40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 2 Kings 18:9-27 (Episode 343)

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

The king of Assyria carries away Israel because they neither listened to nor did what God told them. Hezekiah gathers a crazy amount of gold and silver to try to pay off the Assyrian king. But the foreign king has a message that he wants all the people of Judah to hear. Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! HWSS Regional Conference 1517 Podcast Network 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. while you're over there make sure you go to the events page because we got an event a regional event you know the national here we still stay in conference sold out long ago i mean it was sold out in a matter of 17 days i believe uh which is a record for us by a lot uh that's uh it wasn't like it just like oh a new record it's like if the previous record for the one mile was uh 10

minutes and someone ran it in 25 seconds uh it was that kind of record-breaking thing so i that one sold out can't go to that but if you want to go to an event you can come down to bentonville arkansas and come to the regional event it's two-day event may 5th and 6th chad's going to be there i'm going to be there a whole bunch of other people are going to be there it's a great time it's only 99 for you to come hang out with us i'll put a link in the show notes but yeah you should come hang out. We're going to be talking about the book of Galatians, Paul's letter to Galatians, but we're going to be talking about the whole conference long. There's going to be great food, as always. There's going to be a concert on Friday night with the Arcadian Wild,

who's a great four-piece kind of folky band out of Nashville, Tennessee. It's going to be a lot of fun, so check that out and see if you can't join us in the spring. Chad, last episode, God found himself a guy He's been searching high He's been searching low He's been looking under every rock And seeing if he could find just somebody Anybody

That won't just, you know Pump the brakes on idolatry But actually hit the gas And run over Some asherah poles Tear down some high places You know, all of this sort of stuff And lo and behold

Last episode we got to meet the guy that finally did what even good kings before him couldn't quite get done, and that is that the high places have been torn down. And this gets Hezekiah a gold star as far as kings of Israel go. Yeah, he's the man. I don't know how many times we've heard about the high places.

So-and-so was a good king, but the high places remained. Well, the high places no longer remained under Hezekiah. So that opening eight verses of second Kings chapter 18, just sings the praises of Hezekiah. He not only tore down the high places, he got rid of the, uh, the, the bronze serpent and the Houston that had become an idolatrous object. Nobody, none of the Kings after him or those before him were quite as, as awesome as Hezekiah. He held fast to the Lord. The Lord was with him.

He prospered so on and so forth. And we wrapped up with verse 8, which describes another very David-like quality that Hezekiah has. He struck down the Philistines as far as Gaza and its territory from watchtower to fortified city. Now, one of the things that we're going to be talking actually quite a bit in this episode is some overlap between what we read is happening in the biblical text about Hezekiah and the Assyrian kings that we're going to be hearing quite a bit about. We're also going to be talking about some material that we have from Assyrian records, in particular from those of Sennacherib. I'm going to try and kind of weave that into the biblical narrative, because we actually know a lot about what is happening,

what's being described in this chapter from other sources, from these Assyrian sources. It's kind of cool to compare these two. And this is one of these instances where there's some overlap. So when we hear about him striking the Philistines down in Gaza and everywhere else, we know from the Assyrian records that one of the Philistine cities, Ekron, the king there had the name of Padi, and he had actually remained loyal to the Assyrians. but one of the things that happened is the Philistines didn't like the fact that he was loyal to the Assyrians, so they deposed him and carried him as a captive to Jerusalem. So during Hezekiah's reign, some of the Philistines in the city of Ekron actually carried their king as a prisoner and delivered him to Hezekiah, and he was there for some time

as a captive in Jerusalem. So more than just tracking down the Philistines, they actually ended up taking one of their kings back as a as a prisoner well we shift from verse 8 to verse verses 9 through 12 and in those verses we kind of have a a recap of some of the stuff that we've talked about with the the victories of the assyrians so in the fourth year of hezekiah that was the seventh year of hoshea who was the king in the northern kingdom so during the fourth year of hezekiah shamanizer king of assyria came against samaria besieged it at the end of three years he took it so we've talked about that back in chapter 17 this is the the conquest of samaria and thus the the conquest of the northern kingdom and then in the sixth year of hezekiah

