Isaiah 38:21

38:21 ¹  Isaiah ordered, “Let them take a fig cake and apply it to the ulcerated sore and he will get well.”

Isaiah 34:4

34:4 All the stars in the sky will fade away, ² 

the sky will roll up like a scroll;

all its stars will wither,

like a leaf withers and falls from a vine

or a fig withers and falls from a tree. ³ 

Isaiah 36:16

36:16 Don’t listen to Hezekiah!’ For this is what the king of Assyria says, ‘Send me a token of your submission and surrender to me. ⁴  Then each of you may eat from his own vine and fig tree and drink water from his own cistern,

¹ tc If original to Isaiah 38, vv. 21-22 have obviously been misplaced in the course of the text’s transmission, and would most naturally be placed here, between Isa 38:6 and 38:7. See 2 Kgs 20:7-8, where these verses are placed at this point in the narrative, not at the end. Another possibility is that these verses were not in the original account, and a scribe, familiar with the 2 Kgs version of the story, appended vv. 21-22 to the end of the account in Isaiah 38.

² tc Heb “and all the host of heaven will rot.” The Qumran scroll 1QIsa^a inserts “and the valleys will be split open,” but this reading may be influenced by Mic 1:4. On the other hand, the statement, if original, could have been omitted by homoioarcton, a scribe’s eye jumping from the conjunction prefixed to “the valleys” to the conjunction prefixed to the verb “rot.”

³ tn Heb “like the withering of a leaf from a vine, and like the withering from a fig tree.”

³ tn Heb “make with me a blessing and come out to me.”