A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  Terminology

  The Assyrians called their main god, his cult city, and the land of Assyria Aššur, a term used by the Biblical authors as well. Aššur is mentioned in the Bible some 150 times (Vanderhooft 2008: 85), in the books of Genesis, Numbers, 2 Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Amos, Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Zechariah, Psalms, Lamentations, Ezra, Nehemiah, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, and Sirach (for exact references, and additional ones from the War Scroll from Qumran, see Clines 1993: 412–13). It is noteworthy, however, that nowhere in the Bible – except for the personal name “Esarhaddon,” where Aššur serves as a theophoric element – are Aššur the god or Aššur the city mentioned (Frahm 2011: 271–4). Most of the Biblical references designate instead the land of Aššur, that is, Assyria, and its people. A typical example is the title melek Aššur “king of Assyria.” Attested in the Bible some ninety‐one times, it corresponds to Assyrian šar māt Aššur.

  In a few instances, the Bible assigns the name Aššur to an individual who was regarded as Assyria’s founding father or heros eponymos. This is most obvious in Gen. 10:22, which lists Aššur with Elam, Arpachshad, Lud, and Aram among the sons of Shem. Even though some uncertainty remains, the same legendary Aššur is probably also mentioned in Gen. 10:11–12, if we translate these lines: “Out of that land (Shinar, i.e., Babylonia) came forth Aššur and built Nineveh, Rehoboth‐ir (or: “and the city’s large squares”), Calah, and Resen(?) between Nineveh and Calah; this (Nineveh) is the great city.” Many scholars, both ancient and modern, have understood this difficult and possibly corrupt passage differently, assuming that it ascribes the creation of Assyrian civilization to Nimrod, who is mentioned in the preceding lines (see, most recently, Vanderhooft 2008: 83–4, 89 and van der Kooij 2012: 3–8), but a reference to both Nimrod and Aššur in Mic. 5:5–6, and a few other considerations, mitigate against this interpretation (Frahm 2011: 269–71). Either way, there is no Assyrian parallel for this “founding myth,” which demonstrates, incidentally, that the Biblical authors considered Assyria and its main cities very ancient.

  History

  The Hebrew Bible mentions six Assyrian monarchs by name (for references and discussion, see Millard 1976 and Machinist 1983: 720–2): Tiglath‐pileser III (both under this and his second name, Pulu), Shalmaneser V, Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and probably Assurbanipal, provided the “Osnappar” mentioned in Ezra is to be identified with this king. Suggestions that “Shalman” in Hos. 10:14 might refer to Shalmaneser III and that Nimrod is Tukulti‐Ninurta I have not found universal acceptance. More likely is the idea that the unnamed “savior” of 2 Kings 13:5, who allegedly delivered the Israelites “from the hand of the Arameans,” was Adad‐nirari III (Ackerman 2010: 129). 2 Kings 19:37 mentions the Assyrian princes Adrammelech and Sharezer, the former of whom can be identified with Sennacherib’s son Urdu‐Mullissi (Parpola 1980).

  In 2 Kings especially, but also in Isaiah (and, to a lesser degree, in 2 Chronicles), the Bible provides fairly specific accounts of the activities of the aforementioned kings, primarily with regard to events that took place in the Levant. Some of the information found in the historical sections of the Bible seems to derive from the “Chronicle (sefer divrei hayamim) of the Kings of Judah” and the “Chronicle of the Kings of Israel,” which are mentioned in various chapters of 1 Kings and 2 Kings. These sources were apparently quite reliable, and certain details in the Biblical accounts of Assyria’s actions are therefore historically not too far off the mark. But over the centuries, prompted by new historical and theological concerns, Biblical authors repeatedly rewrote and reedited the accounts in question, so that, overall, their final versions cannot be considered accurate renderings of historical events.

  This section seeks to offer a very basic outline of the Biblical passages devoted to the main episodes of Assyria’s interaction with Israel and Judah. For more detailed critical analyses, see Ackerman 2010: 129–42 and Sweeney 2010. It has been suggested that the type of historical writing found especially in 2 Kings may have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Assyrian models such as the “Synchronistic History” (see Carr 2011: 312), but such dependence is difficult to prove.

