Kindle Notes & Highlights
Elsewhere, the Bible presents Hezekiah’s centralization of the Yahwist cult at the Temple, and his successful exhortation to all Judahites and people of the former territories of Israel to worship there, as one of his defining acts of greatness.39 The measure gave Mount Zion unprecedented religious importance.
Shortly after hailing Hezekiah for tearing down pagan constructions, Second Kings tells us that it was King Josiah, Hezekiah’s great-grandson, who dared take the decisive step of destroying those pagan altars that Solomon had built for his foreign wives.
archaeological evidence shows that a cultic shrine in Lachish apparently remained intact until the town’s conquest by Sennacherib.
Isaiah and Micah alike excoriate the religious establishment for its emphasis on sacrifice and ritual49 and bemoan its total inattention to righteous behavior.
This new spirit of confidence would also show itself in assertive nationalism.
Military historian Trevor N. Dupuy observes that the nation’s “wealth and prosperity were sustained by booty and by what seems to have been the first truly military society in history.”4 A.K. Grayson, an expert on Assyria at the University of Toronto, underscores the point: “The chief occupation of the Assyrian king and state was warfare.”
To prevent Assyrian access to this reservoir, the Jerusalemites had to achieve another major engineering project: they built a previously mentioned “outer wall,” in places a stout 23 feet thick and 16 feet high, to enclose the reservoir, or Siloam Pool
In c. 712, a new ruler had moved to take effective control of all Egypt, save perhaps parts of the Delta. His name was Shabako, and he was a Kushite.
Egypt often appointed Kushites as high officials to help run the system, and the pharaoh eventually ran Kush not as a foreign colony but as an appendage of the Egyptian state’s administrative structure,8 something that would help explain why in the eighth century BC the Kushites would see Egypt as a kindred land, not a foreign one. Indeed, as far back as the 14th century, says Stuart Tyson Smith, an archaeologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, the Kushites tended to see the Egyptians “more as neighbors and collaborators than as oppressors or competitors.”
In about the 11th century BC, beset by its own domestic problems, Egypt left Kush. No one knows how, but the now-independent Kushites seem to have gathered great political and cultural strength. By the eighth century BC, they had become militarily superior to Egypt.
Sargon on that campaign that includes these two sentences: “I opened the sealed harbor of Egypt. The Assyrians and Egyptians I mingled together and I made them trade with each other.”
This is not to say that all Egypt was docile under Kushite rule, but it is to say that Shabako and his two successors of the 25th Dynasty, Shebitku and Taharqa, restored a degree of unity to Egypt that it had not seen in 300 years.
impact on Egyptian art in this laudatory manner: “Under . . . Shabako, Shebitku and Taharqa, Egypt underwent a veritable renaissance.”
REGARDING THE FIRST Kushite conquest of Lower Egypt, it is curious that historians have made no serious attempt to explain why a people from Africa’s interior embarked on this extraordinary campaign c. 728 that reached the shores of the Mediterranean, the first initiative of this kind in recorded history.
campaign. I believe Piye’s sweep into Lower Egypt was motivated to a significant extent by a desire to demonstrate to Assyria that an invasion of the country would be met with force.
By reducing (though not ending) Lower Egypt’s internal divisiveness and turmoil, Piye also strengthened Egypt for a possible showdown with Assyria.
This coherent rationale for Kush’s double conquest of Egypt, in c. 728 and c. 712 provides a logic for the sudden emergence of this north-central African kingdom as a guiding force in Egypt in the last third of the eighth century BC.
The 25th Dynasty, in short, felt it needed to preserve southern Khor as a relatively neutral zone, or buffer, in order to protect the Nile Valley, including not only Lower and Upper Egypt, but Kush as well.
The Assyrians deemed the large “Kush” horse to be the most desirable of all breeds for the chariotry (as distinct from the cavalry). 100 So coveted was it as a battle horse that, Dalley speculates, the unstated main objective of both Tiglath-pileser and Sargon in establishing trading posts at (or inside) the Egyptian border was to improve their pipeline to the horses.
An allusion by Isaiah to Kushite Egypt testifies to the impressiveness of its forces just prior to the showdown of 701. The prophet says Jerusalem seeks help from the 25th Dynasty’s forces because of its “trust in the multitude of their chariots and in the great strength of their horsemen.”
Its context within the Bible is also significant. Four of the Hebrew Bible’s books—First and Second Samuel and First and Second Kings—describe sequentially the rule of David’s royal dynasty over its entire four-century span. In this official history, Second Kings’ account of the Deliverance of Jerusalem occupies a literary function that, as noted, Ronald Clements describes as “a kind of high-point in the whole story of the monarchy which begins in 1 Samuel 8 and does not conclude until 2 Kings 25.”
the Deliverance—
The most useful are scattered in early chapters of the Book of Isaiah. Unlike chapters 36 and 37 of the same book, these passages do not repeat what is already in Second Kings.
22 And if you tell me, ‘It is in YHWH our God that we put our trust!’ Is he not the one whose high places and altars Hezekiah removed, and then ordered throughout Judah and Jerusalem, ‘You must worship before this altar in Jerusalem?’
THE GREEK AUTHOR of the first important narrative history of the world, Herodotus, visited Egypt approximately 250 years after Sennacherib’s invasion. His brief account of the hostilities of 701,20 just over 300 words in length, reflects a point of view that is not so much Greek as Lower Egyptian—since it was Lower Egyptians who were Herodotus’ sources.
As he lay here facing the Assyrians, thousands of field-mice swarmed over them during the night, and ate their quivers, their bowstrings and the leather handles of their shields, so that on the following day, having no arms to fight with, they abandoned their position and suffered severe losses during their retreat.
