The Divided Monarchy – 10 / Invasion of Judah

Sennacherib’s Invasion of Judah

 King Ahaz of Judah died in about 727 BCE He was succeeded by his son Hezekiah (727–697 BCE), who presided over a critical period in the history of Judah, introducing cultic reforms that charted the course for the subsequent development of Israelite religion, and adopting a bold policy towards Assyria, based first on defiance and then on conciliation, that defined Judah’s position in the international affairs of the seventh century BCE Fortunately Hezekiah’s pivotal reign is one of the best documented of any king of Israel or Judah, both in biblical and extrabiblical texts. It is extensively reported in both Kings and Chronicles, and it is the setting of a substantial number of the oracles and narratives collected in Isaiah 1–33. The Assyrian annals provide a full account of Hezekiah’s rebellion against Assyria and subsequent capitulation. A number of larger and smaller Hebrew inscriptions have survived from Hezekiah’s reign, ranging from the famous Siloam tunnel inscription (discussed below) to the extensive corpus of lmlk jar handles (also discussed below) to numerous personal seals and seal impressions belonging to the leading citizens of the day. These personal documents permit an especially intimate access to the time of Hezekiah, but none does so more dramatically than a clay impression that has recently come to light of the seal of King Hezekiah himself. It reads “Belonging to Hezekiah (son) of Ahaz, king of Judah.”

In the Deuteronomistic historian’s summary of his reign (2 Kings 18:1–8, especially verse 4) we are told that Hezekiah “removed the high places” (the local shrines), “broke down the pillars” (standing stones that marked the sacredness of the shrines), “cut down the sacred pole” (the asherah, which seems to have signified the divine presence, sometimes personified as a goddess and consort of the God of Israel) and smashed Nehushtan, “the bronze serpent that Moses had made” (an otherwise unknown but obviously long-venerated cult object). All of these except the last are often-mentioned Israelite cult objects that earlier kings were condemned for failing to abolish, and none of them is Assyrian. It would be a mistake, therefore, to associate Hezekiah’s religious reforms with his revolt against Assyria in the closing years of the eighth century. On the contrary, he is more likely to have initiated these reforms early in his reign, before Sennacherib threatened the country and before the elimination of local places of worship might have demoralized the citizenry who lived outside of Jerusalem. The Chronicler states that Hezekiah began to purify the Temple immediately, in the first month of the first year of his reign (2 Chronicles 29:3). This claim seems intended to emphasize the piety of an ancient and revered king, but it may be only slightly exaggerated. The grim example of Samaria gave credence to the voices of prophets like Hosea, who had warned that the gross religious improprieties in the northern kingdom would lead to disaster and exile, and Hezekiah may have hoped that religious reform would help Judah avoid the fate of Israel.

For the first two decades of his reign, Hezekiah seems to have remained a loyal vassal of Assyria. There is no Assyrian record of an attack on Judah by Shalmaneser V or Sargon II during this period. When King Azuri of Ashdod rebelled against Assyria in 714 BCE, Hezekiah evidently refused to become involved, despite the seditious messages Azuri is said in Sargon’s annals to have sent to Judah. Ashdod had active support from Shabaka (716–702 B.C.E.), the Cushite ruler of Egypt, who had moved to assert the rule of the strong XXVth Dynasty over the entire Nile Valley after the death of the dynastic founder, his brother Piankhy. The “Oracle concerning Ethiopia [i.e., Cush],” in Isaiah 19, with its reference to “sending ambassadors by the Nile,” is often taken as an indication that Shabaka contacted Hezekiah, urging him to join the revolt. If so, Hezekiah evidently refused, perhaps swayed by Isaiah’s counsel (cf. Isaiah 20:6), and the decision proved to be the safe one, since by 712 BCE Sargon had smashed the revolt in Ashdod and had at least intimidated its Egyptian supporters—this is the background of the threats against Egypt and Ethiopia (Cush) in Isaiah 20.

Hezekiah’s policy of compliance with Assyria ended dramatically with the death of Sargon II and the accession of his son Sennacherib (705–681 B.C.E.). Viewed in broad perspective, the reign of Sennacherib was a period of relative tranquillity in the western provinces of the empire. This was partly because the Assyrian army was heavily committed to a long and difficult struggle with Babylon, but it was also because the conquest of the West was now complete. Although Sennacherib’s successors would attempt to extend its boundaries to the Nile, the empire had reached its natural limits. Moreover, the imperial administration, to which Sennacherib made a number of improvements, was in place and working, and this brought an unaccustomed stability to Syria-Palestine—the so-called Pax Assyriaca. It is somewhat ironic, then, that just as this Assyrian Peace was taking hold in the West, Sennacherib sent an army across the Euphrates—his only western campaign—with Jerusalem as its principal target and final destination.