  Tiglath‐pileser III’s military advances in the 730 s and his interactions during this time with the Israelite kings Menahem, Pekah, and Hoshea as well as the Judahite king Ahaz are described in considerable detail in 2 Kings 15–17. The account states that Menahem, realizing Assyria’s superior power, paid tribute to the Assyrian king, whereas Pekah decided to join an anti‐Assyrian coalition headed by Rezin of Damascus. When the Judahite ruler Ahaz refused to support the two allies, the so‐called Syro‐Ephraimite war broke out: according to the Biblical text, Pekah and Rezin attacked Jerusalem, but were defeated by Tiglath‐pileser, who deposed and killed Pekah, transformed significant portions of Israel’s territory into Assyrian provinces, and placed a rump‐state in the area around Samaria under the leadership of the new Israelite monarch Hoshea. All this is more or less in accordance with the information provided by Tiglath‐pileser’s royal annals.

  Hoshea did not remain a faithful Assyrian vassal for long. According to 2 Kings 17:1–6 and 18:9–12, he ceased to pay tribute to Tiglath‐pileser’s successor Shalmaneser V and conspired with king So of Egypt (probably Osorkon IV, who resided in Tanis). Shalmaneser reacted immediately, besieged Samaria for three years, and eventually conquered it (in 722 BCE). While all of this is accurately recorded by the Biblical authors, only Assyrian sources reveal that resistance fighters in Samaria continued the struggle for a little while, and that the final defeat of their city and the transformation of the region surrounding it into an Assyrian province were not achieved before the reign of Shalmaneser’s successor Sargon II. In fact, Sargon’s name is found in the Bible only once, in Isa. 20:1, in connection with the Assyrian conquest of Ashdod in 711 BCE. 2 Kings 17:6 and 17:24 note correctly, however, that large portions of Israel’s population were deported by the Assyrians to the Khabur region and Media and replaced in their homeland by ethnic groups from other territories. Later legends about Israel’s “Ten Lost Tribes” draw on these Biblical passages.

  For most of the last third of the eighth century, Judah, much in contrast to Israel, had embraced a pro‐Assyrian stance. According to 2 Kings 16:17–18, king Ahaz went so far as to make certain changes to cultic installations in the Jerusalem temple “because of the king of Assyria.” Yet after the death of Sargon II – which may be reflected in Isa. 14 (see below, “Stories”) – Ahaz’s successor Hezekiah decided to stop paying tribute to his Assyrian overlords and to join an anti‐Assyrian alliance of Western cities and states. In 701 BCE, the new Assyrian king Sennacherib conducted a campaign against the rebels in the Levant, in the course of which he destroyed numerous Judean cities, reduced Judah’s territory, and forced Hezekiah to send a large tribute to Nineveh. Hezekiah, however, stayed in office as an Assyrian vassal king, and the Assyrians never conquered his capital Jerusalem.

  No other episode in the history of Israel’s and Judah’s encounters with Assyria is more extensively treated in the Bible than the conflict between Sennacherib and Hezekiah, which is the main topic of 2 Kings 18:13–19:37, 2 Chron. 32:1–22, and Isa. 36:1–37:37 (see also Mic. 1:8–16). Since Sennacherib’s 701 campaign is also described in some detail in Assyrian sources, and even in Herodotus, many scholars have used it as a test case to evaluate the reliability of the historical books of the Bible (see, most recently, Gallagher 1999; Grabbe 2003; and Kalimi and Richardson 2014, each with further literature). As it turns out, certain portions of the Biblical account seem to be quite accurate. 2 Kings 18:13–14, for example, specifies that Hezekiah had to pay Sennacherib thirty talents of gold, which corresponds exactly to the number provided in Sennacherib’s own inscriptions (in contrast, the amount of silver mentioned in the same lines differs from that in the Assyrian texts). The reference in 2 Kings 18:17 to the Tartan, Rab‐Saris, and Rab‐šaqê as leaders of the Assyrian army reflects a g
ood knowledge of Assyrian military titles on the part of the Biblical author (Vanderhooft 2008: 86). On the other hand, there are passages that were clearly either substantially revised or newly added at some later point. N. Na’aman (2003) has convincingly shown how in 2 Kings 18–19, chronistic and narrative texts related to Sennacherib’s campaign were combined by an earlier Biblical redactor and then updated by another one during the late years of the Babylonian empire or the early Persian period to reflect the concerns of the Judeans exiled to Babylonia.

  The most severe historical “distortion” in the Biblical account is the claim that Sennacherib suffered a massive defeat at the gates of Jerusalem, with “the angel of the Lord” allegedly striking down “one hundred eighty‐five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians” (2 Kings 19:35). The Biblical authors invented this “happy ending” because they wished to present Hezekiah as a pious hero who was rewarded for his faithfulness with divine favor. In truth, Sennacherib and his army returned to Nineveh because the king had no need to expose Jerusalem to a long and costly siege. By turning Judah into a vassal state, he had reached the main political goal of his campaign against Hezekiah.

