The Oxford History of the Biblical World (59 page)

His moment came in 705
BCE
, when the Assyrian empire was shaken by Sargon II’s death on the battlefield while campaigning in distant Anatolia. That mighty Assyrian king, infamous for his merciless use of force, a man who redrew the map of the Near East by uprooting entire populations, was himself denied a final resting place. He is the only ancient Assyrian monarch not to have been interred in royal fashion. In a mock eulogy, the Israelite prophet Isaiah expressed the relief surely felt by many upon receiving the news:

Is this the man who made the earth tremble,
who shook kingdoms,

who made the world like a desert
and overthrew its cities,
who would not let his prisoners go home?

All the kings of the nations lie in glory,
each in his own tomb;

but you are cast out, away from your grave,
like loathsome carrion,

clothed with the dead, those pierced by the sword,
who go down to the stones of the Pit,
like a corpse trampled underfoot.

You will not be joined with them in burial,
because you have destroyed your land,
you have killed your people.

(Isa. 14.16–20)

In the wake of Sargon’s untimely end, rebellions erupted throughout the empire, from Babylonia as far as the Persian Gulf and along the Mediterranean coast down to the Egyptian border. As the new Assyrian ruler Sennacherib (705–681
BCE
) fought to subdue the Chaldean rebels and their Elamite allies directly south of Assyria, Hezekiah took the lead in organizing the southern Syrian states against him. These included the Phoenician port of Sidon and its holdings down the coast to Acco, as well as Philistine Ashkelon and Ekron and the smaller towns under their rule. As on many previous occasions, Egyptian aid was promised, this time by the new pharaoh Shebitku (702–690
BCE
) of the Nubian Dynasty 25, who was ready to pursue an active role in western Asia against Assyria. Hezekiah pressed for maximum participation in the rebel cause, to the point of using military force against holdouts. At Ekron, where those who called for armed resistance were in the majority, its pro-Assyrian king Padi was removed and imprisoned in Jerusalem. Other small kingdoms, such as Ashdod, Ammon, Moab, and Edom, may have toyed with the idea of joining the rebels, but they promptly dissociated themselves when Sennacherib finally appeared on the scene.

Preparations in Judah for the anticipated Assyrian reprisal concentrated on reinforcing Jerusalem’s defenses, especially the residential quarter that had recently grown up on the city’s western hill. Isaiah looked askance as the king’s engineers “counted the houses of Jerusalem and… broke down the houses to fortify the wall” (Isa. 22.10). A short run of the massive (7 meters [23 feet] wide) fortification wall constructed at that time has been excavated in the Old City of Jerusalem. In the “lower city,” the “city of David,” the Siloam Tunnel project was completed, guaranteeing a sure water supply in case of a siege. A winding tunnel running 533 meters (1,750 feet) from the Gihon Spring in the Kidron Valley to the “Lower Pool” within the city’s walls was dug through the limestone bedrock of the hill beneath the city. An appreciation of the difficulties encountered by the workmen can be read in the inscription chiseled on a wall within its recesses:

While [ ] (were) still [ ] the axe(s) toward one another, and while there were still three cubits to be [tunneled, there was heard] a voice calling to his fellow, for there was a fissure (?) in the rock on the right [and on the left]. And on the day when the tunnel was cut through, the stonecutters struck toward one another, ax against ax. The water flowed from the source to the pool for 1,200 cubits, and the height of the rock was 100 cubits above the heads of the stonecutters.

Not until 701
BCE
, more than three years after he had ascended the throne, did Sennacherib set out to quell the rebellions in the west. Unlike most chapters in Israelite history, the events of that year are particularly well documented. The sources consist of biblical texts from both royal and prophetic sources, an account in Sennacherib’s annals, and an inscribed wall relief from the Assyrian royal palace in Nineveh; this rich trove, together with archaeological evidence, enables us to reconstruct the course of events in considerable detail.

