Chapter 9
Hezekiah and Sennacherib: another deep probe
In 701 BCE the Assyrian king Sennacherib attacked the Southern Kingdom of Judah and laid siege to Jerusalem. There is much archaeological evidence for this traumatic event, and it features prominently in the book of Kings and in the book of Isaiah the prophet, as well as in Sennacherib’s own records. It is a good case study of the relationship between prophets and the events of their times, and how biblical and nonbiblical sources complement each other.
In the second half of the eighth century BCE, the Assyrian Empire was reaching the zenith of its power. In the inexorable advance of the Assyrians toward Egypt, which they conquered in 671 BCE, they began to take over the smaller states of the Levant that stood in their way and had often been unreliable and even rebellious vassals. Among the casualties were Damascus in 732 and the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722. Israel’s southern neighbor Judah survived, in part because of its relatively remote location, some distance from the main coastal highway, and also because beginning in the 730s the kings of Judah had willingly subjected themselves to Assyria as tribute-paying vassals.
At the very end of the eighth century BCE, however, as Assyria was preoccupied with internal difficulties closer to its homeland, the Judean king Hezekiah allied with other regional monarchs, including the Egyptian pharaoh, and rebelled against Assyrian imperial rule. The response of Sennacherib, who had come to power in 705, was swift and harsh. In an extensive campaign in 701 BCE he led his army down the Mediterranean coast, replacing rebellious rulers with more compliant ones and enforcing the payment of tribute. This time Judah did not escape. Its major cities were captured and destroyed, and its capital Jerusalem besieged until Hezekiah surrendered and paid an enormous tribute.
Sennacherib’s account of the siege of Jerusalem
This excerpt from Sennacherib’s first-person account of his campaign of 701 BCE describes his attack on Judah:
As for Hezekiah, the Judean, who had not submitted to my yoke, I besieged forty-six of his fortified walled cities and surrounding small towns, which were without number. Using packed-down ramps and applying battering rams, infantry attacks by mines, breeches, and siege machines, I conquered them. I took out 200,150 people, young and old, male and female, horses, mules, donkeys, camels, cattle, and sheep, without number, and counted them as spoil. Himself I locked him up within Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage. I surrounded him with earthworks, and made it unthinkable for him to exit by the city gate. His cities which I had despoiled, I cut off from his land, and gave them to Mitinti, king of Ashdod, Padi, king of Ekron, and Silli-bel, king of Gaza, and thus diminished his land. I imposed upon him in addition to the former tribute, yearly payment of dues and gifts for my lordship.
He, Hezekiah, was overwhelmed by the awesome splendor of my lordship, and he sent me after my departure to Nineveh, my royal city, his elite troops and his best soldiers, which he had brought into Jerusalem as reinforcements, with 30 talents of gold, 800 talents of silver, choice antimony, large blocks of carnelian, beds (inlaid) with ivory, armchairs (inlaid) with ivory, elephant hides, ivory, ebony-wood, boxwood, garments with multicolored trim, garments of linen, wool (dyed) red-purple and blue-purple, vessels of copper, iron, bronze, and tin, chariots, siege shields, lances, armor, daggers for the belt, bows and arrows, countless trappings and instruments of war, together with his daughters, his palace women, his male and female singers. He (also) dispatched his personal messenger to deliver the tribute and to do obeisance.1
A biblical account of Sennacherib’s attack
Biblical historians record essentially the same events as Sennacherib’s account, confirming the substance of Sennacherib’s claims in a brief summary:
In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, King Sennacherib of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. King Hezekiah of Judah sent to the king of Assyria at Lachish, saying, “I have done wrong; withdraw from me; whatever you impose on me I will bear.” The king of Assyria demanded of King Hezekiah of Judah three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold. Hezekiah gave him all the silver that was found in the house of the Lord and in the treasuries of the king’s house. At that time Hezekiah stripped the gold from the doors of the temple of the Lord, and from the doorposts that King Hezekiah of Judah had overlaid and gave it to the king of Assyria. (2 Kings 18:13–16)
For these events we have an unusually plentiful number of independent sources. These include a lengthy Assyrian account attributed to Sennacherib himself, surviving in multiple copies; a series of stone panels carved in low relief from a room in Sennacherib’s palace that show Sennacherib’s capture of the southern Judean city of Lachish; extensive archaeological evidence for the massive destruction in Judah and for Hezekiah’s extensive preparations for the anticipated siege of Jerusalem; and several biblical accounts incorporated into the books of Kings, Chronicles, and Isaiah. Each of these sources must be interpreted, but on the facts they are in agreement.
