Hezekiah’s “Showing” and the Babylonian Ambassadors’ “Seeing” of the Royal Treasures

Abstract

The book of Kings offers a detailed description of Hezekiah’s reign. Among the episodes recorded, there is the visit of a Babylonian embassy to whom the king shows the treasures of his palace. This act prompts the prophet Isaiah to announce that all these riches will be carried away to Babylon (2 Kgs 20:12–19). Although the plot is relatively straightforward in its broad contours, scholars have struggled to make sense of the relationship between the king’s gesture and Isaiah’s reaction. This article argues that a semantic-pragmatic phenomenon observed in Akkadian offers a path towards a new understanding of the text’s inner logic and meaning. Hezekiah’s “showing” and the Babylonian envoys’ “seeing” of the royal treasures acquire, in light of the parallel evoked, unexpected “legal overtones”: the king’s actions constitute a kind of legal symbolic act, whose dire consequences are fully explicated by Isaiah’s pronouncement.