Sennacherib’s Siege of Jerusalem: Once or Twice?
By Mordechai Cogan
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The Biblical Account of Sennacherib’s Attack
Sennacherib Boasts of His Conquests in Judah
The Assyrian monarch Sennacherib’s military campaign against King Hezekiah of Judah is one of the best-documented and most discussed events in the history of ancient Israel. The late-eighth-century B.C.E. encounter is reported in both Kings (2 Kings 18:13–19:37) and Chronicles (2 Chronicles 32:1–23). It is likely the backdrop for several prophetic teachings (for example, Isaiah 1:4–9, 22:1–14; Micah 1:10–16). In addition, we have a detailed cuneiform account of the campaign in the annals of Sennacherib (his third campaign).† We even have a relief from Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh depicting his conquest of Lachish,† a visual account complemented by archaeological finds from the site south of Jerusalem.†
One might think that with this wealth of data, scholars would have arrived at a satisfactory reconstruction of the course of events, the battles and their results. But scholars have not reached a consensus because of the contradictions in the Biblical and Assyrian accounts regarding the outcome of the campaign. According to the Bible, Sennacherib withdrew after his army was decimated by Yahweh’s angel (2 Kings 19:35), while Sennacherib’s annals claim that Hezekiah surrendered and paid the Assyrian king an extremely large tribute.
For close to a century and a half, scholars have debated these conflicting accounts. Several historians have suggested a novel way to resolve this contradiction: They surmise that the reports relate to two separate campaigns: one in 701 B.C.E., in which Sennacherib emerged as victor and collected a large tribute from Hezekiah as the price for his remaining in office; and a second campaign sometime after 688 B.C.E., in which Sennacherib suffered a major setback in the land of Judah.†
In a recent article in BAR, William Shea, a scholar of ancient Near Eastern studies, sought to defend this two-campaign theory.* On closer examination, however, it is indefensible.
Unfortunately, the Assyrian annals from 689 B.C.E. until Sennacherib’s assassination in 681 B.C.E. have not survived—or at least they have not yet been found, if indeed any were written. Since Assyrian sources cannot confirm a second campaign in Judah, some scholars, including Shea, have sought support in Egyptian sources. In 2 Kings 19:9 the Egyptian pharaoh Taharqa is said to have engaged the Assyrian army in the Judahite Shephelah.* Since Taharqa did not ascend the throne until 690 B.C.E., the Biblical report, it has been argued, must refer to an Assyrian military campaign in Judah after 690 B.C.E. Supporters of the two-campaign theory contend that this was a military campaign led by Sennacherib sometime before his assassination in 681 B.C.E.—a campaign not specifically mentioned in the Bible.
A recently published fragment of a stela records Taharqa’s victory over an enemy whose name is missing. All we know is that the defeated enemy possessed cattle, engaged in the production of honey, and was resettled by the Egyptian pharaoh in villages. In his publication of the text, Egyptologist Donald Redford of Pennsylvania State University compares a number of phrases in the new fragment to passages in other documents from Taharqa’s reign and proposes identifying the enemy as “some Libyan group” that, as other texts indicate, was defeated and impressed into the king’s service†
In his BAR article, Shea asserts that this new text “provides Egyptian evidence in support of the two-campaign theory.” His claim that the defeated enemy was Sennacherib, however, looks like an a priori assumption made in search of evidence to support the two-campaign theory rather than an objective effort to interpret the new text. The Taharqa stela tells us that the defeated enemy forces arrived with their families and possessions to be taken captive to Egypt. It is ludicrous to imagine the mighty Assyrian army marching in defeat to the coastal plain of Israel with the soldiers’ families and possessions in tow! Whoever Taharqa defeated, it was certainly not the Assyrian army of Sennacherib.
Rather than reaching for straws to resolve the historical quandary, it is best to interpret the Biblical text as recounting a single campaign of Sennacherib waged in 701 B.C.E. A critical evaluation of some elements of the Biblical record shows them to be late and legendary; therefore, this account cannot be accepted as evidence. But the most damning judgment of the two-campaign theory is that it is simply impossible given the widely accepted history of the seventh century B.C.E.
