An Historical Interlude

Isaiah 36-39

            Most of these chapters are word-for-word the same as portions of 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles. Isaiah 38:9-20, Hezekiah’s psalm, is the only portion that isn’t repeated somewhere else.

            In the context of Isaiah, this historical interlude seems to serve two purposes. First, it wraps up the Assyrian threat that has dominated the first 39 chapters. The north kingdom disappeared in 722 BC under the Assyrian threat, and 21 years later Assyria seemed poised to do the same to Judah. But the Lord had other ideas and by way (probably) of a plague he wiped out the Assyrian army. Interestingly, Sennacherib’s court records hint at this stunning turn of events, indicating that Sennacherib “had Hezekiah shut up like a bird in a cage,” but remaining silent on the sudden retreat. The Greek historian Herodotus also writes of the loss, saying the army was struck by a plague.

            The second purpose of these chapters is to set up the impending threat from Babylon. This raises a difficult challenge for the interpreter. Babylon didn’t emerge as a major world power in this era until around 630 BC, a good 50 years after the end of Isaiah’s ministry. Here’s the challenge: almost every commentator reads Isaiah 40-66 as dealing with the Babylonian captivity of Israel, but Babylon isn’t a major threat in Isaiah’s day, and the Babylonian exile of Judah doesn’t happen until a century after Isaiah. There are a few choices: perhaps Isaiah prophesied about the future without any immediate connection to the lives of those he was preaching to. I personally find that implausible; I hold that prophecy had to make sense to its original audience. Perhaps a portion of Isaiah wasn’t written by Isaiah but by someone else years later. But there were plenty of prophets in the century after Isaiah. Why would someone pretend to be Isaiah? It seems to me we should assume Isaiah wrote the whole book. So, here’s my basic understanding: the threat of exile resonated with Isaiah’s audience because they had seen the destruction of the north kingdom and because they were well aware of their own weakness in the face of the brutal Assyrians. So, Isaiah’s upcoming prophecies about a return from exile were assurance to a people who feared that exile was their likely fate. Those prophecies took on a whole new urgency when the Babylonians came a-calling decades later, and in that Babylonian era the incident of the Babylonian envoys stood as a stark reminder that the Lord had warned them about other great powers much earlier.