Hezekiah’s Letter — Isaiah 36–39
Four chapters of plain history in the middle of the poetry: an army at the walls, a letter spread before the Lord, fifteen added years, and a visit from Babylon that turns the book toward exile.
Prose in the Middle of the Poetry
Up to now Isaiah has been oracles and songs. Then chapter 36 opens like a chronicle: “Now it came to pass in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah” (Isaiah 36:1). Why does a book of prophecy stop to tell a story? Because this story, told almost word for word in 2 Kings 18–20, is where the whole book turns.
And it is told out of order. When Hezekiah lies sick in chapter 38, the Lord still promises, “I will deliver thee and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria” (38:6). The rescue is still future, so the illness came first; Isaiah has put it and the envoys last, and the history ends in Babylon.
Isaiah 36–40 — our arrangement
1 (36–37) Assyria at the walls — the threat of Isaiah’s day
2 (38) The king “sick unto death”
3 (39) Babylon’s envoys — the threat to come
4 (40) “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people”
Assyria is answered in chapter 37; Babylon is not answered until chapter 40. The last word before the comfort is exile.
Chapter 39 ends, “nothing shall be left” (39:6); chapter 40 opens, “Comfort ye” (40:1), and the rest of the book (Isaiah 40–44) speaks to the people on the far side of that hinge.
Back at the Conduit of the Upper Pool
Where does Sennacherib’s spokesman stand? “By the conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the fuller’s field” (36:2), and Eliakim, promoted in Isaiah 22, goes out to meet him. Isaiah’s reader has been here before — it is the exact place, in the exact words, where the Lord sent Isaiah to meet Ahaz (7:3). There Ahaz was offered a sign, would not ask, and leaned on Assyria instead (Isaiah 7–9). Now Assyria stands on the same spot and puts to Ahaz’s son the question his father failed.
Rabshakeh’s speech is a sermon on ONE word: “What confidence is this wherein thou trustest?” Seven times in chapter 36 the King James says trust or trustest, as he knocks out each prop in turn (36:4–10). Egypt is “the staff of this broken reed,” which is exactly what Isaiah had been preaching (Isaiah 28–33). Then the boldest line: “the Lord said unto me, Go up against this land, and destroy it.” The adversary is fluent in our scripture, and he usually is.
Asked to speak Aramaic, he shouts in Hebrew to the men on the wall instead: “Hath any of the gods of the nations delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria?” (36:11–20). The message was never meant for the king. They “answered him not a word: for the king’s commandment was, saying, Answer him not” (36:21). Some voices are not to be debated. Hezekiah took the argument somewhere else.
A Letter Spread Before the Lord
To be honest, Kings records that Hezekiah had first tried paying, even with gold cut from the temple doors (2 Kings 18:14–16), and it had NOT worked. This time he went into the house of the Lord in sackcloth and sent to Isaiah, who promised that Sennacherib would go home and “fall by the sword in his own land” (37:1–7). Then came a letter.
“And Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers, and read it: and Hezekiah went up unto the house of the Lord, and spread it before the Lord.”
He read it. He did not answer it, and he did not hide it. He laid it open in front of God, every word, and prayed to the God “of all the kingdoms of the earth,” whose rivals “were no gods, but the work of men’s hands” (37:16–20).
He asks God to “hear all the words of Sennacherib,” and does not deny them: “Of a truth, Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the nations” (37:17–18). Faith does not pretend the letter says something else. In our day the Lord told Saints in trouble that their prayers “have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth” (D&C 98:2) — Sabaoth is “hosts,” the very name Hezekiah prayed to.
The Virgin Daughter of Zion Laughs
The answer came “whereas thou hast prayed to me” — BECAUSE of the prayer — and it turns the siege into a comedy: “The virgin, the daughter of Zion, hath despised thee, and laughed thee to scorn” (37:21–22). Our footnote explains the virgin: “The unconquered people of Jerusalem.” No army has taken her.
“The zeal of the Lord of hosts shall do this” (37:32). Where have we read that before? At the end of the Child prophecy, where His government shall have no end: “The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this” (9:7). The guarantee behind the Messiah’s kingdom is the same guarantee that saved Jerusalem that year, and that night was a down payment on it.
Then the angel of the Lord smote “a hundred and fourscore and five thousand” in the Assyrian camp, and Sennacherib went home to Nineveh, where, “as he was worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god,” his own sons killed him (37:36–38). Rabshakeh had asked which god ever delivered his people. Nisroch could not deliver his own worshipper in his own temple.
