Lesson 28 – 2 Kings 18 and 19

2 ND KINGS Week 28, chapters 18 and 19 We’re in 2 nd Kings 18, which is the story of righteous King Hezekiah, King of Judah, who is perhaps best known in modern times as the king that ordered that a water tunnel to be built to protect the water supply of Jerusalem from the Assyrians who had plans to place a siege upon Jerusalem. The result was an amazing excavation that ran from the top of the City of David southward to the bottom of the hill it is built upon. Carved entirely underground through bedrock, this 600-yard long tunnel diverted the water emitting from the Gihon Spring (the primary water supply for Jerusalem) from a stream bed that flowed partially outside the city walls to this new rock-encased aqueduct that then flowed into a reservoir named the Pool of Siloam. And by the way, most people who walk through a tunnel under the City of David think they are walking through Hezekiah’s Tunnel, but they aren’t. There are 2 tunnels under that ancient city, and the one that almost all tourists walk through is the one called the Old Canaanite Tunnel, because it is nice and dry. Hezekiah’s Tunnel is wet and has several inches of water that flows through it all year long. Also, I’ve had folks who have been through the wet tunnel ask me why they didn’t see the famous carved inscription that told of how the tunnel was built by means of simultaneous excavation from both ends. The reason is that when the inscription was first discovered in the 1880’s, a Greek man living in Jerusalem cut the inscription out of the rock walls and tried to sell it. Sadly as he was hammering away trying to remove it, it broke into 6 pieces. Fortunately, just weeks earlier, an archeologist had taken a rub of the inscription (just like when as children we place a paper over some object and scribble with a crayon or a pencil to get an impression of the object transferred to the paper). So once the 6 pieces were recovered they could piece it back together rather easily. We left off last time as the King of Assyria’s 2 nd in command, a fellow with the title of Rav-Shekeh, was blustering and thundering away at the small crowd of people who had come to hear the conference between Assyria’s 3 representatives and Judah’s 3 representatives. This man’s arrogance knew no limits (and no doubt he was accurately reflecting the attitude and will of his master, Sennacherib) as he threatened Judah and King Hezekiah with annihilation if they didn’t immediately surrender. The exaggerated and hyperbolic speech is something that in modern times the world has come to expect of Middle Easterners, especially Arabs. Recall Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein threatening America with “the mother of all wars”, and telling the media that if he were invaded that not a foreign soldier would leave his nation alive. And of course we see Israel’s Palestinian border enemies constantly claiming that they will unleash hell upon Israel or make some other outlandish statement that the Western world can’t decide whether to take seriously or not. This is the nature of the speech that Rav-Shakeh was making here in 2 nd Kings 18, and it was rather typical for that era. But then Rav-Shekeh makes a monumental blunder; in 2 nd Kings 18 verse 25 he says this: