The Scriptures 1998

2 Kings 18:21-32 The Scriptures 1998 (ISR98)

21. “Now look! You have put your trust in the staff of this crushed reed, Mitsrayim, on which if a man leans, it shall go into his hand and pierce it. So is Pharaoh sovereign of Mitsrayim to all who trust in him.

22. “But when you say to me, ‘We trust in יהוה our Elohim,’ is it not He whose high places and whose altars Ḥizqiyahu has taken away, and said to Yehuḏah and Yerushalayim, ‘Bow yourselves before this altar in Yerushalayim’?” ’

23. “And now, I urge you, give a pledge to my master the sovereign of Ashshur, then I give you two thousand horses, if you are able to put riders on them!

24. “And how do you turn back the face of one commander of the least of my master’s servants, and trust in Mitsrayim for chariots and horsemen?

25. “Have I now come up without יהוה against this place to destroy it? יהוה said to me, ‘Go up against this land, and you shall destroy it.’ ”

26. Then said Elyaqim son of Ḥilqiyahu, and Sheḇnah, and Yo’aḥ to the Raḇshaqĕh, “Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it. And do not speak to us in the language of Yehuḏah, in the ears of the people on the wall.”

27. And the Raḇshaqĕh said to them, “Has my master sent me to your master and to you to speak these words, and not to the men sitting on the wall to eat their own dung and drink their own urine, with you?”

28. And the Raḇshaqĕh stood and called out with a loud voice in the language of Yehuḏah, and spoke and said, “Hear the word of the great sovereign, the sovereign of Ashshur!

29. “Thus said the sovereign, ‘Do not let Ḥizqiyahu deceive you, for he is unable to deliver you out of his hand,

30. and do not let Ḥizqiyahu make you trust in יהוה, saying, “יהוה shall certainly deliver us, and this city is not given into the hand of the sovereign of Ashshur.” ’

31. “Do not listen to Ḥizqiyahu, for thus said the sovereign of Ashshur, ‘Make peace with me by a present and come out to me, and let each of you eat from his own vine and each from his own fig tree, and each of you drink the waters of his own cistern,

32. until I come. Then I shall take you away to a land like your own land, a land of grain and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a land of olive-trees and honey, and live, and not die. But do not listen to Ḥizqiyahu, when he misleads you, saying, “יהוה shall deliver us.”