4. He it was who took away the high places. Hezekiah is the first king to do this. As with Josiah a century later, the motive may have been political as well as religious, for an exclusive cult in Jerusalem would clearly consolidate the power of the Judahite king. One can assume that there was some resentment against this new policy, for the high places were popularly viewed as legitimate—and convenient—locations for the worship of YHWH. In Rabshakeh’s provocative speech, he appears to play to this resentment by describing the removal of the high places as an offense against YHWH.

the bronze serpent that Moses had made. The fashioning of the bronze serpent to counter the plague of serpents is reported in Numbers 21. Archaeologists have found numerous serpents, evidently cultic objects, and it looks as if these were objects of worship in popular religion, which were then retrojected on Moses in the story told in Numbers.

Nehushtan. The name is transparently derived from neḥoshet, “bronze,” with a probable pun on naḥash, “serpent.”

7. he rebelled against the king of Assyria. After the death of Sargon II, there was widespread rebellion against the Assyrian overlords in the northern regions of the empire, and Hezekiah evidently exploited the upheaval to reject his own vassal condition.

9. Shalmaneser king of Assyria went up against Samaria. The report beginning here and concluding in verse 12 is a recapitulation of 17:6ff. Evidently, the historical context of the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom needs to be recalled here as Judah is threatened with a similar fate.

13. in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah. Sennacherib’s campaign in Phoenicia, Philistia, and Judah in 701 B.C.E. is elaborately documented in Assyrian annals and bas-reliefs.

all the fortified towns of Judah. According to the Assyrian annals, the imperial forces captured forty-six Judahite towns—which may be an imperial exaggeration. The principal one was Lachish, where Sennacherib is headquartered in the next verse. The Assyrians left a vivid bas-relief of their archers, in characteristic high-pointed caps, assaulting this town.

14. Whatever you fix for me I will bear. Hezekiah’s act of submission, expressed in his readiness to pay whatever tribute Sennacherib imposes, is contradicted by the narrative episode that begins in verse 17, where Hezekiah is represented as part of an alliance with Egypt opposing the Assyrians. It would appear that two different sources, for reasons that are unclear, have been spliced together rather than blended.

17. And the king of Assyria sent. This entire episode appears, with only minor variations, in Isaiah 36. That passage was evidently drawn from here.

Tartan and Rabsaris and Rabshakeh. Although these three terms are presented in the Hebrew text without definite articles, as though they were proper names, each is actually a title: vizier, high chamberlain (literally, “head eunuch”), and head steward. In any case, all are clearly high officials in the Assyrian court.

18. who was appointed over the house. That is, the palace.

21. this shattered reed. Reeds, of course, grow in abundance along the Nile.

which when a man leans on it, enters his palm and pierces it. The metaphor is quite realistic. The reed looks as if it could provide support, but it easily breaks when you lean on it, and the jagged edges of the break can pierce the skin.

23. I shall give you two thousand horses if you can give yourself riders for them. Hezekiah’s attempted rebellion is so hopelessly pathetic, Rabshakeh says, that he could not even muster sufficient cavalrymen were he given the horses.

24. agent. The Hebrew aptly uses an Assyrian imperial administrative title, paḥat (compare the English “pasha,” which has a shared linguistic background).

26. Speak, pray, to your servants Aramaic. Aramaic was the most widely shared language in the lands of the Assyrian empire east of the Jordan, and so by the late eighth century B.C.E. it had been adopted as the diplomatic lingua franca. Thus, an educated Judahite court official would have been fluent in Aramaic.

do not speak Judahite. “Judahite,” of course, is Hebrew, but that term for the language never appears in the Bible. It is not explained how an Assyrian court official had a command of Hebrew.

27. Did he not send to these men sitting on the wall. The verb “send” is merely implied in the Hebrew. Rabshakeh makes clear that his entire speech—itself a brilliant deployment of political rhetoric—is precisely intended for the ears of the people. His purpose is to drive a wedge between the rebellious Hezekiah and the people, convincing them that the uprising is hopeless, and that, in fact, the fate of deportation to Assyria will be a happy one.

30. let not Hezekiah have you trust in the LORD. Rabshakeh appears to be shifting grounds. First he claimed that it was YHWH Who sent the Assyrians against Judah (verse 25), which was a way of conveying to the people the idea that their destruction was divinely ordained and irreversible. Now he takes a different tack: no national god has ever availed against the great king of Assyria.

31. Make terms with me. The literal sense is “make a gift [or blessing] with me,” but in context, as Rashi and the King James Version after him understood, the expression means to offer terms of surrender.

eat each man of his vine and . . . his fig tree, and drink each man the water of his well. The vine and the fig tree appear in a repeated proverbial expression about peaceful and prosperous life. Eating from the vine and the fig tree and drinking well-water are a vivid antithesis to the representation of the starving besieged population eating its own excrement and drinking its own urine.

32. a land like your land. The catalogue of agricultural bounty that follows closely resembles the recurrent list of all the good things of the Land of Israel. Rabshakeh in this fashion depicts life in exile in Assyria as a new promised land.

34. where were the gods of Samaria. The Masoretic Text merely has “that they saved Samaria from my hand” immediately after the question about the sundry gods of the lands in the northern region of the empires. One version of the Septuagint and a fragment of Kings from the Cairo Genizah show the clause here translated, which makes the verse coherent.