 2 Kings 19:24): “With my chariots upon chariots I have ascended the height of the mountains, the uttermost part of Lebanon, so that I felled the tallness of its cedars, the choice of its cypresses, and came to the shelter of its border, to the forest of its orchard. I have dug and drunk strange water, so that I dried up all the rivers of Egypt with the sole of my feet.” The words put into the mouth of the Assyrian are expressive of the feeling which underlay all his blasphemies (Drechsler). The two verses are kept quite uniform, the second hemistich in both cases expressing the result of the first, that is to say, what the Assyrian intended still further to perform after having accomplished what is stated in the first hemistich. When he has ascended the heights of Lebanon, he devastates the glorious trees of the mountain. Consequently in 2 Kings 19:24 the drying up of the Nile of Egypt is to be taken as the result of the digging of wells in the parched desert; in other words, it is to be interpreted as descriptive of the devastation of Egypt, whose whole fertility depended upon its being watered by the Nile and its canals. We cannot therefore take these verses exactly as Drechsler does; that is to say, we cannot assume that the Assyrian is speaking in the first hemistichs of both verses of what he (not necessarily Sennacherib himself, but one of his predecessors) has actually performed. For even if the ascent of the uttermost heights of Lebanon had been performed by one of the kings of Assyria, there is no historical evidence whatever that Sennacherib or one of his predecessors had already forced his way into Egypt. The words are therefore to be understood in a figurative sense, as an individualizing picture of the conquests which the Assyrians had already accomplished, and those which they were still intending to effect; and this assumption does not necessarily exhibit Sennacherib “as a mere braggart, who boastfully heaps up in ridiculous hyperbole an enumeration of the things which he means to perform” (Drechsler). For if the Assyrian had not ascended with the whole multitude of his war-chariots to the loftiest summits of Lebanon, to feel its cedars and its cypresses, Lebanon had set no bounds to his plans of conquest, so that Sennacherib might very well represent his forcing his way into Canaan as an ascent of the lofty peaks of this mountain range. Lebanon is mentioned, partly as a range of mountains that was quite inaccessible to war-chariots, and partly as the northern defence of the land of Canaan, through the conquest of which one made himself lord of the land. And so far as Lebanon is used synecdochically for the land of which it formed the defence, the hewing down of its cedars and cypresses, those glorious witnesses of the creation of God, denotes the devastation of the whole land, with all its glorious works of nature and of human hands. The chief strength of the early Asiatic conquerors consisted in the multitude of their war-chariots: they are therefore brought into consideration simply as signs of vast military resources; the fact that they could only be used on level ground being therefore disregarded. The Chethîb רכבּי רכב , “my chariots upon chariots,” is used poetically for an innumerable multitude of chariots, as גּובי גּוב for an innumerable host of locusts (Nahum 3:17), and is more original than the Keri רכבּי רב , the multitude of my chariots, which simply follows Isaiah. The “height of the mountains” is more precisely defined by the emphatic לבנון ירכּתי , the uttermost sides, i.e., the loftiest heights, of Lebanon, just as בור ירכּתי in Isaiah 14:15 and Ezekiel 32:23 are the uttermost depths of Sheol. ארזיו קומת , his tallest cedars. בּרשׁיו מבחור , his most select or finest cypresses. קצּה מלון , for which Isaiah has the more usual קצּו מרום , “the height of his end,” is the loftiest point of Lebanon on which a man can rest, not a lodging built on the highest point of Lebanon (Cler., Vitr., Ros.). כּרמלּו יער , the forest of his orchard, i.e., the forest resembling an orchard. The reference is to the celebrated cedar-forest between the loftiest peaks of Lebanon at the village of Bjerreh .
2 Kings 19:24 refers to the intended conquest of Egypt. Just as Lebanon could not stop the expeditions of the Assyrians, or keep them back from the conquest of the land of Canaan, so the desert of et Tih , which separated Egypt from Asia, notwithstanding its want of water (cf. Herod. iii. 5; Rob. Pal . i. p. 262), was no hindrance to him, which could prevent his forcing his way through it and laying Egypt waste. The digging of water is, of course, not merely “a reopening of the wells that had been choked with rubbish, and the cisterns that had been covered up before the approaching enemy” (Thenius), but the digging of wells in the waterless desert. זרים מים , strange water, is not merely water belonging to others, but water not belonging to this soil (Drechsler), i.e., water supplied by a region which had none at other times. By the perfects the thing is represented as already done, as exposed to no doubt whatever; we must bear in mind, however, that the desert of et Tih is not expressly named, but the expression is couched in such general terms, that we may also assume that it includes what the Assyrian had really effected in his expeditions through similar regions. The drying up of the rivers with the soles of the feet is a hyperbolical expression denoting the omnipotence with which the Assyrian rules over the earth. Just as he digs water in the desert where no water is to be had, so does he annihilate it where mighty rivers exist.
(Note: Compare the similar boasting of Alarich, already quoted by earlier commentators, in Claudian, de bello Geth. v. 526ff.:
cum cesserit omnis
Obsequiis natura meis? subsidere nostris
Sub pedibus montes, arescere vidimus amnes.