  In 2 Kings 19:36–7 (and elsewhere), the Bible reports quite accurately that Sennacherib was murdered by a group of conspirators from among his own sons – who then fled to “Ararat” (i.e., Urartu) – and was succeeded by king Esarhaddon. This is one of the few cases where the Bible covers events in Assyria that were not immediately related to the situation in Israel and Judah. In a prophetic speech reportedly made by Isaiah (2 Kings 19:7), Sennacherib’s murder is attributed to Yahweh and presented as divine revenge for the king’s assault on the holy city of Jerusalem. Cogan (2009), pointing out that this brings to mind similar claims by Nabonidus with regard to Sennacherib’s destruction of Babylon, has cautiously suggested that the authors of Nabonidus’s inscriptions learnt of the motif of Sennacherib’s divine punishment from a Judean exile, but such a scenario is hard to prove. As pointed out below in the section on “Stories,” the episode of Esarhaddon’s rise to power may have left some traces in the story of Joseph.

  The Bible’s goal to present Hezekiah, counterfactually, as a successful “freedom fighter” explains why it provides so little information on the political situation under his successor Manasseh. Otherwise, it would have become all too clear that Manasseh, as we know from Assyrian sources, was a faithful Assyrian vassal who had little agency. Another reason why the Bible has so little to say about the political events under Manasseh is that, except for Manasseh supplying auxiliary troops when Esarhaddon attacked Egypt, Judah enjoyed a prolonged period of peace during his reign – as Hegel pointed out (in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History), “the periods of happiness are the blank pages of history.”

  After the short reign of Amon, Judah was ruled from 641 BCE onwards by Manasseh’s grandson Josiah. Assyria, under its new king Assurbanipal, had lost much of its influence in the Levant by now, which enabled Josiah to restore Judah’s independence and implement, allegedly in his 18th regnal year (2 Kings 22:3), a major religious reform. 2 Kings does not mention Assyria in this context – the only Biblical reference to Assurbanipal, called Osnappar, is found in a flashback in Ezra 4:10. But many scholars believe that Assyrian royal ideology, communicated through the Assyrian Vassal Treaties imposed on Judah some time earlier, may have influenced Josiah’s new religious politics (see below, “Political Ideology and Law”).

  The downfall of the Assyrian state in the years 614–609 BCE is only obliquely reflected in 2 Kings (23:29). The Biblical book of Nahum, however, deals with it at significant length, celebrating the destruction of Nineveh in 612 with utter relish, as does the conclusion of the book of Tobit (14:15) (for discussion, see Machinist 1997). The focus on Nineveh in these accounts is not surprising, since Nineveh, Assyria’s seventh century BCE political capital, was by far the most important Assyrian city for the Biblical authors, who mention it seventeen times (see Dietrich 2001).

  Even after its demise, the Assyrian empire continued to serve as a cipher for imperial hubris in newly written Biblical texts. The 2nd century BCE apocryphal book of Judith, for example, claims that Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who destroyed the kingdom of Judah and brought the Judeans into exile, “ruled over the Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh” (Judith 1:1). Passages like this create a fictitious image of an Assyro‐Babylonian super‐power waging war against Biblical lands. A more positive view of Assyria seems to be behind the designation of the Persian ruler Darius I – who had facilitated the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem – as “king of Assyria” in Ezra 6:22.

  The last example notwithstanding, the foregoing paragraphs demonstrate that Assyria’s image in the Bible is largely that of an imperial aggressor. Its kings are portrayed as cruel and arrogant. With the exception of a note in 2 Kings 19:37 according to which Sennacherib was killed while “worshipping in the house of his god Nisroch” (possibly Nusku/Nasuh, the son of the moon‐god, and not Ninurta, as usually claimed; see Frahm 2011: 274–5), there are no references to Assyrian kings relying on divine aid. Instead, the Assyrian rulers are said to ascribe their achievements in their hubris entirely to themselves: “by the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my wisdom; for I have understanding” (Isa. 10:13).