We begin with the Biblical texts.†
As is widely acknowledged, the account in Second Kings of Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah draws on a number of sources, distinguished by their style and themes.† The Deuteronomistic author* arranged his material so that it might convey a didactic message. This sometimes required that he abandon strict chronological arrangement.†
Three literary units are detectable in 2 Kings 18:13–19:37:
Unit 1 (2 Kings 18:13–16): This is a chronicle-like report of Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah, the capture of Judah’s fortified cities, Hezekiah’s surrender and the payment of a heavy tribute to Sennacherib. The details of that payment (verse 16) may have been copied from a Temple source.
Unit 2 (2 Kings 18:17—19:9a, 36–37): This describes negotiations regarding Hezekiah’s possible surrender. The Assyrian rabshakeh, the head of a high-level delegation, faces his Judahite counterparts. The rabshakeh raises the following points: (a) Egypt, a “splintered reed staff,” on whom Hezekiah has been relying, cannot be counted on for serious help, and the weak Judahite army by itself is no match for the superior host of Assyria; (b) the God of Israel has called upon Sennacherib to attack Judah; (c) the fate of the Judahite exiles will not be all that bad, as Assyria will resettle the deportees in a land as good as Judah. Hezekiah is overwrought by these demands and turns to the prophet Isaiah to intercede with Yahweh on his behalf. Isaiah offers a word of comfort and encouragement: Sennacherib will withdraw and return home, and there he will be felled by divine will. In the end, Sennacherib returns to Nineveh, where he is assassinated by two of his sons.
Unit 3 (2 Kings 19:9b–35): Sennacherib sends a message to Hezekiah, saying that Hezekiah’s God is as powerless as the gods of the nations that Assyria has already conquered. Hezekiah hurries to the Temple to pray for deliverance, emphasizing Sennacherib’s blasphemy against Yahweh. Isaiah appears and, in a lengthy poetic prophecy (2 Kings 19:21–34), scoffs at the arrogance of the Assyrian king, who claims to have conquered the world from the Nile Valley to the northern forests by his own might, forgetting the true ruler of all. Though three years of hard times will follow the Assyrian onslaught, Isaiah prophecies, in the end Jerusalem and the Davidic king will be saved because they enjoy Yahweh’s protection. That very night, 185,000 Assyrian soldiers are slaughtered by an angel of the Lord.
Although some have argued that these three units come from a single writer who witnessed the events and that they should be read as a continuous report, this approach requires considerable interpolation. For example, the gap found between 2 Kings 18:16 and 18:17—between the surrender of Hezekiah in verse 16 and the appearance before Jerusalem of the rabshakeh demanding surrender in verse 17—may be bridged only by assuming that Sennacherib had a change of heart and rejected Hezekiah’s offer of tribute and now demanded the city’s total surrender, or that he had resumed hostilities for some other reason. To suppose this was originally one continuous narrative also requires dismissing the stylistic differences of each unit of the story.
Before suggesting how the Biblical text can be accounted for, let us return to evaluate the cuneiform inscription of Sennacherib.
The account in Sennacherib’s annals was composed about half a year after the end of the campaign—in other words, some time in 700 B.C.E.—as the date in the colophon of the version known as the Rassam cylinder indicates.† The annals describe, in literary, nonchronological sequence, the reconquest of the rebel states in the west, from Phoenicia down to Philistia and along Egypt’s border. According to the annals, western rulers either fled before the power of Assyria’s army (as did Luli, king of Sidon), surrendered without a fight (like the kings of Transjordan) or suffered humiliating defeat (like the kings of the Philistine cities). The Assyrian army turned back an Egyptian auxiliary force that had come to aid the rebels and took some of its men and equipment as spoils. The annals treat Sennacherib’s operations in the kingdom of Judah separately from those in other areas of combat. The Assyrian annal writer devoted a large amount of space to describing these operations, which points to the importance he attached to Judah’s position in the western coalition against Assyria. Most likely, Hezekiah was the driving force behind the uprising. And although Hezekiah was not removed from the throne after his submission, as was so often the case with defeated monarchs, the annals clearly state that he was forced to surrender and to pay a vast tribute to Sennacherib. Moreover, territory in the Shephelah was divided among the Philistine city-states loyal to Sennacherib.†
Can this Assyrian report and the three Biblical traditions refer to a single campaign? Nothing really prevents us from such a conclusion. We need only consider the perspectives of the various accounts in order to appreciate that we are dealing with the testimonies of diverse witnesses.
