Charles Ellicott Commentary 2 Kings 20:17

"Behold, the days come, that all that is in thy house, and that which thy fathers have laid up in store unto this day, shall be carried to Babylon: nothing shall be left, saith Jehovah." — 2 Kings 20:17 (ASV)

Behold, the days come ... — Compare 2 Chronicles 32:25–26; 2 Chronicles 32:31. It is said there that divine wrath fell upon Hezekiah because his heart was lifted up, and that the Babylonian embassy was an occasion in which God tested his inward tendencies.

Self-confidence and vanity would be awakened in Hezekiah’s heart as he displayed all his resources to the envoys, heard their diplomatic, and perhaps exaggerated, expressions of wonder and delight, and perhaps he himself realized for the first time the full extent of his prosperity.

But it was not only the king’s vanity that displeased a prophet who had always consistently denounced foreign alliances as indicating a deviation from absolute trust in Jehovah; and a more terrible irony than that which animates the prophecy before us can hardly be conceived.

Your friends, he cries, will prove robbers; your allies will become your conquerors.

That Isaiah should have foreseen that Assyria, then at the height of its power, would one day be dethroned from the sovereignty of the world by that very Babylon which, at the time he spoke, was threatened with ruin by Assyrian arms, can only be accepted as true by those who accept the reality of supernatural prediction.

Thenius remarks: “An Isaiah might well perceive what fate threatened the little kingdom of Judah, in case of a revolution of affairs brought about by the Babylonians.”

But the tone of the prophecy is not hypothetical but entirely positive. Besides, Isaiah evidently did not suppose that Merodach-baladan’s revolt would succeed (Compare Isaiah 14:29 and following, 21:9).