  At the same time, the Biblical authors present the Assyrian monarchs as acting involuntarily on behalf of the Biblical god. They are tools of Yahweh, who uses the Assyrian army to punish the cultic and social transgressions of the Israelites and Judahites. This is implicitly stated, to name just two examples, in 2 Kings 15:18–19 and 28–9, where references to the “sins” of Menahem and Pekah, respectively, are followed by notes on attacks on Israel by Tiglath‐pileser III, and is pointed out explicitly in Isa. 10:5–6, where Yahweh famously declares: “Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger … – against a godless nation (a reference to Israel) I send him and against the people of my wrath I command him, to take spoil … and tread them down like the mire of the streets.” In a similar vein, Hosea 9:1–3 chastises Israel for having “played the whore, departing from … God,” and announces that its people “shall not remain in the land of the Lord, but … shall return to Egypt, and in Assyria they shall eat unclean food.” The Assyrian exile of the Israelites is represented in this passage as a metaphorical return to Egypt, where the chosen people had once experienced a life of misery and servitude (Ackerman 2010: 138).

  Assyria’s own ultimate fate is usually portrayed as equally grim in the prophetic books. Isa. 10:12, for example, claims that, eventually, “the Lord … will punish the arrogant boasting of the king of Assyria and his haughty pride.” The detailed account of the destruction of Nineveh in the book of Nahum, presented as a prophecy but clearly written after the fact, has already been mentioned. Isa. 20:25, on the other hand, in an oracle concerning Egypt, states that a day will come when God will proclaim: “Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage.”

  Stories

  The foregoing discussion has focused on explicit references to Assyria in Biblical historiography and prophecy. But Assyrian “motifs” have also left – more indirect – traces in a number of Biblical narratives and poetic sections. Tracking down such traces is, unfortunately, charged with significant methodological problems. It is not enough to hunt for isolated parallels – if one wants to establish an Assyrian background for a Biblical story, the parallels have to be numerous and/or specific, and a case needs to made for a historical scenario behind the alleged borrowing (see the discussion in Henkelman 2006). Even in cases that seem to meet these requirements, absolute certainty is normally elusive, and there is often no consensus on whether Assyrian influence really played a role.

  Despite the fact that the Assyrian king Sargon II is named only once in the Bible (see above, “History”), it has been suggested that events from his reign had an impact on two particularly prominent episodes in the Bible. C. Uehlinger (1990) has posited the existence of an origina
l version of the famous Tower of Babel story in Gen. 11:1–9 that had nothing to do with Babylon but was a subtle critique of Sargon’s attempt to build from scratch a massive new capital, the city of Dur‐Šarrukin (Khorsabad). One of Uehlinger’s main leads is the expression pâ ištēn šuškunu, used in Sargon’s inscriptions to describe how the king made his workmen, who came from all of Western Asia, “of one mouth.” Uehlinger argues that this phrase inspired the depiction found in the Tower of Babel episode of the linguistic dynamics at the beginnings of history. Initially, “the whole earth had one language and the same words” before, later, the proverbial “confusion of tongues” ensued. Uehlinger considers the Biblical narrative a counter‐story that reverses the unifying message of Sargon’s building accounts – a message that had been compromised when Sargon was killed in 705 BCE and Dur‐Šarrukin, after serving as residence of the Assyrian court for only a very short time, was partly abandoned. This interpretation has not found universal approval, but several scholars have accepted and further developed it (see, e.g., van der Kooij 2012: 19–24).

  As has been repeatedly observed (for some references, see Frahm 2011: 278), Sargon’s violent death in 705 BCE on the battlefield in Tabal in Anatolia may have Biblical resonances as well, in the mocking dirge in Isaiah 14 that commemorates the downfall of an oppressive anonymous “king of Babel.” The Isaiah text addresses this monarch with the words: “All the kings of the nations lie in glory, each in his own tomb; but you are cast out, away from your grave … like a corpse trampled underfoot” (Isa. 14:18–19). Even though not everyone agrees (see especially Olyan 2006), it does not seem far‐fetched to assume that this description was inspired by the fate of Sargon, whose body had not been recovered after he had been killed – and whose death initiated a period of religious‐historical soul‐searching in Assyria. The designation of the fallen ruler as “king of Babel” instead of “king of Assyria” may be the result of a later editorial adaptation made under the impression of the Babylonian exile. Isaiah’s exclamation “how you (the dead king) are fallen from heaven, Bright one, Son of Dawn (Hebr. hēlêl ben šāḥar)” (Isa. 14:12), translated in the Vulgata as “quomodo cecidisti de caelo lucifer,” was later interpreted by Origen and other Christian theologians as referring to the devil (see Frahm 2013: 111–12) – a strange “mnemohistorical” trajectory for a passage that may once have described in metaphorical terms the demise of a Late Assyrian monarch.