¹¹ Then Eliakim, Shebna, and Joah said to the royal spokesman, “Please speak to your servants in Aramaic,^(A) since we understand it. Don’t speak to us in Hebrew^[a] within earshot of the people who are on the wall.”

¹² But the royal spokesman replied, “Has my master sent me to speak these words to your master and to you, and not to the men who are sitting on the wall, who are destined with you to eat their own excrement and drink their own urine?”