Isaiah 36

On this and the three next chapters, see the notes on the parallel passage in 2 Kings xviii.-xx., to which those which here follow are merely supplementary.

1 in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah. This chronological note as it stands is difficult, as it appears from the Assyrian monuments that Sennacherib succeeded to Sargon on the throne of Assyria, 705 B.C., i.e., in the twentieth year of Hezekiah, and that the expedition against Judah took place 701 B.C., or Hezekiah’s twenty-sixth year. Various explanations have been suggested by scholars, but none of them seems quite to meet the case. But, as Professor Sayce points out, the events of Hezekiah’s reign are not arranged in chronological order. His sickness and the embassy from Merodach-baladan which followed it, instead of taking place after the campaign of Sennacherib, occurred more than ten years before. The king of Assyria from whom Hezekiah and Jerusalem were to be delivered (2 Kings xx. 6) was not Sennacherib but Sargon (The Higher Criticism and the Monuments, 1894, p. 446).

2 the highway of the fuller’s field. See note on vii. 3.

3. Shebna the scribe. A lower office than he had previously held; one step probably in his degradation and ruin: see on xxii. 15-19.

6. Egypt. There was some ground for the charge that the ruling party in Jerusalem was seeking an Egyptian alliance; a policy against which Isaiah had uttered his indignant protest: see xxx. 1-7; xxxi. 1-3.

19. Hamath, etc. The Assyrian inscriptions show that Hamath (see x. 9), the key to Northern Palestine, was destroyed by Sargon soon after the fall of Samaria. “Sepharvaim” (Abu Habba) is a short distance south-west of Bagdad. Sennacherib vaunts his father Sargon’s conquests as his own.