J.J. Blunt's Undesigned Scriptural Coincidences
AN ARGUMENT FOR THE VERACITY OF THE HOLY BIBLE
Introduction
Part One:
The Books of Moses
Part Two:
The Historical Scriptures
Part Three:
The Prophetical Scripture
Part Four:
The Gospels and Acts
Appendix:
The Gospels, Acts
and Josephus

IV. ELIAKIM, SHEBNA, JOAH AND SENNACHERIB’S INVASION

There is another ingredient in the details of this invasion of Sennacherib which, when compared with a passage in Isaiah, furnishes, I think, a probable coincidence; and tends to hem round the wonderful event which is said to have attended that invasion, with still more evidence of truth.

When the King of Assyria sent his host against Jerusalem on this occasion, the persons deputed by Hezekiah to confer with his captains, were, we read, “Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah, which was over the houshold, and Shebna the scribe, and Joah the son of Asaph the recorder.” [2 Kings 18:18.] Their names occur more than once [2 Kings 19:2; Isa. 36:3.] , and still with this distinction, namely, that the parentage of Eliakim and of Joah is given, but not that of Shebna: of the two former it is told whose sons they were, as well as what offices they held; whilst Shebna is designated by his office only.

Now is there a reason for this, or is it merely the effect of accident? The omission certainly may be accidental, but I will suggest a ground for thinking it not so, and will leave my readers to be the judges of the matter.

In the twenty-second chapter of Isaiah (15, et seq.) we find the prophet delivering a message of wrath against one Shebna, in the following terms: “Thus saith the Lord God of hosts, Go, get thee unto this treasurer, even unto Shebna, which is over the house, and say, What hast thou here? and whom hast thou here, that thou hast hewed thee out a sepulchre here, as he that heweth him out a sepulchre on high, and that graveth an habitation for himself in a rock? Behold, the Lord will carry thee away with a mighty captivity, and will surely cover thee. He will surely violently turn and toss thee like a ball into a large country: there shalt thou die, and there the chariots of thy glory shall be the shame of thy lord’s house. And I will drive thee from thy station, and from thy state shall he pull thee down.” The purport of which rebuke is that, whereas Shebna was busily engaged in constructing for himself a sumptuous sepulchre at Jerusalem, as though he and his posterity were to have that for their burial-place for ever, he might spare himself the pains, for that God, for some transgression of his which is not mentioned, was about to depose him from the post of honour which he held, and banish him from his city, and leave him to die in a strange land.

It is true that Shebna is here called the “treasurer,” whereas the Shebna mentioned in the Book of Kings, with whom the coincidence requires that he should be identified, is called “the scribe,” but the two periods are not necessarily the same, and he might have been “the treasurer,” at the one, and “the scribe,” at the other; for that he is the same man I can have no doubt, not merely from Shebna in either case belonging clearly to the King’s court, which greatly limits the conditions; but from Eliakim the son of Hilkiah being again spoken of immediately in connection with him, in the passage of Isaiah (5:20), as he had been in the passage of the Book of Kings. It being presumed, then, that the Shebna of Isaiah and the Shebna of the Book of Kings is the same person, I account for the omission of his parentage in the history from the circumstance of his being a foreigner at Jerusalem, whilst Eliakim and Joah were native Jews whose genealogy was known; and this fact I conclude from the expression in Isaiah which I have printed in Italics, “What hast thou here, and whom hast thou here, that thou hast hewed thee out a sepulchre here?” Jerusalem not having been the burial-place of his family, because he did not belong to Jerusalem.