Rabshakeh Mocks the Lord before Jerusalem

¹¹ Then Eliakim, Shebna, and Joah said to the Rabshakeh, “Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, since we understand it. Do not speak to us in Hebrew in the hearing of the people on the wall.”

¹² But the Rabshakeh replied, “Has my master sent me to speak these words only to you and your master, and not to the men sitting on the wall, who are destined with you to eat their own dung and drink their own urine?”

¹³ Then the Rabshakeh stood and called out loudly in Hebrew: “Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria!

¹⁴ This is what the king says: Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he cannot deliver you.

¹⁵ Do not let Hezekiah persuade you to trust in the LORD when he says, ‘The LORD will surely deliver us; this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.’

¹⁶ Do not listen to Hezekiah, for this is what the king of Assyria says: Make peace with me and come out to me. Then every one of you will eat from his own vine and his own fig tree, and drink water from his own cistern,

¹⁷ until I come and take you away to a land like your own—a land of grain and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards.

¹⁸ Do not let Hezekiah mislead you when he says, ‘The LORD will deliver us.’ Has the god of any nation ever delivered his land from the hand of the king of Assyria?

¹⁹ Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Have they delivered Samaria from my hand?

²⁰ Who among all the gods of these lands has delivered his land from my hand? How then can the LORD deliver Jerusalem from my hand?”

²¹ But the people remained silent and did not answer a word, for Hezekiah had commanded, “Do not answer him.”

²² Then Hilkiah’s son Eliakim the palace administrator, Shebna the scribe, and Asaph’s son Joah the recorder came to Hezekiah with their clothes torn, and they relayed to him the words of the Rabshakeh.