ld hear him, the
delegates besought him to speak in Aramaic, which they understood, but
"speak not to us in the Jews' language, in the ears of the people that
are on the wall!" Instead, however, of granting their request, the
Assyrian general advanced towards the spectators and addressed them in
Hebrew: "Hear ye the words of the great king, the King of Assyria.
Let not Hezekiah deceive you; for he shall not be able to deliver you:
neither let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord, saying, The Lord will
surely deliver us: this city shall not be given into the hand of the
King of Assyria. Hearken not to Hezekiah: for thus saith the King of
Assyria, Make your peace with me, and come out to me; and eat ye every
one of his vine, and every one of his fig tree, and drink ye every one
the waters of his own cistern; until I come and take you away to a
land like your own land, a land of corn and wine, a land of bread and
vineyards. Beware lest Hezekiah persuade you, saying, The Lord will
deliver us!" The specified conditions were less hard than might have
been feared.*

* The Hebrew version of these events is recorded in 2 Kings
xviii. 13-37; xix., and in Isa. xxxvi., xxxvii., with only
one important divergence, namely, the absence from Isaiah of
verses 14-16 of 2 Kings xviii. This particular passage, in
which the name of the king has a peculiar form, is a
detached fragment of an older document, perhaps the official
annals of the kingdom, whose contents agreed with the facts
recorded in the Assyrian text. The rest is borrowed from the
cycle of prophetic narratives, and contains two different
versions of the same events. The first comprises 2 Kings
xviii. 13, 17-37; xix. l-9a, 36&-37, where Sennacherib is
represented as despatching a verbal message to Hezekiah by
the Tartan and his captains. The second consists merely of 2
Kings xix. 96-36a, and in this has been inserted a long
prophecy of Isaiah's (xix. 21-31) which has but a vague
connection with the rest of the narrative. In this
Sennacherib defied Hezekiah in a letter, which the Jewish
king spread before the Lord, and shortly afterwards received
a reply through the prophet. The two versions were combined
towards the end of the seventh or beginning of the sixth
century, by the compiler of the _Book of Kings_, and passed
thence into the collection of the prophecies attri