2 Kings 20:7

Hebrew Bible

5 “Go back and tell Hezekiah, the leader of my people: ‘This is what the Lord God of your ancestor David has said: “I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears. Look, I will heal you. The day after tomorrow you will go up to the Lord’s temple. 6 I will add fifteen years to your life and rescue you and this city from the king of Assyria. I will shield this city for the sake of my reputation and because of my promise to David my servant.”’” 7 Isaiah ordered, “Get a fig cake.” So they did as he ordered and placed it on the ulcerated sore, and he recovered. 8 Hezekiah had said to Isaiah, “What is the confirming sign that the Lord will heal me and that I will go up to the Lord’s temple the day after tomorrow?” 9 Isaiah replied, “This is your sign from the Lord confirming that the Lord will do what he has said. Do you want the shadow to move ahead 10 steps or to go back 10 steps?”

Isaiah 38:21

Hebrew Bible

19 The living person, the living person, he gives you thanks, as I do today. A father tells his sons about your faithfulness. 20 The Lord is about to deliver me, and we will celebrate with music for the rest of our lives in the Lord’s temple.” 21 (Isaiah ordered, “Let them take a fig cake and apply it to the ulcerated sore and he will get well.” 22 Hezekiah said, “What is the confirming sign that I will go up to the Lord’s temple?”)

 Notes and References

"... A textual dimension attaches to the relationship between the two witnesses to the Isaiah text, Masoretic and 1QIsa. The Qumran source lacks verses 38:21-22 which in the present form of the Masoretic text conclude the composite narrative (verses 1-8) with a prayer-psalm (verses 9-20): “Then Isaiah said, ‘Let them take a cake of figs, and apply it to the boil, that he may recover.’ And Hezekiah said, ‘What is the sign that I shall go up to the house of the Lord?’” It is generally agreed that these two verses are misplaced in the Masoretic, probably as a result of homoioteleuton, since both and the concluding appendix end on the words, preceded in one instance by Isaiah 38:20 and in the other by the graphically similar (verse 22). Therefore, they are generally transposed after verse 6, to a position paralleling the place which they occupy in the 2 Kings arrangement. These verses clearly were in front of a reviser of 1QIsa. He supplied the missing passage by squeezing most of verse 21 into the remainder of the last line of chapter 38 - omitting, though, the word and then wrote the word and all of verse 22 vertically in the left-hand margin. However, the fact that the first scribe neatly ended his copy of chapter 38 by using up only about one-fourth of the last line, leaving the remainder blank, seems to suggest that his Vorlage contained a shorter text than the Masoretic ..."

Talmon, Shemaryahu Text and Canon of the Hebrew Bible: Collected Studies (p. 24) Eisenbrauns, 2010

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