which was the ninth year of hoshea samaria was taken so samaria is gone the northern kingdom is going to be destroyed and as we read on the king of assyria the israelites captive to assyria and put them all over the place put a mahala on the habor on the river of gozan and the cities of the medes why because they did not well literally they didn't listen to the voice of the lord their god your english translations are going to render that obey but uh they didn't listen basically they didn't shema uh instead they listened to well they listened to the voice of false prophets they listened to the voice of their own heads and hearts they listened to the voice of their compatriots but the one voice they didn't listen to was the voice of of god

and instead they transgressed his covenant even all that moses the servant of the lord commanded they neither listened nor obeyed maybe listen nor did basically in hebrew yeah i like i like this uh this last verse here how that they neither listened nor listen which is which is really what's going on there i mean did but the idea of listening is that you hear it you absorb it and that you may potentially act upon what it is that you've heard. And so not only did they not do anything or listen, they didn't listen or do anything. It's hard to do anything if you don't listen.

Yeah, right. If you close your ears to the voice of the Lord, your God, you're not going to do, of course, what he says because you didn't hear what he said for you to do. This is one of the reasons that God is always like, listen to me, you've got to listen to me, You've got to listen to me, because God knows that—you know how this goes when, I don't know, you have a kid, and you're like, listen to me. Now, why are you doing that?

Why don't you just say, do this thing? But why is it when your kid's—you really need to tell him something, and you need him to do something. You say, listen to the words that are coming out of my mouth, because you know, as children are this way, and the children of God are no different, there's no chance that you do what it is that I desire you to do if you do not hear what I have to say. So I need you to listen very carefully. That's why the ears are the organ of reception, right? Not the eyes. He's not saying, watch. He's saying, listen. So open your ears. When God says watch, He's about to do something. Yeah, yeah. But He wants you to actually do something. He says, listen. I was thinking,

that could be the epitaph on the tombstone of the northern kingdom. Those five words at the end of verse 12, they neither listened nor obeyed. That's not a happy epitaph, but that pretty much sums up everything. They didn't shema and they didn't asa. They didn't listen. And because of that, they didn't do. Period. That was their doom right there. So I think we're pretty much done with the northern kingdom uh that was just kind of a brief recap of what we we talked about quite a bit back when we covered chapter 17. so now we're going to shift gears in in verse 13 and we're going to hear about more hear a lot more about hezekiah and we're also going to hear quite a bit about the his counterpart in assyria the next assyrian ruler was a guy by the name of

Sennacherib. So we're in the 14th year of King Hezekiah, and we have Sennacherib, who's the Assyrian king, who's decided that he's going to come up against all the fortified cities of Judah and besiege them and actually capture a number of them. So just kind of get ourselves oriented chronologically, this is 701 BC. So in case you're kind of wondering where we've been, That's a definite marker here. 701 BC, Sennacherib comes against Judah. And we not only have this recorded here, but we also have the same thing recorded in the book of Isaiah.

So if you turn to Isaiah 36 through 39, a lot of the material that's recorded in 2 Kings is going to be also repeated, almost verbatim actually, in Isaiah 36 through 39. And of course, you have the Chronicles account as well. So this is one of those rare Old Testament instances where we have multiple occurrences of the same account described in pretty close sorts of ways,

kind of a Matthew-Mark-Luke approach to this incident. And we know this. So what seems to have happened is, so Sennacherib becomes the ruler of Assyria, I think around maybe 706 BC. And it's pretty typical. When you have a turnover of leadership in the ancient world, what happens?

We got revolts that are breaking out all over the place. Because the people who were under the authority of the previous ruler, they see this as a chance to, you know, to break bad, right? They're going to rebel against the new ruler. They're going to try and establish some independence again. So a lot of times the first few years of the new king is basically just squashing one rebellion after another. And we know that's what Sennacherib had to do. He had to squash rebellion against the Babylonians, and then he had the Philistines, he had the Egyptians, and then he had the people of Judea. All these people he had to take care of.