Archaeological evidence
Both Sennacherib’s own account and that in 2 Kings agree that as part of his campaign, Sennacherib attacked the major fortified cities of Judah in order to eliminate local resistance and the outer defenses of the capital in Jerusalem. At a large number of Judean sites, there are layers of ash and other debris resulting from this campaign. The most well known of these sites is Lachish, for which we also have graphic visual evidence in reliefs depicting its siege and conquest from Sennacherib’s royal palace at Nineveh, his capital. The archaeological evidence and the reliefs correlate nicely, confirming the details of the Assyrian onslaught and their military tactics.
In preparation for the anticipated siege of Jerusalem, Hezekiah refortified the city, extending its wall to include a more recently settled district known as the Mishneh, or Second Quarter. Excavations have uncovered parts of this wall, dated to the late eighth century BCE.
Another archaeological datum is a tunnel more than 1,700 feet long that goes under the city of David, the original nucleus of Jerusalem. The tunnel itself has been known to scholars since the early nineteenth century and has been convincingly identified with a construction project sponsored by the Judean king Hezekiah in the late eighth century BCE:
[Hezekiah] made the pool and the conduit and brought water into the city (2 Kings 20:20);
9. Jerusalem in the late eighth century BCE.
Hezekiah closed the upper outlet of the waters of Gihon and directed them down to the west side of the city of David (2 Chron. 32:30).
The tunnel was an aqueduct: it brought the water from the city’s main spring, known appropriately as Gihon (“gusher”), which was outside the fortifications on the east side, to a newly constructed pool or reservoir, called Siloam, on the west side, now within the city’s wall.
Carved into the wall of the tunnel near its southern end was an inscription. Known as the Siloam Tunnel Inscription, the text is six lines long but is not entirely complete, perhaps because some of it was lost when it was hacked out of the tunnel wall not long after its discovery in 1880. It dramatically describes how two groups of laborers, working deep underground from both ends of the tunnel, met near the center. First they “heard the sound of each man calling to his fellow,” and then they met, “pick against pick,” whereupon “the water flowed from the spring to the pool for twelve hundred cubits.” Although the text is written in an elegant ancient Hebrew script, it does not appear to be an official monument commemorating the tunnel’s completion—it does not mention the name of the king who ordered the construction, nor give a date, and its location inside the tunnel is not where one would expect a monumental inscription to be carved. Perhaps it was placed there by the chief engineer or the workers themselves. In any case, almost all scholars agree that the inscription dates to the late eighth century, memorializing this additional phase of preparation for the expected Assyrian siege and dramatically illustrating the short biblical notices.
Sennacherib in other texts presents his victories in religious terms, as gifts from his patron deity Ashur who had designated him as king. Paralleling this ideological interpretation, the biblical sources discuss the events of 701 BCE as ultimately caused by Yahweh, from two distinct perspectives. The first explains the attack itself: Why did Yahweh allow the Assyrians to decimate Judah’s defenses and its population? Because Yahweh himself was using them to punish his people for their rebelliousness. Speaking through the prophet Isaiah, Yahweh makes a remarkable assertion:
Ah, Assyria, the rod of my rage—
the staff of my fury!
Against a godless nation I send him,
and against the people with whom I am angry I command him,
to take spoil and seize plunder,
and to tread them down like mud in the streets. (Isa. 10:5–6)
In the prophet’s interpretation, the Assyrians were instruments of punishment in Yahweh’s hands, because his people had failed to trust in him, but had sought “refuge in the protection of Pharaoh, … shelter in the shadow of Egypt” (Isa. 30:2), that is, they had relied on foreign alliances rather than on Yahweh. Moreover, they had broken their fundamental contract with God, the Sinai Covenant, and so their religious observances were futile until they learned to “seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (1:17).
Because the Israelites were rebellious sons (Isa. 1:2, 5), they would be punished. Like a flood coming from the Euphrates River in northern Mesopotamia, their homeland, the Assyrians would inundate Judah (Isa. 8:7–8) with horrific results:
Your country lies desolate,
your cities are burned with fire;
in your very presence
aliens devour your land;
it is desolate, as overthrown by foreigners.
And daughter Zion is left
like a booth in a vineyard,
like a shelter in a cucumber field,
like a besieged city. (Isa. 1:7–8)
This is a vivid description of Sennacherib’s campaign against Judah and his siege of Jerusalem, reduced to a ramshackle hut in a flattened landscape.
But the story did not end there, for Jerusalem was not captured or destroyed. The matter-of-fact summary in 2 Kings 18:13–16 is followed in 2 Kings 18:17–19:17 by a much lengthier and more ideological account of extended negotiations between Hezekiah and Sennacherib, during which the prophet Isaiah assures Hezekiah that Yahweh will protect Jerusalem for his own sake, and for the sake of his servant David, whose successor Hezekiah is. The account concludes with a verse with a mythical tone:
That very night the angel of Yahweh set out and struck down one hundred eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; when morning dawned, they were all dead bodies. Then King Sennacherib of Assyria left, went home, and lived at Nineveh. (2 Kings 19:35)
The Assyrian withdrawal is here interpreted not as the result of Hezekiah’s surrender but as direct divine intervention, rewarding Hezekiah’s faithfulness and demonstrating Yahweh’s guarantee to protect Jerusalem, whose Temple was his home and which was the capital of the dynasty that he himself had chosen.
