Is not Hezekiah misleading you…?: This whole verse is a rhetorical question. Its purpose is to strongly affirm the belief of the Assyrian king that the faith of the people of Judah in Yahweh was of no value and would not be rewarded. The Hebrew verb translated Is … misleading sometimes occurs in contexts that indicate no moral judgment, where it means to urge someone to do something. But here, as elsewhere in 1-2 Chronicles, the verb has a negative connotation of misleading someone into doing something against that person’s will. It may be translated in a variety of ways here, such as “is leading you astray,” “is deceiving you” (Bible en français courant), “Is … deluding you” (Anchor Bible), and “is lying” (Contemporary English Version). Since the Hebrew verb here has the sense of urging someone to action, Dillard begins this verse with “Hasn’t Hezekiah reduced you to forced labor…?” The forced labor would refer to making the people work on water projects and repairing the walls of the city. But such a translation seems to be more specific than the Hebrew verb suggests here.

The LORD our God will deliver us from the hand of the king of Assyria: Sennacherib quotes Hezekiah here, so this is an embedded quotation. The pronoun our is inclusive in the mouth of Hezekiah, since he addressed his own people with these words. From the hand of the king of Assyria means “from the power of the Assyrian king.” Some other figurative ways of expressing this phrase are “from the grasp of the king of Assyria” (New American Bible) and “from the King of Assyria’s clutches” (New Jerusalem Bible). Good News Translation renders this embedded quotation as indirect discourse, so it says “from our power” since it is the king of Assyria who is speaking. Contemporary English Version has simply “from me.”

In order to avoid the embedded quotation in this verse, translators may say:

• Hezekiah is certainly tricking you when he says that the LORD your God will deliver you from my powerful attack. You will eventually die of hunger and thirst.

Quoted with permission from Omanson, Roger L. and Ellington, John E. A Handbook on 1-2 Chronicles, Volume 1. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2014. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .