In the late eighth century B.C., when Sennacherib, King of Assyria, sent messengers to Hezekiah, King of Judah, to demand the surrender of Jerusalem, Hezekiah dispatched three senior officials to negotiate with the Assyrian messengers. When the negotiations proved unsuccessful, Hezekiah sent these Judean officials to the prophet Isaiah to seek the prophet’s advice. (2 Kings 18–19; Isaiah 36–37.) One of these senior Judean officials was a man named Shebna. In the early 1950’s Nachman Avigad of The Hebrew University, one of the world’s greatest living epigraphers, startled the scholarly world with a brilliant decipherment of a tomb inscription […]