Sennacherib marched his troops down the Mediterranean coast, meeting little resistance from the rebels in Sidon. The latter’s king having fled to a safe haven in one of the city’s overseas colonies, Sennacherib installed a new king, who shouldered Assyrian vassaldom. Continuing south toward Philistia, the Assyrians took Ashkelon and its environs and deported the royal family; a member of a rival line was set on the throne. At this juncture an Egyptian expeditionary force under the command of Taharqa, later to become pharaoh, engaged the Assyrians. The combined Egyptian and Nubian cavalry and chariot corps were no match for Sennacherib’s army; many were taken prisoner before they could escape the rout. The cities of Eltekeh, Ekron, and Timnah in the Shephelah were the next to fall, setting the stage for the attack farther inland on the line of fortresses that guarded the roads up to the Judean hill country. Sennacherib’s scribes described the scene:

As for Hezekiah the Judean, who had not submitted to my yoke, I besieged fortysix of his fortified walled cites and surrounding smaller 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.

Among the walled cities to fall to Sennacherib was the mighty fortress at Lachish, whose storming has been immortalized on an engraved relief that was prominently displayed in the king’s palace at Nineveh. The expansive montage depicts the multiphased Assyrian assault on the city, whose defenders are shown desperately hurling stones and torches on the attackers from the wall. Excavations at the site have recovered the remains of a counterramp within the city opposite the Assyrian ramp on the outside, heaped up just in case the wall would be breached by the attacking forces. The Assyrian artist included later stages of the battle in his relief; engraved below the besieged city is a row of impaled Judeans, suffering the punishment meted out for treason. A long line of refugees is shown exiting the city gate on their way to pass in review before Sennacherib, who had set up his command post at the foot of the high mound of Lachish.

While these battles for control of the Judean Shephelah raged, Sennacherib also set about negotiating with Hezekiah for his submission, no doubt in an attempt to cut his losses and to complete the campaign in the quickest possible time. As a warning of things to come, Jerusalem was brought under siege:

As for Hezekiah the Judean… 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.

Simultaneous with the physical pressure, Sennacherib dispatched a high-level team of ranking Assyrian officers to meet their Judean counterparts at the upper pool on the Fuller’s Field road to the north of Jerusalem’s city walls. In the carefully crafted speech reported in 2 Kings 18.19–35, the Rab-shakeh, an Assyrian official who is presented as having more than just a working knowledge of Hebrew, turned to the defenders on the city wall and warned them of the consequences they would suffer if they continued to resist. Nothing and no one, he claimed, could thwart Assyria’s
sure victory, especially since the God of Israel had ordered the attack! In his shock over these uncompromising demands, Hezekiah sought the advice of Isaiah, whose counsel urged calm confidence in the Lord’s protection of the city and its Davidic king.

In the end, it seems that negotiations led to a formula of surrender. Hezekiah would retain his throne, with Judah resuming its vassal status and the yearly payment of dues and tribute; a large indemnity, beyond the normal spoils of war, was to be transferred to Sennacherib; extensive sections of the kingdom—those captured during the fighting—were to be parceled among the Philistine city-states loyal to Assyria (Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gaza, and Ekron). An onerous settlement, but one that saved Hezekiah and Jerusalem.

Later generations, looking back on the attack on Judah in that year, viewed it as perhaps the most fateful event in the kingdom’s three-hundred-year history to that point. Had Jerusalem fallen, Judah would have gone the way of the northern kingdom of Israel and especially its capital, Samaria—to exile and extinction. That Sennacherib struck a compromise with Hezekiah, given the strategic upper hand held by the Assyrian army throughout the land, seemed inconceivable. Sennacherib was not beyond the most ruthless punishment of rebellious cities: a decade or so later he would literally wipe Babylon from the map. Some Judahites (as Byron illustrates in his poem “The Destruction of Sennacherib”) understood this break with the customary imperial practice as a miracle: the hand of the Lord, the God of Israel, had saved Jerusalem. Champions of Jerusalem’s cause told of the annihilation of the vast Assyrian army that had camped outside the city’s walls (2 Kings 19.35), and they pointed to Sennacherib’s assassination, though some twenty years after the siege of Jerusalem, as just due for the blasphemous words he had uttered against the Lord.

The seventh century opened for Judah with its monarch and its population in the most dire straits. The prophet Isaiah is once again our informant, as he addressed the nation:

Your country lies desolate,
your cities are burned with fire;

in your very presence
aliens devour your land.

(Isa. 1.7)

The most that the man of God could promise those who daily faced the ravaged countryside was that, within three years, life would resume its regular cycle of sowing and reaping, planting and eating (Isa. 37.30). Within three years, Hezekiah died, the despair of defeat and the destruction that he brought on Judah accompanying him to his grave.

