And Rabshakeh said unto them, Say now to Hezekiah, Thus says the great king, the king of Assyria, What confidence is this in which you trust?
All Commentaries on Isaiah 36:4 Go To Isaiah 36
Jerome
AD 420
But what Eliakim and Shebna and Joah humbly requested, namely, “Speak to your servants in the Syrian language [Aramaic], for we understand it, and do not speak to us in Hebrew within the hearing of the people on the wall,” has this sense: Is it really necessary to fill the people with unjustified terror and to spread panic? Speak a language that these people do not understand, for we have knowledge of your tongue and are familiar with the Syrian dialect, which is common to us both. To this the Rabshakeh replied arrogantly: “Did my master send me,” he said, “to your master rather than to the men who sit on the wall?” Then he added, to supply the threat of terror by showing that they would be overtaken by hunger, poverty and thirst: “that they would eat their own dung and drink their own urine with you?”
