Isaiah 38:21

"Now Isaiah had said, Let them take a cake of figs, and lay it for a plaster upon the boil, and he shall recover. Hezekiah also had said, What is the sign that I shall go up to the house of Jehovah?"

This injection of some pertinent fact into a narrative subsequently to its actual chronological occurrence is a typical feature of the Word of God from Genesis to Revelation. As an example, in Jonah, after the men cast lots and charged him with being the cause of the danger they were in, learned that Jonah was a follower of Jehovah; "Then, the men were exceedingly afraid, and said unto him, What is this that thou hast done? For the men knew that he was fleeing from Jehovah, because he had told them" (Jonah 1:10). Thus there appears here a fact that the mariners had learned at the time of Jonah's taking passage on the ship of Tarshish.

The fact that dried figs were used in the medical practice of the ancients is confirmed by both Roman historians, Pliny, and Celsus.[18] The significance is that natural means were frequently utilized by the Lord in the performance of those wonders with which the Bible is filled.

The additional information provided in these last two verses was summarized thus by Dummelow: "The remedy for the king's disease was suggested by Isaiah, and the sign was given at the king's request."[19]

In this connection, even during the charismatic age of the church when elders endowed with the gift of healing, prayed for the sick, they also anointed the sufferer with oil, as in James 5:13-15.