Discovery Box2 Kings 7:4 
Context7:4 If we go into the city, we’ll die of starvation, 1 and if we stay here we’ll die! So come on, let’s defect 2 to the Syrian camp! If they spare us, 3 we’ll live; if they kill us – well, we were going to die anyway.” 4
2 Kings 7:6
Context7:6 The Lord had caused the Syrian camp to hear the sound of chariots and horses and a large army. Then they said to one another, “Look, the king of Israel has paid the kings of the Hittites and Egypt to attack us!”
2 Kings 7:8
Context7:8 When the men with a skin disease reached the edge of the camp, they entered a tent and had a meal. 5 They also took some silver, gold, and clothes and went and hid it all. 6 Then they went back and entered another tent. They looted it 7 and went and hid what they had taken.
2 Kings 7:10
Context7:10 So they went and called out to the gatekeepers 8 of the city. They told them, “We entered the Syrian camp and there was no one there. We didn’t even hear a man’s voice. 9 But the horses and donkeys are still tied up, and the tents remain up.” 10
2 Kings 7:12
Context7:12 The king got up in the night and said to his advisers, 11 “I will tell you what the Syrians have done to us. They know we are starving, so they left the camp and hid in the field, thinking, ‘When they come out of the city, we will capture them alive and enter the city.’”
2 Kings 25:1
Context25:1 So King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came against Jerusalem with his whole army and set up camp outside 12 it. They built siege ramps all around it. He arrived on the tenth day of the tenth month in the ninth year of Zedekiah’s reign. 13
1 tn Heb “If we say, ‘We will enter the city,’ the famine is in the city and we will die there.”
2 tn Heb “fall.”
3 tn Heb “keep us alive.”
4 tn Heb “we will die.” The paraphrastic translation attempts to bring out the logical force of their reasoning.
5 tn Heb “they ate and drank.”
6 tn Heb “and they hid [it].”
7 tn Heb “and they took from there.”
8 tn The MT has a singular form (“gatekeeper”), but the context suggests a plural. The pronoun that follows (“them”) is plural and a plural noun appears in v. 11. The Syriac Peshitta and the Targum have the plural here.
9 tn Heb “and, look, there was no man or voice of a man there.”
10 tn Heb “but the horses are tied up and the donkeys are tied up and the tents are as they were.”
11 tn Heb “servants” (also in v. 13).
12 tn Or “against.”
13 sn This would have been Jan 15, 588