The historical facts, then, are these: Sennacherib invaded Judea, attacked its major cities, and laid siege to Jerusalem, whereupon Hezekiah surrendered and paid tribute. But those facts were subject to interpretation. Jerusalem had survived, and that was Yahweh’s doing, expressed in extravagant terms: a miraculous divine slaughter of the Assyrian army, just as Yahweh had annihilated the Egyptian army during the Exodus from Egypt. So extravagant is this account that both the early second-century BCE writer Sirach and the late first-century CE Jewish historian Josephus demythologized it, attributing the death of Sennacherib’s soldiers to a plague. But for Isaiah, and also for the authors of the book of Kings, both Assyria’s attack and withdrawal were manifestations of Yahweh’s control over history.
This probe illustrates the role of the prophets as interpreters of historical events, informed by their understanding of Yahweh as the most powerful, implicitly even the only god. It also provides an example of how, when taken together, biblical and nonbiblical texts and archaeological data mutually enhance our understanding.
Chapter 10
Poetry and dissent
Some of the biblical and nonbiblical texts quoted in this book are printed in poetic lines, and scholars agree that about a third of the Old Testament is poetry. But to conserve writing materials such as papyrus and parchment, in ancient manuscripts poetry and prose were written the same way, in continuous lines. This is one reason why poetry is sometimes difficult to identify. Another is that several formal features that we associate with poetry are not discernible in ancient Near Eastern poetry in general and biblical poetry in particular. For example, rhyme is seldom used, although assonance and alliteration occasionally are. Moreover, the meter of biblical poetry is not fully understood. Presumably the Israelites, and many of their neighbors, used a variety of patterned rhythms, but there is no consensus about how to analyze them.
The most easily recognizable feature of biblical poetry is known as parallelism, in which an idea expressed in one line is expressed in different words in the next. The result is a kind of thought rhyme. The parallelism may be synonymous, as in:
Know well the condition of your flocks,
and give attention to your herds. (Prov. 27:23)
It may also be contrasting:
A soft answer turns away wrath,
but a harsh tongue stirs up anger. (Prov. 15:1)
Finally, it may also be progressive:
As a door turns on its hinges,
so does a lazy man in bed. (Prov. 26:14)
Parallel examples of parallelism
As a poetic device parallelism was widely used. In an ancient Canaanite myth, the storm god Baal is told how he will defeat his adversary, Prince Sea:
Let me tell you, Prince Baal,
let me repeat, Rider on the Clouds:
behold, your enemy, Baal,
behold, you will kill your enemy,
behold, you will annihilate your foes.
You will take your eternal kingship,
your dominion forever and ever.
In these lines two couplets with synonymous parallelism frame a triplet with both progressive and synonymous parallelism.
Both the techniques and the formulation are familiar to readers of the Bible:
Behold, your enemies, O Yahweh,
behold, your enemies will perish;
all evildoers will be scattered. (Ps. 92:9)
Your kingdom is an eternal kingdom,
your rule is forever and ever. (Ps. 145:13)
Further examples are found in many of the poetic passages quoted throughout this book.
Taken on its own, this last proverb may appear to be prose rather than poetry, but because it occurs in a context of proverbs that use parallelism, it too should be considered poetic.
Many variations on these types occur, but the overall pattern is transparent and forms an essential formal element of biblical poetry and of much ancient nonbiblical poetry as well. Given the ongoing use of the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, it is also convenient, to say the least, that unlike rhyme or meter, parallelism is easy to convey in translation.
Poems are scattered throughout the narrative books that form the Torah and the Former Prophets, that is, from Genesis through 2 Kings. We find much more poetry in the Latter Prophets, especially in the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and many of the twelve Minor Prophets. There are also books in the Writings that are entirely in poetic form. One is the book of Psalms, the hymnbook of ancient Israel. Another is the relatively short Song of Solomon (also called the Song of Songs), a collection of often erotic love poems between a man and a woman.
Wisdom literature
In ancient Israel as in the rest of the ancient Near East, one kind of writing that frequently employed poetry is what scholars call wisdom literature
. The term is broad, including genres such as hymns, disputations, fables, and especially proverbs. Whatever the genre used, wisdom literature focuses on the human condition and is often universal in the sense that it is not linked to particular historical events or individuals. In part because of its universality, wisdom literature was international, with remarkable cross-fertilization among various cultures.
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