In those days, therefore, Jahveh, without pity for His people, called them to “weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth: and behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall die. And the Lord of hosts revealed Himself in mine ears, Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord, the Lord of Hosts.” * The prophet threw the blame on the courtiers especially Shebna, who still hoped for succour from the Egyptians, and kept up the king’s illusions on this point. He threatened him with the divine anger; he depicted him as seized by Jahveh, rolled and kneaded into a lump, “and tossed like a ball into a large country: there shalt thou die, and there shall be the chariots of thy glory, thou shame of thy lord’s house. And I will thrust thee from thy office, and from thy station he shall pull thee down!”** Meanwhile, day after day elapsed, and Pharaoh did not hasten to the rescue. Hezekiah’s eyes were opened; he dismissed Shebna, and degraded him to the position of scribe, and set Eliakim in his place in the Council of State.***
* Isa. xxii. 1-14.
** Isa. xxii. 15-19.
***In the duplicate narrative of these negotiations with the
Assyrian generals, Shebna is in fact considered as a mere
scribe, while Eliakim is the prefect of the king’s house (2
Kings xviii. 18, 37; xix. 2: Isa. xxxvi. 3, 22; xxxvii. 2).
Isaiah’s influence revived, and he persuaded the king to sue for peace while yet there was time.
Sennacherib was encamped at Lachish; but the Tartan and his two lieutenants received the overtures of peace, and proposed a parley near the conduit of the upper pool, in the highway of the fuller’s field. Hezekiah did not venture to go in person to the meeting-place; he sent Eliakirn, the new prefect of the palace, Shebna, and the chancellor Joah, the chief cupbearer, and tradition relates that the Assyrian addressed them in severe terms in his master’s name: “Now on whom dost thou trust, that thou rebellest against me? Behold, thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, even upon Egypt; whereon if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it: so is Pharaoh, King of Egypt, to all that trust on him.” Then, as he continued to declaim in a loud voice, so that the crowds gathered on the wall could hear him, the delegates besought him to speak in Aramaic, which they understood, but “speak not to us in the Jews’ language, in the ears of the people that are on the wall!” Instead, however, of granting their request, the Assyrian general advanced towards the spectators and addressed them in Hebrew: “Hear ye the words of the great king, the King of Assyria. Let not Hezekiah deceive you; for he shall not be able to deliver you: neither let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord, saying, The Lord will surely deliver us: this city shall not be given into the hand of the King of Assyria. Hearken not to Hezekiah: for thus saith the King of Assyria, Make your peace with me, and come out to me; and eat ye every one of his vine, and every one of his fig tree, and drink ye every one the waters of his own cistern; until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of corn and wine, a land of bread and vineyards. Beware lest Hezekiah persuade you, saying, The Lord will deliver us!” The specified conditions were less hard than might have been feared.*
* The Hebrew version of these events is recorded in 2 Kings
xviii. 13-37; xix., and in Isa. xxxvi., xxxvii., with only
one important divergence, namely, the absence from Isaiah of
verses 14-16 of 2 Kings xviii. This particular passage, in
which the name of the king has a peculiar form, is a
detached fragment of an older document, perhaps the official
annals of the kingdom, whose contents agreed with the facts
recorded in the Assyrian text. The rest is borrowed from the
cycle of prophetic narratives, and contains two different
versions of the same events. The first comprises 2 Kings
xviii. 13, 17-37; xix. l-9a, 36&-37, where Sennacherib is
represented as despatching a verbal message to Hezekiah by
the Tartan and his captains. The second consists merely of 2
Kings xix. 96-36a, and in this has been inserted a long
prophecy of Isaiah’s (xix. 21-31) which has but a vague
connection with the rest of the narrative. In this
Sennacherib defied Hezekiah in a letter, which the Jewish
king spread before the Lord, and shortly afterwards received
a reply through the prophet. The two versions were combined
towards the end of the seventh or beginning of the sixth
century, by the compiler of the Book of Kings, and passed
thence into the collection of the prophecies attributed to
Isaiah.
The Jewish king was to give up his wives and daughters as hostages, to pledge himself to pay a regular tribute, and disburse immediately a ransom of thirty talents of gold, and eight hundred talents of silver: he could only make up this large sum by emptying the royal and sacred treasuries, and taking down the plates of gold with which merely a short while before he had adorned the doors and lintels of the temple. Padî was released from his long captivity, reseated on his throne, and received several Jewish towns as an indemnity: other portions of territory were bestowed upon Mitinti of Ashdod and Zillibel of Graza as a reward for their loyalty.*
* The sequence of events is not very well observed in the
Assyrian text, and the liberation of Padî is inserted in 11.
8-11, before the account of the war with Hezekiah. It seems
very unlikely that the King of Judah would have released his
prisoner before his treaty with Sennacherib; the Assyrian
scribe, wishing to bring together all the facts relating to
Ekron, anticipated this event. Hebrew tradition fixed the
ransom at the lowest figure, 300 talents of silver instead
of the 800 given in the Assyrian document (2 Kings xviii.
14), and authorities have tried to reconcile this divergence
by speculating on the different values represented by a
talent in different countries and epochs.
Hezekiah issued from the struggle with his territory curtailed and his kingdom devastated; the last obstacle which stood in the way of the Assyrians’ victorious advance fell with him, and Sennacherib could now push forward with perfect safety towards the Nile. He had, indeed, already planned an attack on Egypt, and had reached the isthmus, when a mysterious accident arrested his further progress. The conflict on the plains of Altaku had been severe; and the army, already seriously diminished by its victory, had been still further weakened during the campaign in Judæa, and possibly the excesses indulged in by the soldiery had developed in them the germs of one of those terrible epidemics which had devastated Western Asia several times in the course of the century: whatever may have been the cause, half the army was destroyed by pestilence before it reached the frontier of the Delta, and Sennacherib led back the shattered remnants of his force to Nineveh.*
* The Assyrian texts are silent about this catastrophe, and
the sacred books of the Hebrews seem to refer it to the camp
at Libnah in Palestine (2 Kings xix. 8-35); the Egyptian
legend related by Herodotus seems to prove that it took
place near the Egyptian frontier. Josephus takes the king as
far as Pelusium, and describes the destruction of the
Assyrian army as taking place in the camp before this town.
He may have been misled by the meaning “mud,” which attaches
to the name of Libnah as well as to that of Pelusium. Oppert
upheld his opinion, and identified the Libnah of the
biblical narrative with the Pelusium of Herodotus. It is
probable that each of the two nations referred the scene of
the miracle to a different locality.