Charles Ellicott Commentary Isaiah 36

It came to pass in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah ... —In the judgment of nearly all Assyriologists (Sir Henry Rawlinson, Sayce, Hinckes, Lenormant, Schrader, Cheyne), we have to rectify the chronology. The inscriptions of Sennacherib fix the date of his campaign against Hezekiah in the third year of his reign (B.C. 700), and that does not coincide with the fourteenth, but with the twenty-seventh year of the king of Judah. The error, on this assumption, arose from the editor of Isaiah’s prophecies taking for granted that Hezekiah’s illness followed the destruction of Sennacherib’s army, or, at least, his attack, and then counting back the fifteen years for which his life was prolonged from the date of his death.

Most of the scholars named above have come to the conclusion that the illness preceded Sennacherib’s campaign by ten or eleven years, and this, of course, involves moving back the embassy from Babylon (Isaiah 39:0) to about the same period. Lenormant (Manual of Ancient History, 1:181), adhering to the Biblical sequence, real or apparent, of the events, meets the difficulty by assuming that Hezekiah reigned for forty-one instead of twenty-nine years, and that Manasseh was associated with him in titular sovereignty even from his birth, and that the fifty years of his reign were counted from that time.

Sennacherib king of Assyria. —According to the Assyrian inscriptions, the king succeeded Sargon, who was assassinated in his palace, B.C. 704, and after subduing the province of Babylon which had rebelled under Merôdach-baladan, turned his course southward against Hezekiah with four or five distinct complaints—

1. that the king had refused tribute (2 Kings 18:14);
2. that he had opened negotiations with Babylon and Egypt (2 Kings 18:24) with a view to an alliance against Assyria;
3. that he had helped the Philistines of Ekron to rise against their king who supported Assyria, and had kept that king as a prisoner in Jerusalem (Records of the Past, i. 36-39).

The king of Assyria sent Rabshakeh. —The word is a title (the Rabshakeh), probably the chief officer or cup-bearer. In 2 Kings 18; 2 Chronicles 32; 2 Chronicles 32, we have the previous history of the war. Hezekiah, on hearing Sennacherib’s reproach, began to strengthen the fortifications of Jerusalem, called his officers and troops together, and made an appeal to their faith and courage. In Isaiah 22, we have the prophet’s view of those preparations. Probably by Isaiah’s advice, who put no confidence in this boastful and blustering courage, Hezekiah sent to Sennacherib, who was then besieging Lachish, to sue for peace, acknowledging that he had offended.

A penalty of three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold was imposed and paid, Hezekiah being reduced to emptying his own treasury and that of the Temple, and even to stripping the Temple doors and pillars of the plates of gold with which they were overlaid. Peace, however, could not be obtained even at that price. Encouraged, perhaps, by this prompt submission, and tearing up the treaty (the breach of covenant of which Isaiah complains in Isaiah 35:1), Sennacherib sent his officers, the Tartan, the Rabsaris, and the Rabshakeh (the names are all official titles), to demand an unconditional surrender.

He stood by the conduit of the upper pool. —The spot was the same as that at which Isaiah had addressed Ahaz thirty or more years before (Isaiah 7:3). It was probably chosen by the Rabshakeh because it commanded one end of the aqueduct which supplied the city with water, thus enabling him to threaten that he would cut off the supply (Isaiah 36:12).

Eliakim. —It is significant that Eliakim now fills the office which, a short time before, had been filled by Shebna, while the latter is reduced to the inferior position of a scribe (Isaiah 22:15–25). The change is clearly traceable to Isaiah’s influence. The “scribe” was the secretary who formulated dispatches and decrees; the “recorder,” probably the registrar of the official annals.

I have counsel and strength for war ... — Reports of Hezekiah’s speech, probably also of his negotiations with Egypt, had reached the ears of the Assyrian king. So Sennacherib, in his inscriptions, speaks of “the king of Egypt as a monarch who could not save those who trusted in him” (Smith, Assyrian Canon). The Pharaoh in this case was Shabatoka, or Sabaco II., the father of the Tir-hakah of Isaiah 37:9, one of the Ethiopian dynasty that reigned in Egypt from B.C. 725-665.

Is it not he, whose high places ... — This was the impression left on the mind of the Rabshakeh by what he heard of Hezekiah’s reformation. From the Assyrian standpoint, a god was honoured in proportion as his sanctuaries were multiplied; but wherever he went, the Rabshakeh had found “high places” where Jehovah had been worshipped, which Hezekiah had desecrated. How could one who had so acted hope for the protection of his God?