Sargon had been killed in battle in Asia Minor, and news of his death sparked hope throughout the empire that Assyrian power would diminish. Almost immediately a rebellion broke out in Babylon, led again by Merodachbaladan, who had also opposed Sargon at his accession (722 B.C.E.). He was supported by a coalition of Babylonian ethnic groups, including his fellow Chaldeans, as well as Arameans and Elamites. Merodachbaladan may also have tried to foment unrest in the West, where, in any case, a major revolt was brewing. The ringleaders were, in the north, Luli, the king of Sidon, and, in the south, Sidqia (s\id-qa-a-a) of Ashkelon and Hezekiah of Judah. The people of Ekron also joined in, deposing Padi, their pro-Assyrian king, and consigning him to the custody of Hezekiah, who had “attacked the Philistines as far as Gaza and its territory, from watchtower to fortified city” (2 Kings 18:8), evidently attempting to force other Philistine states into the fold. Egypt, hoping to reassert control over the territories and trade routes lost to Tiglath-pileser and Sargon, supported the revolt.

Earlier, after Sargon’s suppression of the 714–712 BCE revolt in Ashdod, Pharaoh Shabaka had come to terms with Assyria in order to stabilize the position of the XXVth Dynasty in Egypt by reducing the threat from Assyria. Now, however, Shabaka (716–702 BCE) or his successor, Shebitku (702–690 BCE), was ready to support rebellion against Assyria.

In 701 BCE, having ousted Merodachbaladan and brought things somewhat under control in Babylonia, Sennacherib marched against the western rebel states, beginning with Sidon. When the Assyrian army arrived, the Phoenician cities surrendered without a fight. Luli fled to Cyprus (cf. Isaiah 23:12), where he later died, while Sennacherib installed Ittobaal (Tuba’lu) on the Sidonian throne. The Assyrian annals boast of the submission at this time of the rulers of a number of western states (“all the kings of Amurru”). Some or all of these—including the Transjordanian states of Ammon, Moab and Edom—may originally have supported the coalition, so that their surrender left Ashkelon, Ekron and Judah isolated. Sennacherib stormed down the coast and accepted the surrender of Ashkelon, deporting Sidqia to Assyria and replacing him with Sharruludari, who, despite his Assyrian name, is said to have been the son of a former king of Ashkelon who had been loyal to Assyria. At this point Sennacherib spent some time destroying and looting towns and cities, like Joppa, that had been dependent on Ashkelon. Before he was ready to march on Ekron, he was intercepted at Eltekeh (Tell esh-Shallaf, north of Jabneh) by a very large Egyptian expeditionary force that had responded to a request from Ekron for help. Though the annals claim that Sennacherib defeated the Egyptians, he may have merely escaped them—or at best repulsed them—and their continuing presence in the region was probably a factor in his decision to withdraw permanently from Palestine before consummating his siege of Jerusalem. In any case, he moved on from Eltekeh to Ekron and captured the city, punishing the rebels but sparing those who had remained loyal to Assyria; he would eventually bring Padi back from Jerusalem and restore him to his throne.

After the capture of Ekron, the Assyrian army marched into Judah. For this stage of Sennacherib’s campaign we have fairly extensive accounts not only in the Assyrian annals, on which we rely for almost all we know about the earlier stages, but also the Bible. The biblical account, which is found in 2 Kings 18:13–19:37 (= Isaiah 36–37), consists of two distinct sections that are widely recognized as deriving from different sources. The opening section (2 Kings 18:13–16) is a straightforward summary of the events, describing the devastation of the Judahite countryside by the Assyrian army and Hezekiah’s payment of tribute to Sennacherib. The businesslike tone of this passage and the absence of ideological or even interpretive expansion suggest that it is a quotation from an early annalistic source. Although much more compact than the Assyrian account, it corresponds closely—sometimes remarkably so—to the picture given there, so that these two annalistic sources, Judahite and Assyrian, tend to corroborate each other. The section that follows in the biblical account (2 Kings 18:17–19:34) is a long discursive narrative detailing demands for the surrender of Jerusalem made by Sennacherib’s officers and placing special emphasis on the role of the prophet Isaiah in convincing Hezekiah not to surrender. This material probably originated in prophetic circles associated with Isaiah, and its language and ideology indicate it was transmitted in the Deuteronomistic tradition. For these reasons the historical value of this second section of the biblical account of the invasion is sometimes discounted, but a number of studies have demonstrated the presence, especially in the speeches of Sennacherib’s ambassadors, of stereotyped elements of style, ideology and language known from Assyrian royal inscriptions. This suggests that this section, too, is based on authentic events—or at least early accounts of events—and therefore has historical value despite its complex literary history and its inclusion of numerous later expansions and interpolations.

According to the Assyrian annals, Sennacherib besieged and captured 46 of Hezekiah’s fortified cities (cf. 2 Kings 18:13), turning many of them over to the Philistine states that had been loyal to Assyria. Most of these captured cities, we assume, were on Judah’s western frontier, which, with Hezekiah’s Philistine allies reduced to vassalage or worse, was vulnerable and unable to resist the Assyrian onslaught.