Sennacherib’s own account survives on clay prisms. The Israel Museum’s translation reads, “I confined Hezekiah inside Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage,” and its curators note that “no explicit Assyrian siege of Jerusalem is mentioned” (Israel Museum). He claims the cage, never the city. Kings do not carve their failures into clay.
Fifteen Years on the Dial of Ahaz
“Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live” (38:1–3). No condition is spoken, yet Hezekiah turns his face to the wall, prays, and weeps sore, and Isaiah is sent straight back: “I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears: behold, I will add unto thy days fifteen years” (38:5).
Was Isaiah wrong the first time? No. Judgment carries a condition even when none is spoken, as Nineveh learned (Isaiah 15–20). Prayer changed an announced outcome, and God names what moved Him: the prayer and the tears. President Spencer W. Kimball: “I believe we may die prematurely but seldom exceed our time very much. One exception was Hezekiah” (Faith Precedes the Miracle, 103–5, in OT Student Manual 12-32).
Now the sign, which most readers pass over. Hezekiah chose the harder one, the shadow going back (2 Kings 20:9–11) — but on whose dial? “The sun dial of Ahaz” (38:8). Ahaz was the king who, at that same conduit, was offered a sign “in the depth, or in the height above” and said, “I will not ask” (7:11–12). His son asks, “What is the sign?” (38:22), and God answers on his father’s own instrument. The Hebrew behind both “dial” and “degrees” is ma’alot, steps. The sign Ahaz refused was given after all — to the son who ASKED, on the steps Ahaz built.
The Living, the Living, He Shall Praise Thee
Only Isaiah keeps “the writing of Hezekiah” (38:9–20), the psalm of a man who had said, “I shall go to the gates of the grave”. It turns near the end:
Isaiah 38:18–19 — synonymous, then antithetic
For the grave cannot praise thee,
death can not celebrate thee:
they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth.
The living, the living, he shall praise thee, as I do this day:
the father to the children shall make known thy truth.
Grave against the living, with “praise thee” and “thy truth” on both sides. The dead cannot pass the truth on; a living father can.
Why did he want to live? To praise God and teach his children. And his sins? “Thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back” (38:17) — behind God, where He does not turn to look.
“What Have They Seen in Thine House?”
Then Babylon “sent letters and a present” — a second letter — and this one Hezekiah does not spread before the Lord. He “was glad of them,” and there was nothing “that Hezekiah shewed them not” (39:1–2). Chronicles says the envoys came “to inquire of the wonder that was done in the land,” and that “God left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart” (2 Chronicles 32:31). They came asking about God’s wonder. He showed them his gold.
Isaiah asks one question: “What have they seen in thine house?” ALL, says Hezekiah. So all of it “shall be carried to Babylon,” and sons of his line will serve as eunuchs in Babylon’s palace (39:3–7). Babylon came as a friend. Isaiah names it the destroyer to come.
Then the hardest verse here: “Good is the word of the Lord which thou hast spoken… For there shall be peace and truth in my days” (39:8). Charitably read, he calls God’s judgment good, as a humble man does; Chronicles says he “humbled himself for the pride of his heart,” so that wrath “came not upon them in the days of Hezekiah” (2 Chronicles 32:25–26). Peace in his days was mercy on that repentance. Critically read, the king who wept at the wall for his own life sheds no tears for his sons, and Kings words it as a question: “Is it not good, if peace and truth be in my days?” (2 Kings 20:19).
Both readings sit in the text. An honest reader keeps both, because both are in us.
Key References — Isaiah 36–39
- 2 Kings 18:13–20:21 — the parallel account, with the tribute Isaiah omits.
- Alma 34:17–27 — “pour out your souls in your closets, and your secret places, and in your wilderness” (v. 26).
Two Houses in Four Chapters
Follow one word through. Hezekiah goes into “the house of the Lord” in sackcloth and again with the letter (37:1, 14). Then his own house: “Set thine house in order” (38:1). “What have they seen in thine house?” “All that is in thine house… shall be carried to Babylon” (39:4–6). The repeated words show it. When he carried his trouble into the Lord’s house, an empire went home. When he opened his own house to be admired, Babylon took notes.
Isaiah’s question is left with us. What have they seen in thine house? People come into our lives as the envoys came, having heard that God did something for us. Do they leave having seen the wonder, or only the treasury?
And have you spread the letter before the Lord? Everyone gets one: the diagnosis, the demand, the voice shouting that no god delivers anyone from this. Read it. Then carry it up and open it in front of Him, every word, and ask Him to read it with you. He has answered that prayer before — “I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears” (38:5). As for the voice on the wall, answer him not.
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