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Catholic Commentary
The Request for Aramaic and Rabshakeh's Defiant Refusal
11Then Eliakim, Shebna and Joah said to Rabshakeh, “Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it. Don’t speak to us in the Jews’ language in the hearing of the people who are on the wall.”12But Rabshakeh said, “Has my master sent me only to your master and to you, to speak these words, and not to the men who sit on the wall, who will eat their own dung and drink their own urine with you?”
Isaiah 36:11–12 records Judah's three officials requesting that the Assyrian envoy Rabshakeh speak Aramaic rather than Hebrew to avoid demoralizing the people on Jerusalem's walls. Rabshakeh refuses, revealing his intent to address the common soldiers directly with threats of siege starvation, exposing that this is psychological warfare rather than diplomatic negotiation.
Rabshakeh refuses the diplomats' plea and addresses the terrified soldiers directly—his true strategy is not to negotiate with power, but to shatter the people's trust and hope from within.
Catholic tradition illuminates this passage along several convergent lines.
The Nature of Diabolical Rhetoric. St. Jerome, who translated this very passage in the Vulgate and wrote extensively on Isaiah, noted that Rabshakeh speaks "in voce magna" — with a loud voice — a phrase the tradition associates with the bombast of falsehood. Error, unlike truth, must shout. The Catechism teaches that the devil is "a liar and the father of lies" (CCC §391, citing Jn 8:44), and the Fathers consistently read Rabshakeh as a figura diaboli — a figure of the deceiver. His strategy here is precisely that of the Adversary in Job: not a frontal assault on God, but an assault on the people's trust in God and in their appointed shepherds.
Legitimate Authority and the Protection of the Faithful. The officials' request to use Aramaic reflects a principle the Church has consistently affirmed: that those in authority bear a responsibility to protect those entrusted to their care from messages that would lead them to despair or apostasy. This resonates with the Church's own discernment around communications that harm the faithful (cf. Gaudium et Spes §59 on the proper use of communication). The shepherds of Jerusalem tried, however imperfectly, to maintain this protective function.
Scatological Imagery and Human Dignity. Rabshakeh's crude taunt also functions theologically as a desecration of the human person. Catholic anthropology, rooted in imago Dei, insists on the dignity of every person (CCC §1700). Rabshakeh reduces human beings to their biological extremity — to the consumption of waste — stripping them of every dignity, spiritual, civic, and bodily. This anti-anthropology is characteristic of totalitarian dehumanization in every age.
Contemporary Catholics encounter their own "Rabshakehs" — voices that deliberately speak over the heads of Church leadership to address the faithful directly, using the vernacular of social media, entertainment, or political rhetoric to sow despair about the Church's future, the credibility of her teachings, or the possibility of perseverance in holiness. The tactic is identical: bypass the shepherds, demoralize the ordinary believer, and make surrender seem the only rational option.
Isaiah 36:11–12 invites Catholics to recognize this pattern with clear eyes. When voices insist that the Church is finished, that fidelity is foolish, that moral struggle will end only in failure, the spiritually alert Catholic should hear an echo of Rabshakeh's taunt. The response of the officials — and ultimately of Hezekiah, who will bring the letter to the Temple — is instructive: name the manipulation, refuse to be the amplifier of despair, and bring the whole crisis before God in prayer. A practical response is to be cautious about what we share, amplify, or repeat — especially when the message traffics in hopelessness about the Church or one's own soul.
Commentary
Verse 11 — The Diplomats' Desperate Appeal
The three officials named — Eliakim son of Hilkiah (palace administrator), Shebna (secretary), and Joah son of Asaph (recorder) — represent Jerusalem's highest civil and administrative offices. Their request is not cowardice but shrewd statecraft: Aramaic was the recognized lingua franca of Near Eastern diplomacy between major powers (cf. 2 Kgs 18:26), much as Latin once served European chancelleries. By asking Rabshakeh to use Aramaic, they are invoking the conventions of international negotiation — implicitly insisting that this is a matter between states and sovereigns, not a harangue to be broadcast to frightened civilians.
The phrase "in the hearing of the people who are on the wall" is critical. The wall here is not incidental scenery; the soldiers and perhaps civilians pressed upon it are a live, terrified audience. Eliakim and his colleagues understand immediately what Rabshakeh is doing: this is not negotiation, it is psychological siege warfare. If the population hears of starvation and hopelessness from a credible military power, morale collapses before any battering ram strikes. The officials' appeal is thus an act of pastoral protection — they are trying to shield the people from a carefully weaponized despair.
Verse 12 — The Refusal and the Obscene Taunt
Rabshakeh's answer is a masterpiece of calculated brutality. He first demolishes the pretense that this is a private diplomatic exchange: "Has my master sent me only to your master and to you?" The rhetorical question exposes what the officials already feared — Sennacherib sent his envoy precisely to address the people, not merely the king. His mission is subversion from within.
The graphic image that follows — men who will "eat their own dung and drink their own urine" — is not impulsive vulgarity but a precise evocation of siege conditions. Ancient siege warfare was notorious for reducing cities to starvation and the consumption of filth. The Assyrian army had already done this to Samaria (2 Kgs 6:24–29, where famine led to cannibalism). Rabshakeh's words are not a metaphor; they are a military briefing dressed in obscenity. He is telling the common soldier: your elite has already failed you; this is your future; surrender now. The phrase "with you" at the verse's end wickedly implicates the very officials who tried to silence him — they too will share this fate, he implies, making their pretensions to diplomatic dignity grotesque.
The Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the fourfold sense of Scripture honored by Catholic tradition (cf. §115–118), this passage carries rich anagogical and tropological dimensions. The Assyrian army besieging Jerusalem becomes a perennial type of the forces of evil besieging the soul and the Church. The wall represents the boundary of faith and communal identity. Rabshakeh's strategy — bypassing legitimate authority to speak directly to the vulnerable, using the language of the people to sow despair — is precisely the method the Fathers identified with diabolic temptation. St. John Chrysostom, commenting on the parallel in 2 Kings, observed that the enemy of souls always seeks to make the terms of surrender appear inevitable and the hope of deliverance appear foolish. Rabshakeh's taunt — — parodies the Eucharistic promise: instead of being fed by God in the midst of enemies (Psalm 23:5), the people are told they will feed on their own degradation. The spiritual reading, then, presents a stark antithesis: the Bread of Life versus the bread of despair.