Now, what's recorded for us here is how he moves into Judea and begins to attack these various cities of Judah. And according to him, now this is according to the Assyrians, he captured, I think, 46 towns. now maybe he's exaggerating there was a lot of exaggeration happening in this these i mean this was assyrian propaganda keep in mind yeah you know so you can't you can't read what the assyrians wrote about these great accomplishments that they did without a grain of salt because of course they were it's like listening to the russians tell you we've lost five people in this entire battle yes right really yeah propaganda is not a new thing it didn't originate uh you know in the the world wars of the 1900s this was an ancient thing you

always i mean you read the uh you read the hieroglyphs on the egyptian monuments well you're just reading propaganda i mean they're just boasting this is nothing but one long boast about this pharaoh did this great thing and this pharaoh did that great thing they don't record defeats in other words they record victories and so you know it's propaganda when it's like he took he captured 47 cities and also uh added 37 000 stars to the sky and you're like i feel like uh i don't know this is like an accurate history yeah yeah we'll we'll see later on in this chapter how he's he's bragging about he's like basically emptied the waters of the nile you know he destroyed the heights of the cedars of lebanon it just it it's just one brag after another basically

is what you're looking at here. So typical arrogant hyperbole that you read in the Assyrian records. But of course, it is factual. He did come and he attacked. He attacked a lot of cities. And we're going to hear about one of them in just a minute, Lachish.

I'll describe a little bit in more detail about what happened there. But verse 14 introduces us to a little bit different side of Hezekiah. So we have this glowing report of Hezekiah. No king like him before, no king like him afterward. He fathered the Lord with all his heart. He was like David, so on and so forth.

All of which is true. I mean, we don't want to take away from that. But keep in mind that despite this very glowing complimentary speech about Hezekiah, it wasn't like he was perfect. so i mean we're talking we're not about like some sort of superhuman uber righteous perfectly moral king i mean he's compared to david and we know we know about david right david was a man after god's own heart but david was also a guy who was after bathsheba and who was guilty of

murder and did a lot of bad stuff so don't get the picture of that this david like hezekiah is going to be some sort of jesus figure or something he's not he's got foibles and flaws just like all All the kings did. That's what makes the Bible different than, you know, the history of the Assyrians or whatever, is that they would have left this out, right? Yeah, right. They leave all that kind of stuff out. They're not going to tell you about that stuff, but the Scripture is not like that. You know, I mean, maybe the numbers are rounded off and that kind of stuff, but they don't hide the failings of kings or leaders or heroes.

yeah you're not gonna you're not gonna be like looking at this big obelisk in assyria uh that archaeologists might find and you know when they're deciphering the the acadia and they're like oh look it says that in the fifth year of sennacherib he was on the roof of his palace yeah and he saw he saw this naked woman bathing and he wanted her so he took her and then he killed her then he killed her husband no none of that's going to be recorded but it is in the bible because the Bible is not your typical religious propaganda. I mean, this just kind of puts it all out there. It opens a closet door.

All the skeletons fall out for all the world to see. So what are we talking about here? Well, verse 14 says, Hezekiah, king of Judah, sent to the king of Assyria at Lachish, saying, now you might think he'd say something like, you know, the Lord my God will destroy you, Or how dare you enter into the sacred holy land of Judea and attack our cities? No, he says, this is Hezekiah talking to the king of Assyria.

I have done wrong. Withdraw from me. Whatever you impose on me, I will bear. So things weren't good with Hezekiah. He's threatened by the Assyrian king, and he realizes, probably because of what was happening at Lachish, he's realizing that from his perspective, he has no hope of winning a battle against the Assyrian king. So what's he going to do?

Well, he's basically going to say, hey, sorry, I shouldn't have rebelled against you. Name the price, and I'll give it to you. Whatever it takes for you to get out of my country, I'll pay whatever steep fine that you impose upon me. And we read the king of Assyria required of Hezekiah, king of Judah, 300 talents of silver and 30 talents of gold. So that's the price. At least that's the initial price, as we're going to find out just in a minute. The Assyrian king wanted even more. By the way, that is a lot.

that's a lot yeah yeah keep in mind by the way that um we're used to thinking of of talents well any any time we hear about gold and silver what we we're thinking of coins right because that's the way that we were anything about but they didn't have coins yet this is not coinage we're talking about here so uh weights this is weights yeah that this is how this was determined so a talent in hebrew is a kicker and this was probably like weights maybe they were shaped like coins disc shaped but we're talking about a talent that is 75 pounds yeah so 300 talents so 300 times 75 pounds of silver and then 30 of these talents of gold so get your scales out uh get your industrial size scales out here and just start measuring the gold there's a whole lot of it i mean it's

It's over 20,000 pounds of silver. Yeah, I mean, that's almost as much as I have hidden in my back room there. My four knocks. Yeah, 20,000. It was 22,000 pounds of silver. And then, you know, 30. You're talking about, you know, 2,200 pounds of gold. That's a lot.

