Isaiah 36:1-12 ▼

1 And it came to pass in the fourteenth … year of king Hezekiah that Sennacherib king of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah, and he captured them.

2 And the king of Assyria sent the Rabshakeh from Lachish to Jerusalem, to king Hezekiah, with a great army; and he stood by the conduit of the upper pool on the highway to the Field of Fuller.

3 And went out to him Eliakim son of Hilkiah, who was over the house, and Shebna the scribe, and Joah son of Asaph the recorder.

4 And the Rabshakeh said to them, “Say, please, to Hezekiah, thus says the great king, the king of Assyria: ‘What is this confidence with which you are confident?

5 You speak a mere word of the lips is counsel and strength for the battle? Now, in whom are you trusting, that you have rebelled against me?

6 Behold, are you trusting in the staff of this broken reed in Egypt, which a man who leans on it, it will go into his palm and pierce it! So is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all those trusting in him.

7 But if you say to me, ‘In YHWH our God we trust,’ is it not He for whom His high places and His altars, Hezekiah has turned aside, and said to Judah and to Jerusalem, ‘Before this altar you? shall worship?

8 And now, make a wager, please, with my lord the king of Assyria, and I will give to you two thousand horses—if you are able to set for you riders on them.

9 And how can you turn back the faces of one among a governor of the least servants of my lord, and place your trust in Egypt for chariot and horsemen?

10 And now, was it without YHWH that I came up against this land to destroy it? YHWH has said to me, ‘Go up against this land and destroy it!’”

11 And Eliakim said and Shebna and Joah to the Rabshakeh, “Speak, please, to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it; and do not speak to us in Hebrew in the ears of the people who are on the wall.”

12 And the Rabshakeh said “Was it to your lord and to you that my master sent me to speak these words? Was it not to the men sitting on the wall who will eat their own dung and drink their own urine with you??”