1. In those days Hezekiah fell mortally ill. The editor of the Book of Isaiah will continue to replicate material from 2 Kings—this passage occurs in Isaiah 38 and 39. Again, we have integral citation with only minor textual variants. The formulaic phrase at the beginning, “In those days,” is a noncommittal temporal indicator, and it is unclear whether Hezekiah’s grave illness occurred before or after the siege of Jerusalem reported in the previous chapter.

5. the LORD God of David your forefather. This epithet serves as a reminder of God’s commitment to preserve the Davidic dynasty, and Hezekiah is presented as a king who does what is right in the eyes of the LORD, like David his forefather.

6. and from the hand of the king of Assyria I will save you. This clause could be an indication that Hezekiah’s illness preceded the siege of Jerusalem, but the inference is not entirely certain because even after the lifting of the siege, Assyria would have remained a potential threat.

7. Fetch a clump of figs. Isaiah here appears not to be performing a miracle but to be practicing folk medicine. Hezekiah, however, in the next verse requests a portent that he will be cured.

burning rash. Only here do we learn that sheḥin, burning rash, which is Job’s affliction, is a potentially fatal disease.

and he revived. Given that Hezekiah in the next verse remains uncertain that he will recover, the sense of “revived” (literally, “lived”) here is that after the application of the fig poultice he experienced some relief from the torment of the burning rash.

9. should the shadow go down ten steps. What is evidently in question is a kind of sundial, but one that is not a horizontal disk but rather a series of steps set into a wall, ten on the left side to show the shadow of the ascending sun and ten on the right side for the descending sun. A device of this sort has been found in Egypt. The King James Version and modern Hebrew understand maʿalot as “degrees,” but these were probably actual steps, which is what the word usually means.

10. It is easy for the shadow to incline down ten steps. This would be the natural course of the shadow, so Hezekiah chooses instead the miraculous reversal of the progress of the shadow. That also becomes a figure for the reversal of his seemingly imminent death.

11. the Steps of Ahaz. The sundial in question proves to be a well-known marker in Jerusalem commissioned by King Ahaz.

12. king of Babylonia. The Babylonians were threatened by the Assyrian empire to the north and so were eager to make common cause with the kingdom of Judah.

13. the envoys. The received text has only “about them,” and this identification is added in the translation for clarity.

17. a time is coming when everything that is in your house . . . will be borne off to Babylonia. This dire prophecy is presented as punishment for Hezekiah’s imprudence in exposing all his treasures to the eyes of the Babylonian visitors. Many scholars think that the episode was added over a century later in an effort to explain the despoiling of Jerusalem during the reign of Jehoiakim in 597 B.C.E. or in the final destruction of the city in 586 B.C.E.

18. they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylonia. Although sarisim sometimes may refer to court officials who are not necessarily castrated, one suspects that the core meaning that involves castration is invoked here: there could be no greater curse for a king than to have his sons turned into eunuchs, incapable of begetting offspring.

19. The word of the LORD that you have spoken is good. This response by Hezekiah to the grim prophecy is astonishing. On the surface, he seems to be saying to Isaiah that he accepts the word of the LORD, that it must be good because it is God’s will. In the next sentence, however, he thinks to himself that what is good about it is that the disaster will not happen in his lifetime—something that in fact Isaiah has not clearly told him. This self-centered view of national catastrophe puts the virtuous Hezekiah in a somewhat questionable light.

20. his making the pool and the conduit so that he could bring water into the town. The conduit is a remarkable engineering feat that one can walk through to this day. It is a tunnel sloping gradually down from outside to inside, devised to introduce water into the town in time of siege. It is roughly 550 yards in length, not at all in a straight line, and showing evidence that two teams of workers hewed the tunnel out of the underground rock from opposite directions, somehow managing to meet each other in the middle.