1Now in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, Sennacherib king of Assyria attacked and captured all the fortified cities of Judah.
2The king of Assyria sent Rabshakeh from Lachish to King Hezekiah in Jerusalem with a large army. He stood by the aqueduct from the upper pool on the highway leading to the fuller’s field.
3Then Eliakim son of Hilkiah, who was in charge of the palace, Shebna the scribe, and Joah son of Asaph, the recorder, came out to meet him.
4Rabshakeh said to them, “Now tell Hezekiah, ‘This is what the great king, the king of Assyria, says: “What is this confidence in which you trust?
5I say that your advice and strength for war are just empty words. Now in whom do you trust that you have rebelled against me?
6Look, you are trusting in Egypt, that bruised reed of a staff. If a man leans on it, it will go into his hand and pierce it. That’s what Pharaoh king of Egypt is like to all who trust in him.
7But if you tell me, ‘We trust in Yahweh our God,’ isn't he the one whose high places and altars Hezekiah removed, telling Judah and Jerusalem, ‘You must worship before this altar’?”
8Now, please make a deal with my master, the king of Assyria, and I will give you two thousand horses, if you can find enough riders for them.
9How then can you defeat even one captain, the least of my master’s servants, when you rely on Egypt for chariots and horsemen?
10Have I come up against this land to destroy it without Yahweh's approval? Yahweh himself told me, “Go up against this land and destroy it.”’”
11Then Eliakim, Shebna, and Joah said to Rabshakeh, “Please speak to us, your servants, in Aramaic, because we understand it; don't speak to us in the language of Judah while the people on the wall are listening.”
12But Rabshakeh replied, “Did my master send me to speak these words only to your master and to you, and not also to the men sitting on the wall, who will have to eat their own waste and drink their own urine with you?”
13Then Rabshakeh stood and shouted loudly in the language of Judah, “Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria!
14This is what the king says, 'Don’t let Hezekiah trick you, because he won’t be able to save you.
15Don’t let Hezekiah make you trust in Yahweh by saying, “Yahweh will surely save us. This city will not be handed over to the king of Assyria.”'
16Do not listen to Hezekiah, for the king of Assyria says, ‘Make peace with me and come out to me. Then each of you can eat from your own grapevines and fig trees, and drink water from your own cisterns,
17until I come and take you away to a land like your own—a land with grain and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards.’
18Don't let Hezekiah persuade you by saying, “Yahweh will rescue us.” Have any of the gods of other nations saved their lands from the king of Assyria?
19Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Did they save Samaria from me?
20Among all the gods of these countries, which ones have rescued their land from me, so that Yahweh should rescue Jerusalem from me?’
21But the people remained silent and did not answer him, because the king had ordered, “Do not answer him.”
22Then Eliakim, son of Hilkiah, who was in charge of the palace, along with Shebna the scribe and Joah, son of Asaph, the recorder, came to Hezekiah with their clothes torn and told him what Rabshakeh had said.