Isaiah 38
Isaiah 38 is the thirty-eighth chapter of the Book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. This book contains the prophecies attributed to the prophet Isaiah, and is one of the Books of the Prophets.
Text
The original text was written in Hebrew language. This chapter is divided into 22 verses.Textual witnesses
Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter in Hebrew are of the Masoretic Text tradition, which includes the Codex Cairensis, the Petersburg Codex of the Prophets, Aleppo Codex, Codex Leningradensis.Fragments containing parts of this chapter were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls :
- 1QIsaa: complete
- 1QIsab: extant: verses 12, 14‑22
Parashot
The parashah sections listed here are based on the Aleppo Codex. Isaiah 38 is a part of the Narrative . : open parashah; : closed parashah.Verse 8
Behold, I will bring again the shadow of the degrees, which is gone down in the sun dial of Ahaz, ten degrees backward. So the sun returned ten degrees, by which degrees it was gone down.
In the parallel account in the Second Book of Kings, Hezekiah is given a choice of whether to see the shadow move forward ten degrees or move backward ten degrees, and he chooses the more challenging backward option.
Canticle
Verses 10 to 20 are also known as the Song of Hezekiah or Canticle of Ezechias, with the incipit ego dixi, appearing in the Roman Breviary for Lauds on Tuesdays, and also in the Office of the Dead.Verse 21
One of the salient features of this chapter is found in verse 21, where the prophet Isaiah instructs physicians to take-up a fig-cake and to rub it over Hezekiah's boil.The rabbis, in their homiletical explanations, explain the action of taking a fig-cake and rubbing it over a boil as being a "miracle within a miracle," since the act of rubbing a boil with figs has the ordinary effect of aggravating a skin-condition, and, yet, Hezekiah was cured of his skin-condition.