Isaiah39chapter 39

Isaiah 39:1-2

sent letters and a present to Hezekiah: Merodach-baladan's embassy arrives under cover of a get-well gift, a Babylonian prince using the king's recovery as the occasion for a diplomatic overture aimed at the Assyrian rival both courts shared. Hezekiah's response goes past courtesy into display, showing the envoys the silver, the gold, the spices, the precious ointment, and all the house of his armour, nothing in his house or his dominion withheld. Barnes reads the scene against the chapter just finished, a king who trusted the Lord alone against Sennacherib's siege now trusting his own storehouses to impress a foreign embassy.

Isaiah 39:3-4

What said these men: Isaiah's arrival after the fact turns the scene into an interrogation, three short questions laid one after another, what said these men, whence came they, what have they seen, each answer from Hezekiah repeating the same word, all, nothing withheld. Gill notes the king answers plainly and without the alarm the prophet's questioning might have raised in a more guarded man, a king who does not yet see what he has just done. The pattern of question and full confession sets up the oracle that follows as an answer already earned rather than a surprise attack.

Isaiah 39:5-6

Hear the word of the Lord of hosts: Isaiah answers the display with a sentence that turns every treasure just shown into future plunder, the days come that all that is in thine house, and that which thy fathers have laid up, shall be carried to Babylon, nothing left. Henry notes the oracle names Babylon rather than Assyria, the empire that had just besieged Jerusalem replaced in a single verse by the empire that had just sent a friendly letter, the true danger hidden inside the gift. The word marks the book's turn, the last chapters faced Assyria at the gates and this one names the power that will actually take the city two centuries on.

Isaiah 39:7

eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon: The oracle's second half names Hezekiah's own sons as the future exiles, taken away to be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon, the book's first sentence naming Babylon as Judah's coming captor rather than a distant power or a passing ally. Delitzsch reads this as the hinge the whole book turns on, every chapter from here carrying Babylon's shadow the way the chapters before carried Assyria's. The sentence looks forward across the reigns still to come, fulfilled in the exile of Judah's royal line more than a century after Hezekiah's own death.

Isaiah 39:8

Good is the word of the Lord which thou hast spoken: Hezekiah's answer, good is the word of the Lord, and there shall be peace and truth in my days, is weighed two ways by the bench. Some read it as submission, a king accepting a judgment he has no power to alter and finding thankfulness that it falls beyond his own reign. Others, following Henry's reading, hear it as a narrower relief for himself rather than grief for his sons and his people, a king content so long as the trouble is not his to bear, and the difference between the two readings is named here without settling it.