Isaiah 36
1 In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, Sennacherib king of Assyria attacked all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them.
2 The king of Assyria sent the chief officer from Lachish to Jerusalem, to King Hezekiah, with a large army. He stopped by the channel of the upper pool, on the road to the Launderer’s Field.
3 Eliakim son of Hilkiah, the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary, and Joah son of Asaph, the recorder, went out to meet him.
4 The chief officer said to them, “Tell Hezekiah: ‘This is what the great king, the king of Assyria, says: “What are you relying on?”
5 You say, ‘Advice and strength for war are nothing but empty words.’ Now, who are you relying on, that you have rebelled against me?
6 Look, you are relying on Egypt, that broken reed of a staff. It pierces the hand of anyone who leans on it. That is what Pharaoh king of Egypt is like to everyone who relies on him.
7 And if you tell me, ‘We rely on the LORD our God’—wasn’t it Hezekiah who removed His high places and altars, and told Judah and Jerusalem, ‘You must worship before this altar’?
8 Now, make a bargain with my master, the king of Assyria: I will give you two thousand horses, if you can find riders for them.
9 How can you turn back even one of my master’s least important officers? Yet you rely on Egypt for chariots and horsemen.
10 And now, did I come up against this land to destroy it without the LORD? The LORD told me, ‘Go up against this land and destroy it.’”’”
11 Eliakim, Shebna, and Joah said to the chief officer, “Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, because we understand it. Don’t speak to us in Judean within earshot of the people on the wall.”
12 But the chief officer said, “Was it to your master and to you that my master sent me to speak these words? Wasn’t it to the men sitting on the wall, who will have to eat their own filth and drink their own urine along with you?”
13 Then the chief officer stood up and shouted loudly in Judean: “Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria!
14 This is what the king says: ‘Don’t let Hezekiah deceive you, because he cannot rescue you.
15 And don’t let Hezekiah persuade you to rely on the LORD by saying, “The LORD will surely rescue us; this city will not be handed over to the king of Assyria.”
16 Don’t listen to Hezekiah. This is what the king of Assyria says: “Make peace with me and come out to me. Each of you will eat from your own vine and fig tree, and drink water from your own cistern,
17 until I come and take you to a land like your own, a land of grain and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards.”
18 Don’t let Hezekiah mislead you by saying, “The LORD will rescue us.” Have the gods of the nations rescued their lands from the king of Assyria?
19 Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Did they rescue Samaria from my hand?
20 Which of all the gods of these lands has rescued its land from my hand? So how can the LORD rescue Jerusalem from my hand?’”
21 But they kept silent and did not answer him a word, because the king had commanded, “Do not answer him.”
22 Then Eliakim son of Hilkiah, the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary, and Joah son of Asaph, the recorder, came to Hezekiah with their clothes torn and told him the words of the chief officer.
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