The Assyrian annals and Unit 1 in the Bible are in basic agreement: Sennacherib brought Hezekiah to his knees; Hezekiah rendered tribute to Sennacherib and thus was permitted to retain his throne.
Unit 2 of the Biblical account centers on one particular episode—the speech made by the head of the Assyrian delegation, the rabshakeh, and the impression it made on those who heard his striking rhetoric. This episode reflects the realities of political negotiations that were part of Assyrian foreign policy. But this account cannot have been set down in writing before 680 B.C.E., the year of Sennacherib’s assassination, because the concluding factual details concern the identity of Sennacherib’s murderers and their place of refuge. The reference to Taharqa as “king of Egypt” in this unit is an anachronistic designation employed by a writer after Taharqa’s rise to the throne in 690.*
Unit 3 is the latest of the Biblical testimonies. In this prophetic narrative, Hezekiah is portrayed as a pious king who prays to Yahweh in the Temple. He has no need for the intercession of a prophet. Isaiah is Yahweh’s messenger; he delivers a promise of punishment for the proud and arrogant Assyrian king A reference to the Assyrian conquest of Egypt, which occurred nearly three decades after Sennacherib’s campaign and which was led by his successor Esarhaddon and, later, by Ashurbanipal, indicates that Isaiah’s original prophecy has been embellished by later updating. The legendary ending of the Biblical passage—the decimation of the Assyrian army that brought about the salvation of Jerusalem, Yahweh’s city, and of Hezekiah, the scion of David—probably developed in the circle of the faithful who understood that something miraculous had occurred years before. Whereas so many of the major cities in the ancient Near East had been humbled by the might of Assyria, Jerusalem had withstood Sennacherib’s attack.
Moreover, the broader historical context makes contemplation of a second campaign by Sennacherib in the early seventh century out of the question. Had Sennacherib been defeated in a second campaign decades after 701 B.C.E., as suggested by the two-campaign theory, the history of the seventh century would have to be rewritten. Assyria ruled the Near East for almost all of the seventh century. If Sennacherib had been defeated between 688 and 681 B.C.E., as argued in the two-campaign theory, it would mean that Judah, as well as the entire west, must have been reconquered at some time later in the seventh century. There is no indication anywhere that this occurred. Esarhaddon, son and heir of Sennacherib, certainly did no such thing. Indeed, his recorded appearance in the border area of Philistia in the early part of his reign was more like a state visit.† Furthermore, Manasseh, Hezekiah’s heir, appears as a submissive vassal of Assyria from the start, with no record of his having been forced into this position. This was true of all the kings in southern Syria and Phoenicia, for they had all been roundly defeated by Sennacherib two decades earlier, in 701 B.C.E. These vassal kingdoms did not rebel against him again, and so were not the objects of additional military activity.
One further fact: In 689 B.C.E. Assyria was at the height of its power, as demonstrated by the impressive military campaign it waged against Babylonia. To put an end to his “Babylonian problem” once and for all, Sennacherib decided upon the unprecedented step of not only ravaging Babylon, but utterly wiping it off the face of the earth. As he states in a cuneiform inscription carved in rock near Bavian (northeastern Iraq), “I made its devastation greater than that of ‘the Flood.’ So that in future days, the site of that city, its temples and its gods, would not be identifiable, I completely destroyed it with water and annihilated it like inundated territory.”† If Sennacherib was capable of doing this to the venerable city of Babylon, would any western monarch in his right mind have chosen to rebel against him a year or so later?
The defense for Sennacherib’s one and only campaign to Judah rests its case.
