Am I now come up without the LORD against this place to destroy it? The LORD said to me, Go up against this land, and destroy it.
Am I now come up without the Lord against this place to destroy it? ... This particular remark forms the foundation on which the Jewish writers, followed by Procopius, rest their conjecture that Rab-shakeh was a renegade Israelite, as it seems to imply that he was acquainted with the predictions of Isaiah respecting the judgments which God was about to inflict upon the Hebrews through the instrumentality of the Assyrians. But there is no certain evidence of the truth of this hypothesis. The language of Rab-shakeh might have been only bluster. Perhaps he may have been encouraged by some false prophet, who pretended to have had a revelation to him upon this matter; or he might have inferred that he was sent on a mission of judicial punishment to the Hebrews from the successes he had met with.