Biblion Bible Commentary
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On What Do You Trust?
Isaiah 36:1-22
1 Now in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, Sennacherib king of Assyria attacked all of the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. · WEB
An Assyrian officer preaches at the wall in the local language, and most of what he says is true.
Sennacherib king of Assyria attacked all of the fortified cities of Judah and captured them Isaiah 36:1.
The narrative that pivots the book. Everything through chapter thirty-five was the Assyrian crisis in poetry; here it arrives as history, in 701, with every walled town in Judah already gone.
He stood by the aqueduct from the upper pool in the fuller's field highway Isaiah 36:2.
The exact spot where Isaiah met Ahaz thirty years earlier Isaiah 7:3. The same water channel, a different king, and this time the Assyrian is standing on it.
What confidence is this in which you trust? Isaiah 36:4.
The field commander's speech is the longest quotation of an enemy in the book, and its power is that it is mostly accurate.
You trust in the staff of this bruised reed, even in Egypt, which if a man leans on it, it will go into his hand and pierce it Isaiah 36:6.
He is right, and he is saying what Isaiah has been saying for thirty years Isaiah 30:7. The Egyptian alliance was worthless, and a Nile reed used as a walking stick splinters and drives into the palm — an injury worse than no support at all.
Isn't that he whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah has taken away? Isaiah 36:7.
Here he is wrong, and the mistake is instructive. Hezekiah's reform had removed the local shrines 2 Kings 18:4, and the Assyrian reads it as a king who insulted his own god. He cannot conceive of a deity who wants fewer altars.
I will give you two thousand horses, if you are able on your part to set riders on them Isaiah 36:8.
The taunt is that Judah could not field two thousand cavalrymen if the horses were given away.
Have I come up now without Yahweh against this land to destroy it? Yahweh said to me, "Go up against this land" Isaiah 36:10.
And this is also true, in the sense the tenth chapter established — Assyria is the rod in God's hand Isaiah 10:5. The officer has stumbled onto the theology and drawn the wrong conclusion from it, because a rod does not get to keep the credit.
Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it. Don't speak to us in the Jews' language in the hearing of the people who are on the wall Isaiah 36:11.
The delegation asks him to switch to the diplomatic language. It is an admission that they do not want their own people hearing the argument.
Has my master sent me only to your master and to you... and not to the men who sit on the wall, who will eat their own dung and drink their own urine with you? Isaiah 36:12.
He refuses, and describes what a siege does. Then he raises his voice and preaches over their heads — offering every man his own vine and fig tree, and a deportation described as a move to a better country Isaiah 36:16–17.
Who are they among all the gods of these countries that have delivered their country out of my hand, that Yahweh should deliver Jerusalem? Isaiah 36:20.
The argument's conclusion, and it is empirically sound. Every god on the list had failed. The one error in it is putting Yahweh on the list.
But they remained silent, and said nothing in reply Isaiah 36:21.
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