That's a lot of precious metal. It's a lot of precious metal. Yeah. And that's a steep, steep price to pay. Now, the question is, all right, well, it's a lot of gold and silver. Where in the world are you going to get that much gold and silver from? Where are you going to get it from? The two places that we always hear about, from the king's house and from the Lord's house.

Those are kind of your two national banks of Israel, if you will. And that's what we hear in verse 15 that Hezekiah did. Hezekiah gave him all the silver that was found in the temple, in the house of the Lord and in the treasuries of the king's house. So that's the silver. He's taking it from the two national banks, the Lord's house and his house.

Where's he going to get the gold? Well, verse 16 says that Hezekiah stripped the gold from the doors of the temple of the Lord and from the doorpost that Hezekiah had overlaid. And he gave all this to the king of Assyria. Yeah, so they don't have this just lying around. they had to go this isn't just like everyone hand in your jewelry this is like you know they're they're popping gold caps off teeth they are uh undoing the the hinges on the doors they're

taking the doorknobs off they're like anything that's remotely got gold on it's gotta it's gotta go with it like we're trying to we're trying to get a lot of gold here so if there's any you have something in your house lord's house king's house is decorated with gold it's gotta come off yeah hand it over yeah it's a it's really it's a it's a sad episode because it it shows that uh well it's it's a contrast so later we're going to hear about how hezekiah actually goes to the temple and prays there he's asking god intervene but this time he doesn't do that he goes to the temple not with the purpose of praying but he goes to the temple with the purpose of looking around and be like hey is that gold up there we'll strip it down is that gold

there, we'll tear it off because we got to have all this gold. Otherwise, the Assyrian king is going to be unhappy or more unhappy with us than he already is. So it was a politically calculated decision that Hezekiah made. He's the underdog. And so he thinks there's no way that he's going to be able to defeat the Assyrians. And so what he turns to is the same thing that kings have turned to over and over and over well you know if you can't beat a guy then you pay him off more or less and that's so that's what he's doing so uh he he he does this he sends it to the king uh sends it to the king of assyria verse seven now you would think i mean i would think about just reading through this that the assyrian king would like kind of smugly receive this gift

and be like well that'll teach him a lesson and then you know pocket the uh pocket the money and then be about his business. That's not what happened. For whatever reason, we're not told. For whatever reason, this was not enough. So the payoff was not going to satisfy Sennacherib. Instead, he wants to go to Jerusalem itself. He wants to take the city.

Whatever it takes, he wants to make sure that he walks triumphant through the gates of Jerusalem. And what he's going to do there, well, who knows? You can probably guess from what they did to other places. But what happens in verse 17 is that he didn't come himself, but he sends his top dogs. So this is translated various sorts of ways. Sometimes the Hebrew is just rendered into English.

It's just transliterated, and sometimes it's translated. but uh what we're looking at here are are three different titles basically so the esv has the king of assyria sent the tartan the rab sadis and the rav shakir rab shakir however you want to say it in english so these are three offices we might call them uh that were uh you know representative of various kinds of authorities. So NIV has the supreme commander, his chief officer, and his field commander. Robert Alder recommends that we translate this.

He sent the vizier, the head eunuch, and the head steward. It doesn't really matter. These guys, in other words, these aren't personal names. These are the offices that they held. So Tartan and Rav Saris and Rav Shaka. So he sends these three guys with a great army from Lachish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem. now what's happening at lachish well a lot of really horrific things wrapping at lachish

and we know this from a a huge wall relief in the palace at nineveh that belonged to king sennacherib so when you're not listening to the podcast google the siege of lachish and just look at the images that are that are going to come up there uh the whole battle scene is is depicted in this massive wall relief so you can see the assyrians they have these pointy hats and some of them have slings some of them have a lot of them have have bows some that have spears and shields some of these guys are in like these siege works it's it kind of looks like a uh a wagon or a chariot with a cover over the top of it and they're and a ram in the front to of course to hit the walls. In the archaeological digs that they've done at Lachish, they found a huge