The Biblical Account of Sennacherib’s Attack
The Biblical text is one key to understanding whether the Assyrians attacked Jerusalem once or twice. In the accompanying article, author Mordechai Cogan suggests that the account in 2 Kings consists of three units. The first is a straightforward account of Assyria’s conquest of Judah’s fortified cities and of the tribute Judah’s King Hezekiah was forced to pay. In the second unit, an Assyrian official, the rabshakeh, tells the people of Jerusalem that resistance will prove fruitless. The third unit, seen by some scholars as describing a later attack, relates that Jerusalem was spared destruction when an angel slew 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in one night. Cogan, however, argues that the third unit refers to the same attack as the first unit but was written by a later author who attributed Jerusalem’s survival to God’s miraculous intervention.
Unit 1 (2 Kings 18:13–16)
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.
Selections from Unit 2 (2 Kings 18:17–19:9a, 36–37)
The Rabshakeh said to them: “Say to Hezekiah: Thus says the great king, the king of Assyria: On what do you base this confidence of yours? Do you think that mere words are strategy and power for war? On whom do you now rely, that you have rebelled against me? See, you are relying now on Egypt, that broken reed of a staff, which will pierce the hand of anyone who leans on it. Such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who rely on him. But if you say to me, ‘We rely on the Lord our God,’ is it not he whose high places and altars Hezekiah has removed, saying to Judah and Jerusalem, ‘You shall worship before this altar in Jerusalem’? … Is it without the Lord that I have come up against this place to destroy it? The Lord said to me, Go up against this land, and destroy it.” … “Do not listen to Hezekiah; for thus says the king of Assyria: ‘Make your peace with me and come out to me; then every one of you will eat from your own vine and your own fig tree, and drink water from your own cistern, until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of grain and wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a land of olive oil and honey, that you may live and not die. Do not listen to Hezekiah when he misleads you by saying, The Lord will deliver us.’” … Isaiah said to them, “Say to your master, ‘Thus says the Lord: Do not be afraid because of the words that you have heard, with which the servants of the king of Assyria have reviled me. I myself will put a spirit in him, so that he shall hear a rumor and return to his own land; I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land.’” … Then King Sennacherib of Assyria left, went home, and lived at Nineveh. As he was worshiping in the house of his god Nisroch, his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer killed him with the sword, and they escaped into the land of Ararat. His son Esar-haddon succeeded him.
Selections from Unit 3 (2 Kings 19:9b–35)
[Sennacherib] sent messengers again to Hezekiah, saying, “Thus shall you speak to King Hezekiah of Judah: Do not let your God on whom you rely deceive you by promising that Jerusalem will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria. See, you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands, destroying them utterly. Shall you be delivered? Have the gods of the nations delivered them, the nations that my predecessors destroyed … ?” Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers and read it; then Hezekiah went up to the house of the Lord and spread it before the Lord. And Hezekiah prayed before the Lord … Then Isaiah son of Amoz sent to Hezekiah, saying, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I have heard your prayer to me about King Sennacherib of Assyria … Therefore thus says the Lord concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city, shoot an arrow there, come before it with a shield, or cast up a siege-ramp against it. By the way that he came, by the same he shall return; he shall not come into this city, says the Lord. For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.” That very night the angel of the Lord set out and struck down one hundred eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; when morning dawned, they were all dead bodies.
Sennacherib Boasts of His Conquests in Judah
The Assyrian account of the campaign against Judah agrees in many respects with the version in the Bible. In his royal annals, Sennacherib describes a string of military victories from Phoenicia to Egypt’s border, and he boasts of his attacks against 46 fortified cities in Judah. He also lists the riches that he was able to extract from King Hezekiah. Interestingly, though Sennacherib writes that he trapped Hezekiah in Jerusalem “like a bird in a cage,” he never claims to have defeated him outright.
In my third campaign, I marched against Hatti. The awesome splendor of my lordship overwhelmed Lulli, king of Sidon, and he fled overseas and disappeared forever. The terrifying nature of the weapon of (the god) Ashur overwhelmed his strong cities …
As for Hezekiah, the Judaean, 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 by 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 [Hezekiah], 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 Ṣilli-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 … countless trappings and implements 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.
—From the annals of Sennacherib, king of Assyria (705–681 B.C.E.), translated from the Rassam Prism, in Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings, Anchor Bible Series (New York: Doubleday, 1988), pp. 337–339.
