Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“But the Rabshakeh said, ‘Has my master sent me to speak these words to your master and to you, and not to the people sitting on the wall, who are doomed with you to eat their own dung and drink their own urine?’”
NL Daily Devotion for Monday, November 19, 2018
by Daniel D. Maurer, Clergy Stuff
Yup.
That’s in the Bible!!
Sometimes we forget that the stories in the Bible were for REAL people during a REAL time.
Are all the stories REAL? Yes . . . insofar as they reveal truth about God and God’s people.
I think what this illustrates for us today is that the Israelites weren’t beyond name-calling for people if they thought they deserved it!
It’s nice to know that people back then knew how to threaten each other. Not so much as violence is good . . . but to know that people have always been . . . people!
Narrative Lectionary Daily Reading:
Isaiah 36:4-12
The Rabshakeh said to them, ‘Say to Hezekiah: Thus says the great king, the king of Assyria: On what do you base this confidence of yours? Do you think that mere words are strategy and power for war? On whom do you now rely, that you have rebelled against me? See, you are relying on Egypt, that broken reed of a staff, which will pierce the hand of anyone who leans on it. Such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who rely on him. But if you say to me, “We rely on the Lord our God”, is it not he whose high places and altars Hezekiah has removed, saying to Judah and to Jerusalem, “You shall worship before this altar”? Come now, make a wager with my master the king of Assyria: I will give you two thousand horses, if you are able on your part to set riders on them. How then can you repulse a single captain among the least of my master’s servants, when you rely on Egypt for chariots and for horsemen? Moreover, is it without the Lord that I have come up against this land to destroy it? The Lord said to me, Go up against this land, and destroy it.’
Then Eliakim, Shebna, and Joah said to the Rabshakeh, ‘Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it; do not speak to us in the language of Judah within the hearing of the people who are on the wall.’ But the Rabshakeh said, ‘Has my master sent me to speak these words to your master and to you, and not to the people sitting on the wall, who are doomed with you to eat their own dung and drink their own urine?’
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