siege ramp that the Assyrians built that went up to the city wall. There's pictures of Judeans, of the Israelites that have been impaled on poles or on stakes. There's also pictures of some of them being led away as prisoners of war. So this whole battle scene is depicted that was happening at lakish which is about 25 or 30 miles from jerusalem it was a it was an important defense city like you had to get through lakish to get to jerusalem basically and so that's why it was that's why it was attacked so sometimes you have a few minutes uh google the siege of lakish and you can read all about uh what was happening there and you can see all the various images i think they're in the the whole thing is in the british museum now if you ever have a chance to go go

check it out but it's it's it's a great it's a great archaeological remain that illustrates in in this very graphic violent detail everything that was happening at this biblical city uh now none of this is described in the scriptures we're just told that they were at lakish the whole siege and the in the battle and everything is not described but that's we know that that is what was happening at at this time so anyway these guys come from that city which has been conquered and now they're on their way to Jerusalem. They show up to Jerusalem, these three guys, these three representatives of the king of Assyria.

They come to King Hezekiah and they go up at a place. It's called, they stand by the conduit of the upper pool, which is on the highway to the washer's field. Now we've heard about this before, or if you've read Isaiah, you've heard about this before. This is the exact same place where Isaiah confronts Hezekiah's father Ahaz and tells him, you know, here's your choice. Trust in the Lord or you're going to be destroyed. And Ahaz is like, oh, no, no, I'm not going to trust in the Lord.

I'm not going to put the Lord to the test by asking for a sign. That's the same place where that whole episode occurred. Well, now we're back at this exact same place. And what's more, it's going to be a moment of who you're going to trust. You're going to trust in the Lord, are you going to trust in somebody else? So these three Assyrian officials show up. They're standing there, and they called for the king. And so

the king sends his own representatives out. So we have a little powwow here between the Assyrian officials sent by Sennacherib and the Jewish officials, the Israelite officials, sent by Hezekiah. And these guys are named Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah, and he's over the household. And then you have Shevna,

who is the scribe or the secretary. then you have a guy named joah the son of asaph and he is the he's the recorder so you got three assyrian officials you got three israelite officials and they're meeting there and they're about to have uh have this discussion this is this is interesting too like you send out three guys and you would think you'd send out like the general the captain and the lieutenant or something i don't know uh he sends out yeah he sends out his butler uh his scribe and his historian i wonder if maybe part of the reason i'm this is totally conjecture is because uh

he expected these guys these assyrians to speak in aramaic okay so aramaic would have been the the lingua franco of the day it was kind of the what english has become what latin once was uh what french sort of was for a while i mean that was just like the there was a language that the educated people knew and language would have been the language of political discourse and so you know who knows aramaic in uh in jerusalem well it probably would have been like the king's close officials maybe maybe not the generals but maybe you know guys like well these fellas you know his secretary scribe and a historian i mean they probably yeah they're gonna they're gonna know aramaic yeah now it backfires though because as we'll hear in the

course of this speech when uh when i don't i don't know how to say his name uh rob rab sheki robsha care uh can be pronounced different ways in english but rapture care so when he starts talking he doesn't speak in aramaic he speaks in hebrew they didn't expect that i mean they were thinking this was going to be like you speak aramaic to us we'll speak aramaic back to you that way you know not everybody's going to be able to understand what's going on although no that's that would have destroyed the whole purpose of this this it's it's pretty actually uh a smart smartly political speech that this assyrian guy is about to deliver uh as as we will hear momentarily so he's going to speak in hebrew so that he's going to speak no doubt with a loud

voice so that everybody who's hanging on the walls and trying to eavesdrop on this conversation so they can understand so here's how he starts out so this is rob sheke the uh the assyrian he says say to Hezekiah, thus says the great king, the king of Assyria, on what do you rest this trust of yours? Do you think that mere words are strategy and power for war? In whom do you now trust that you have rebelled against me? Behold, you're trusting in now in Egypt, that broken reed of a staff that will pierce the hand of any man who leans on it, such as Pharaoh, king of Egypt, The speech goes on. Let me pause there for just a minute. Notice how often already the language of trust has come up.