For the Assyrian kings, the religious justification for conquest was the aggrandizement of the god Ashur’s domain and glory.3 But the principal god of Kush and Upper Egypt, Amon, was no imperialistic deity. It was not through conquest per se that his worshippers honored him. Nonetheless, it was their Amon-based faith that impelled the Kushites to intervene in Khor.
Egypt in the late eighth century, the Kushites would have seen those emperors as agents of chaos and regarded themselves as sustainers of ma’at. While defense of the Nile Valley and trade considerations were the immediate reasons for the Kushites’ pre-emptive strike into Khor, the overarching reason was the need to maintain ma’at.7 Egypt’s indigenous dynasties had showed themselves incapable or unwilling to acquit themselves of their pharaonic responsibility as Amon’s representatives to repel chaos from Egypt. That explains why, starting with Piye, the Kushites felt themselves religiously
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Several prisoners were already in the hands of the torturers. Two were stretched naked on the ground to be flayed alive,
the Rab-saris, literally the chief eunuch, and the Rab-shakeh, or literally the chief cupbearer or butler.
identifies each by an exotic title that actually
He also insinuates that, by requesting a parley in a language the citizens do not know, the royal court is trying to pull a fast one on ordinary folks.43 Indeed, he even hints that if Hezekiah does not capitulate, the people should overthrow him. These are not the sort of details and subtleties that one would expect a narrator to invent.
Sennacherib: “Behold, I will put a spirit in him, so that he will hear a report and return to his own country, and I will strike him down by the sword in his own country.”
“YHWH’s angel went out and struck the Assyrian camp—185,000 men! At daybreak there were dead bodies all about.”
This troubles-elsewhere theory, however, does not explain why Sennacherib would have left Khor permanently.
After 701, he reigned another two decades. Yet he never came back to Khor to finish what he had started. (Despite his boast in his annal of being Hezekiah’s overlord, his hegemony over Judah in the years after 701 is to be questioned.) After quelling any problems elsewhere in his empire, then, why would he not return to Judah?
The epidemic theory enjoys a following that is larger than that of all other theories combined.
Although the epidemic theory is dominant in terms of numbers of supporters, it would be inaccurate to say that a scholarly consensus exists in favor of it. From my sampling of more than 100 scholars who deal with with the events of 701, perhaps as many as 40 per cent abstain from subscribing to any theory at all.
That text states that a “large army” was at Jerusalem and another important force was with Sennacherib at Libnah (at least a day’s journey west of the capital). If, as Sennacherib says, the Assyrians attacked a total of 46 Judahite sites, it is likely that other military units were assigned elsewhere.11 Assyria’s multi-pronged offensive would have made it hard for disease to strike a crippling blow to the army as a whole.
The mouse’s Horus-related symbolism does not in itself invalidate the idea that disease ravaged Sennacherib’s forces. Thus Lloyd, despite everything, still says that “some such disease as typhoid or cholera would be the most probable explanation” for the Assyrians’ departure.16Yurco, too, says that “the probable outbreak of pestilence” was at least partly responsible for the withdrawal. 17 Nonetheless, their respective analyses of the mouse/ disease symbolism weaken the case for this theory.
Finally, once the health of his army had returned, what would have kept Sennacherib out of Judah and southern Philistia for the rest of his career?
“I admit my guilt. Withdraw from me and whatever you will impose upon me, I shall bear.”21 The idea? Jerusalem surrendered.
THE FINAL THEORY involves the Kushites.
the Vietnam war and that won for the journalist the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Hersh told us how, as a then-obscure freelancer, he had gotten wind of the tragedy. Subsequently, he looked up Mylai in a newspaper’s library, not expecting to find anything. To his amazement, he discovered a clipping on an alleged mass killing at that village. This article was, if I remember correctly, a wire-service account just one or two paragraphs long. It understated the scale of the slaughter and was too incomplete to have attracted public attention. But the gist of Hersh’s eventual story was
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Thus Yurco suggested in 1980 that disease probably played a key role in the Assyrian withdrawal but that the report of Taharqa’s advance may also have had something to do with it: “It was after the receipt of this rumor, and perhaps at least in part because of it, that Sennacherib suspended operations in Judah and returned ultimately to Assyria.”
I think all four of these scholars are right in giving some degree of credit to the Kushites in the post-Eltekeh stage of the conflict.
In a 1924 book on Assyria, Luckenbill suggests that Kushite Egypt’s force could be solely responsible for ousting Sennacherib. In a four-sentence passage (the longest sustained discussion that I have encountered on actual Kushite success against Sennacherib), Luckenbill says the Battle of Eltekeh conceivably could have occurred not before the siege of Jerusalem, as Sennacherib’s account appears to place it, but during the siege.
If that clash was what truly forced Sennacherib to lift the siege at Jerusalem, it would, as Luckenbill says, have had to take place after the siege was under way. Second Kings says that Sennacherib was at Lachish during the siege: Sennacherib’s invasion took him from Sidon south down Khor’s coastal plain, and Eltekeh is located well before Lachish. After capturing Lachish, Sennacherib’s army would have had to travel about 20 miles north, as the crow flies, to an area through which it had already passed. Why? What possible strategic objective could Sennacherib have attained by backtracking to
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In my opinion, the best account for the failure of Sennacherib’s campaign is in a book published in 1978 and reissued in 1997, Battles of the Bible.
When Sennacherib became aware of this imminent danger, he had no choice but to break off contact everywhere and to beat a hasty and ignominious retreat under cover of night.48 Of all the books and articles I have seen, this comes closest to what I feel really happened.