Hezekiah’s son Manasseh ascended the throne at the young age of twelve, and went on to reign in Jerusalem for fifty-five years (698–642
BCE
), longer than any other dynast of the house of David. Historians as a rule vilify Manasseh, adopting the evaluation of the biblical sources that censure the king for his deviation from the religious reforms instituted by his father and for introducing idols into the Temple.
Manasseh is further accused of instituting a reign of terror, shedding the blood of many innocent persons in the capital; postbiblical tradition holds that the venerable prophet Isaiah was among those martyred. The report of Manasseh’s evil deeds and apostasy was transparently worked up by the editors of the oldest history of Israel, the book of Kings, to rationalize the later demise of the monarchy and the exile of the nation in terms of God’s just management of the world. In the editors’ view, Judah’s violation of the Mosaic covenant brought deserved punishment, Manasseh’s acts being the breaking point. But a more balanced view of Manasseh and his policies can be achieved by setting them against the backdrop of the Near East during the century of Assyrian domination when Judah was subject to Nineveh.

Sennacherib did not return to the west again; the political settlement imposed at the conclusion of the campaign of 701 held for close to a quarter century, into the reign of his son Esarhaddon (681–669
BCE
). In 679, the second year of his reign, Esarhaddon marched unchallenged to the border with Egypt in the Sinai Peninsula, in a show of force meant to demonstrate Assyria’s continuing interest in those distant reaches of its empire. An uprising in the Phoenician port of Sidon several years later tested this policy, and the revolt was decisively put down—the city was despoiled and leveled, and its population was deported. A new commercial center named after the king, Kar Ashur-ahi-iddina (“Port Esarhaddon”), was built to replace the former town, settlers from abroad were brought in, and all were placed under the direct administration of a governor appointed by Nineveh. Clearly Assyria would brook no interference with its rule.

All the while, however, the Egyptian king Taharqa (biblical Tirhakah; 690–664
BCE
), who may have harbored memories of his defeat in 701, when as a young commander he led the Egyptian forces against Sennacherib, was bent on supporting those elements in Phoenicia and Philistia who were prepared to take a more independent position vis-à-vis Assyria. Esarhaddon saw no other means to protect Assyrian interests in the Mediterranean area than direct confrontation with Taharqa, and he invaded Egypt in 674, only to be repelled. Such a defeat could not be left unanswered—to do so could have meant loss of the west altogether. In fact, while Esarhaddon reorganized for another attempt at taking Egypt, Baal of Tyre, who was bound by treaty to Assyria, and Mitinti of Ashkelon made common cause with Taharqa. Other petty monarchs may also have been enticed into revolt against what they perceived as a weakened Assyria. Three years later, as a prelude to his second invasion of Egypt, Esarhaddon laid siege to Tyre and forced its surrender. Proceeding south, he crossed the desert of the northern Sinai with the help of local Arab rulers and entered Egypt. There he triumphed. Taharqa fled Memphis, leaving behind family and officials, who were taken prisoner and, together with great wealth, carried off to Assyria. The victorious Assyrians established their rule throughout the Nile Valley.

This was the world that Manasseh faced during his first three decades as king, and it is little wonder that as ruler of the diminutive mountain kingdom of Judah he fulfilled his vassal duties on command. Esarhaddon mentions Manasseh among the “twenty-two kings of the west, the sea coast, and overseas” who were called up to provide material for the reconstruction of the royal storehouse at the Assyrian capital of Nineveh; these same vassals took part in the building of Port Esarhaddon. But as expressive of obedience as these activities may seem, there is one blemish on this
picture of Manasseh as loyal servant of the empire. A late, reworked biblical passage (2 Chron. 33.11) tells of Manasseh’s incarceration by Assyrian troops in Babylon and his subsequent return to Jerusalem. Manasseh may have been enticed by Baal of Tyre and by Pharaoh Taharqa to join in their revolt, and when Esarhaddon set out for Egypt, his route took him through the coastal plain of Philistia, very close to the border of Judah. Like the other rebels, Manasseh was arrested on the charge of treason; he was subsequently pardoned and returned to his throne, as were several of the minor rulers in the Nile Delta after the Assyrian victories in Egypt. Less than a decade later, Manasseh appears in Assyrian records once again, together with the twenty-one other western vassal kings, this time providing armed contingents for the Egyptian campaign of Esarhaddon’s son and successor, Ashurbanipal (669–627
BCE
).