One, two, three, four, five. I count five perhaps more times just in the next few verses where that comes up. That's what this is all about. Who are you going to trust in? What he's going to really be toying with is you're going to trust in Hezekiah. are you going to trust in Egypt? Are you going to trust in the Lord? Who are you going to trust in? Really, what he's wanting them to do is, of course, to trust in Sennacherib, the Assyrians. It's where he wants them to put their faith. And he's saying, you look anywhere else,

you look to the gods of the nations, you look to your own God, you look to Hezekiah, you look to the Egyptians. Nowhere else are you going to find the kind of deliverance that you can find in the Assyrian king. You should fear, love, and trust in him alone, is kind of the implication of of this this speech yeah the language here is like pretty colorful right i mean we're talking about egypt and you know the pharaoh of of egypt you know he's you don't want to trust in him he's like a broken reed of a staff which will pierce the hand of any man that leans on it like i mean this is uh is that is it seems like maybe this was like the the one if you're not talking about gods if you're talking about other people that you might trust in

this is like well hey whatever you do don't make that mistake that some other people made when they decide to go try to team up with the egyptians don't do that that never works out yeah i mean we do know from from the syrian records that the the egyptians had rebelled against them they'd formed a coalition with the philistines to try and fight against the syrians and they'd already been defeated so he said hey you want to trust in the egyptians we've already kicked their butt it's it's not they're not going to be any help to you it's like leaning on a broken read that's going to puncture your hand so uh you've got no you've got nowhere to go is basically his message so far now i love how he shifts in verse 22 man this is some uh this is this is

politics political rhetoric and and and misguided theology all kind of woven together here he said He goes on, but if you say to me, we trust in the Lord, our God, is it not he whose high places and altars Hezekiah has removed saying to Judah and to Jerusalem, you shall worship before this altar in Jerusalem. So see what he's done. He's, he's, he's, he knows a lot. He must've known, you know, he had his, he has his, uh, sources of information, spies or whoever. So he knows what Hezekiah has done. He's the guy that removed the high places, which from God's perspective was great. Now, I think what his motive is, what his goal is, he knows that not everyone would

have been happy with the fact that Hezekiah took away those high places. I mean, there would have been people who thought high places were great. And so now he's saying, yeah, well, those were God's high places. And now he's taking those away. do you really think that God is going to be pleased with Hezekiah because he's taken away these high places? Yeah, of course the answer is yes, but this guy doesn't, he doesn't understand that those were, this is interesting because it seems like in his mind, he's like, oh, all of these high places were places where you could go and worship the God of Israel. This is

where you can do that. And what Hezekiah has done is got rid of them all and says, you have to make this trek to jerusalem you have to do it here in this one central location surely there's people that aren't happy about that so he's he's sort of ignorant of the fact that those weren't high places to the god of israel and that you were only ever supposed to worship god in one place he doesn't understand all this he thinks hezekiah is making some kind of power move with the people it seems like, that maybe is not a popular move. Yeah, yeah. Well, he's got his theology wrong.

Politically, he's skilled. He knows where he's coming from politically. He's got his theology wrong, but he's at the same time trying to manipulate the situation to make those who maybe are not fully on board with Hezekiah's decision to doubt whether what Hezekiah did was actually the right thing to do. so uh he goes on with his speech in verse 23 come now make a wager with my master the king of assyria

i will give you 2 000 horses if you are able on your part to set riders on them how then can you repulse a single captain among the least of my master servants when you trust in egypt for chariots and for horsemen moreover is it without the lord that i have come up against this place to destroy it the lord said to me go up against this land and destroy it and he just he didn't quite know when to stop i mean he's he's he's talking about don't trust in egypt it's true when it comes to that don't don't trust it don't trust in egypt but then he starts going astray when he claims that god is unhappy because hezekiah has removed all his high places and then he basically says listen i'm so great i i'd give you 2 000 horses but you don't even have enough

people to to to place his riders on these horses you're weak in other words this is a pretty big burn like all right uh how about this i'll make a now make a wager with master uh let's see let's see let's like let's do a test here i'll give you 2 000 horses for this upcoming battle and here's the bet you won't be you don't have enough riders for them I can spare 2,000 horses but you couldn't fill

them with riders if you wanted to it's a pretty big burn yeah we'll try to make this a fair fight we got these 2,000 extra spare horses we'll just give them to you you know kind of even things up a little bit the problem is of course you don't have enough riders to place on those so it's not going to do you any good