Sennacherib’s principal success in this part of the campaign was against the fortress city of Lachish in the Judahite Shephelah, which guarded the southwestern entrance into the passes to Jerusalem. Lachish is not specifically mentioned in Sennacherib’s annals—it was presumably one of the 46 captured cities—and the siege is not reported in the Bible (though the presence of the Assyrian army at Lachish is mentioned several times in 2 Kings 18–19). Nevertheless, the siege is very well documented, both by the reliefs depicting the siege found in the ruins of Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh and by the excavation of Lachish. The old annalistic summary at the beginning of the biblical account states that Hezekiah sent a message of contrition to Sennacherib while he was at Lachish, asking the Assyrian king to withdraw and promising that “whatever you impose on me I will bear” (2 Kings 18:14). This suggests that the Assyrian war camp at Lachish, which is depicted in the Nineveh reliefs, was the headquarters for the entire Judahite campaign including the siege of Jerusalem, which must have already been well advanced before Hezekiah dispatched his submissive message.

Despite the arrangement of the biblical materials, it must have been prior to Hezekiah’s submission that Sennacherib sent a delegation of three officers to Jerusalem to demand the surrender of the city, as described in 2 Kings 18:17–19:7. The duties of these officers in the normal operations of the Assyrian bureaucracy are well known. Two of the officers, the Tartan (Viceroy) and the Rabsaris (Chief Eunuch), had important military and diplomatic duties, but the third, the Rabshakeh (Chief Cupbearer), who was the highest-ranking domestic attendant of the king, ordinarily did not. Yet it was the Rabshakeh who served as the Assyrian spokesman at Jerusalem, and this is best explained by the assumption that he spoke Hebrew. The demand for surrender, though formally addressed to Hezekiah, was also a piece of military propaganda, designed to intimidate and demoralize the citizens of Jerusalem: Rabshakeh refused a request by Hezekiah’s delegation that he speak Aramaic (the internationally accepted diplomatic language), and instead shouted a message “in the language of Judah” to the people listening on the city wall, denouncing Hezekiah and offering them favorable surrender terms.

Neither the Assyrian nor the biblical account indicates how long Jerusalem was under siege before Hezekiah submitted, but it was long enough for the Assyrian army to erect earthworks against the city gates and ravage the surrounding countryside while keeping Hezekiah confined, as Sennacherib boasted, “like a bird in a cage.” It may seem surprising, in fact, that the city wall was never breached, but Jerusalem was not as vulnerable as the cities on Judah’s western frontier. The four years (705–701 BCE) it had taken Sennacherib to subdue Merodachbaladan had given Hezekiah time to make elaborate preparations, especially in the capital city itself. According to 2 Chronicles 32:5, he had rebuilt and strengthened the city wall of Jerusalem and the millo. He also added “another wall” that was “outside” the first, part of which has been recently uncovered in a Jerusalem excavation directed by Nahman Avigad. Hezekiah’s most remarkable achievement in this regard, though, was the construction of a tunnel to protect the city’s water supply. The Gihon Spring, Jerusalem’s principal source of water, was situated at a vulnerable location in the Kidron Valley outside the city wall. Hezekiah’s workers sealed access to the Gihon and the other water sources outside the city (2 Chronicles 32:3–4) and excavated a tunnel, still extant, that diverted the water under the hill to a collecting pool in the western part of the city, within the walls (cf. 2 Kings 20:20; 2 Chronicles 32:30). This remarkable engineering feat—the excavation of a tunnel 1,749 feet long and in places 100 feet beneath the streets of the city—was described and commemorated in an inscription found in 1880. Preceding his reference to Hezekiah’s tunnel, the Chronicler indicates that Hezekiah maintained numerous storehouses for agricultural goods and places (cities) for quartering livestock (2 Chronicles 32:28–29), and these, too, should probably be seen as part of his preparations for the invasion. The possibility that he reorganized the kingdom fiscally, dividing it into four administrative districts for the distribution of supplies, arises from the study of a large group of stamps found on jar handles and whole vessels—more than 1,200 of them have been found at numerous sites—each of which bears the depiction of a winged scarab and the legend lmlk, meaning “Belonging to the king,” followed by the name of one of four towns, which may have been central distribution depots.

In the end, the siege of Jerusalem was lifted, and the Assyrian army departed. Although there may have been other factors, Hezekiah’s preparations probably made the completion of the siege seem more difficult than it was worth to Sennacherib, especially since he had already achieved his major goals. The revolt in the West had been completely quelled, and all the leading rebel states—Sidon, Ashkelon and Judah—had submitted and accepted vassalage status, the former two with new kings of Sennacherib’s choosing. Hezekiah was still on the throne of Jerusalem, but Padi had been freed from his custody and returned to Ekron, and Hezekiah himself had accepted vassalage and paid an extremely high price to keep his throne. To supply the precious metals required by Sennacherib, Hezekiah emptied both the palace and temple treasuries and stripped the gold ornamentation from the entryway of the Temple (2 Kings 18:15–16). True, the Egyptian army was probably still operating somewhere in the region, but, with the size of the force that ambushed him at Eltekeh still fresh in his mind, Sennacherib must have been content to go home and leave the Egypt problem for his successors.