The Great Isaiah Scroll, the best preserved of the biblical scrolls found at Qumran from the second century BC, contains all the verses in this chapter.
The parashah sections listed here are based on the Aleppo Codex.[3] Isaiah 38 is a part of the Narrative (Isaiah 36–39). {P}: open parashah; {S}: closed parashah.
{S} 38:1-3 {S} 38:4-8 {S} 38:9-22 {S}
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.[4]
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.[5]
Verse 21
One of the salient features of this chapter is found in verse 21 (repeated in 2 Kings 20:7), where the prophet Isaiah instructs physicians to take-up a fig-cake and to rub it over Hezekiah's boil (וַיֹּאמֶר יְשַׁעְיָהוּ יִשְׂאוּ דְּבֶלֶת תְּאֵנִים וְיִמְרְחוּ עַל הַשְּׁחִין וְיֶחִי = Now Isaiah had said, 'Let them take a cake of figs and apply it to the boil, that he may recover.').
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.[6]