it's like if you said some of you are fighting with tell you what uh we'll give you uh 50 uh bomber jets too bad you don't have any pilots or bombs yeah that's right so but my favorite part is when he gets to the very end uh or he claims he claims yahweh's authority yeah to come up against this place he says is it without the lord that's that's yahweh all caps lord moreover is without yahweh that i've come up against this place to destroy it the lord said to me go up against this land and destroy it yeah so so here he's saying your god told me he was angry with this removal of the high places and told me to go

come and punish you for it yeah i mean he's he's he's trying every trick that he can come up with in order to destroy the confidence of the people. Now, it's at this point when the Israelites are out there, Eliakim and Shevna and Joah, they say to Rabshakeh, please speak to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it. Do not speak to us in the language of Judah.

So don't speak to us in Hebrew within the hearing of the people who are on the wall. That's the whole point, I think. That is the whole point, yeah. In fact, that's what he goes on to say. He said to them, Rob Shuck, he says to them, has my master sent me to speak these words to your master and to you and not to the men sitting on the wall?

And at this point, you can kind of picture him like lifting his head up and spreading his hands out and pointing all these guys who are on the wall. Like, hey, I'm not talking to you three. I'm talking to all these guys that I can see up there with their spears and their stones and their bows that are listening to our conversation. and then it but then he wraps it up with this way and and not to the men sitting on the wall who are doomed with you to eat their own dung and to drink their own urine yeah this is him saying

i'm not i'm not i'm not here just to talk to you uh i'm here to talk to everyone maybe especially to all the guys that are definitely gonna die uh if you don't do what you know you need to do and then he does this, eat their own dung, drink their own I mean, he's I mean, this isn't a bad intimidation mood move I mean, if you're

just some guy you're up there, you got your bow and stuff and you're, he's, I mean, you have to imagine that this guy is saying this in a language you can understand, but he must be really projecting Yeah, oh yeah So the idea is that they're not whispering

he's like delivering a sermon oh yeah yeah i mean this is a politically calculated speech that is supposed to produce uh terror or at least anxiety in the hearts of everybody who hears it and i mean keep in mind too this was uh people knew what happened during sieges everybody in the ancient world knew the horrors of of sieges i mean in in past episodes we've talked about that that terrible time when the city was reduced to uh you know they were eating donkey brains and they were eating uh the the dung of uh of of pigeons and you have reports of people resorting to cannibalism i mean so everybody knew that things got really grotesquely inhumanely horrible during sieges so the idea of drinking your own urine eating your own dung this this wouldn't have been just kind

of like rhetorical uh uh overkill this would be like yeah we we've heard about these these horrible situations and and of course they probably knew about what had happened at la quiche reports had already come in that that city had been taken and there have been massive massive uh killings in fact archaeologists one found one massive grave with like 1500 skeletons in it there at la quiche so it'd been a massacre you're sitting on the city wall you're listening to this your family no doubt is within the walls and yeah i mean it it's a it's a time where you're you're struggling with fear anxiety doubt and along comes this guy and his mouth becomes the mouth of satan more or less in order to get you to to doubt whether you should believe

the word of god and to get you to doubt whether you should trust in him so this whole uh speech toward the wall and the part of this is here an official is intended to to undermine people's faith in Yahweh and his promise to to Jerusalem and he's not done yet we'll have to finish it up in the next episode yeah yeah he's he's trying to at the very least make it to where it's going to be very difficult for anyone to sort of rally the troops here I mean he's he's just spreading fear and I mean he's lying about certain things as well of course but he's doing he's trying to cover everything he's like we're gonna kill you God's on my side you got more you don't have enough men you could if i gave you horses you still couldn't fight me like he's doing all the

things so he's making you question question you know things theologically he's making you question things um strategically and you're you're looking at the numbers like i mean he's trying to paint a picture that says any way that you might try any way that hezekiah might try to spin this you lose yes don't listen to him all right right yeah and he's uh he's gonna continue that uh in the next few verses which we'll get to in the next episode all right well that is it we are out of time we will see how this thing shakes out we're going to hear some more from these guys and then uh we'll see where who trusts and what coming up next episode uh i'll see you then chad all right see you then