Now therefore, I pray thee, give pledges to my lord the king of Assyria, and I will deliver thee two thousand horses, if thou be able on thy part to set riders upon them.
Now therefore, I pray thee, give pledges, х hit`aareb (H6148), has, among other significations, that of giving security, or a pledge. But in Hithpael, with 'et (H854) following, it denotes-`to enter into a contest,' That is the meaning here-`enter the lists with my lord the king of Assyria;' and so the Septuagint has: michtheete too kurioo mou basilei Assurioon].
And I will deliver thee two thousand horses, if thou be able ... to set riders upon them. The challenge referred to Hezekiah's competency to furnish not two thousand fighting men-that he might readily have done-but two thousand cavalry soldiers. The Jews were deficient in this 'arm,' their mountainous country not being suited to the use of war-chariots, and a constitutional king was bound by the Mosaic law not to multiply horses for himself (Deuteronomy 17:16), nor to traffic with Egypt for the purchase of those animals for war, to which purpose the Jews would have almost exclusively applied them. In Egypt, a flat and fertile country, horses were, we learn from sacred as well as from classical writers, extensively bred and employed in war-chariots (cf. Exodus 14:9; Exodus 15:19; 1 Kings 10:26; 1 Kings 10:28). But they were prohibited to the Jews as symbolical of military prowess and self confidence (Psalms 20:7; Psalms 33:17; Proverbs 21:31). Nevertheless that people frequently evinced a strong desire to obtain horses; perhaps the numerous and influential party in the court of Jerusalem who advocated the Egyptian alliance might have been solicitous at that crisis to procure a stock of them from Egypt, in order to cope on equal terms with an Assyrian army, which was always strong in this department (Isaiah 31:1; Hos. 16:3); but the commerce seems to have been discouraged or absolutely prohibited by the good king Hezekiah, thus affording some foundation for the taunt of Rab-shakeh, that the Jews had neither horses nor horsemen.