The Assyrian Rabshakeh, taunting the terrified listeners on Jerusalem’s wall, knows exactly what he is doing. Or else the Isaian framer of this menacing dialogue has nearly outdone himself in framing the taunter’s message in ways that will resonate most deeply with Jerusalem’s soul.
In the mix, the Rabshakeh taunts YHWH himself.
The Rabshakeh said to them, ‘Say to Hezekiah: Thus says the great king, the king of Assyria: On what do you base this confidence of yours? Do you think that mere words are strategy and power for war? On whom do you now rely, that you have rebelled against me? See, you are relying on Egypt, that broken reed of a staff, which will pierce the hand of anyone who leans on it. Such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who rely on him. But if you say to me, ‘We rely on 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”?
Isaiah 36.4-7 (NRSV, emphasis added)
As quoted, the Rabshakeh’s repetitious deployment of two words that share the root בטח (to trust) is tedium itself. No one talks like that. Yet this very vocabulary lies at the core of Isaiah’s dialect of confidence or trust in YHWH. If Israel can be faulted for anything in this long book, no culpability tears more viciously at the people’s covenant with YHWH than the people’s decision not to trust. I have highlighted the English equivalents of the terms above in plain italics.
It appears that the text frames the matter of a binary decision about whom to trust—Assyria or YHWH—in the starkest possible terms, even at the expense of making the Rabshakeh talk like a six-year-old child.
Yet to these eyes, this is not the passage’s most pungent moment. Rather, it is the framing of Hezekiah’s strategy (so formatted above) with the resonant term עצה and then paraphrasing it immediately thereafter with the claim ‘We rely on the LORD our God’.
Here the Rabshakeh places not just Hezekiah’s panicked option for resistance but most likely the very counsel of YHWH over against the unstoppable might of the Assyrian empire. To read עצה in this context as an unremarkable reference to Hezekiah’s ‘strategy’ and nothing more is to indulge in an atomistic reading of this most poignant text.
This is war. No one present on or below the wall as this intimidating scene unfolds doubts this.
What the prophet knows—whether or not the surely more eloquent Rabshakeh is aware—is that this is a peculiar kind of war. Assyria vs. YHWH himself.
All else is asterisks and footnotes.
Canter Bridge 