The Rescue of Jerusalem: The Alliance Between Hebrews and Africans in 701 BC

by Henry T. Aubin

Account A is the shortest by far, consisting of only 18:13-16. This passage describes the tribute that Hezekiah had to give Sen-nacherib after his withdrawal and explains how the Hebrew king had to strip much of the gold and treasure from Jerusalem’s Temple of Solomon.

In B2, the prophet Isaiah says Yahweh will make Sennacherib withdraw (19:32-34) and then, in the next verse, Yahweh does so as his angel slays the Assyrian soldiers. In B1, however, Isaiah says Yahweh will make Sennacherib withdraw by having him hear a report or rumor (19:7)—both terms are acceptable translations.17 Then, two verses later, Sen-nacherib hears a report that “Tirhakah,” king of Kush, is approaching with an army to fight him.

Yet Gonçalves insists that this can have no historical basis. Rather, he suggests, this business about Taharqa arriving and Sen-nacherib scrambling away is a literary invention. Its purpose, he proposes, is to reflect a “theological concern.” By casting Taharqa, representing Egypt, as causing the Assyrians’ abject departure, the Second Kings writer is trying to underscore the extent of the arrogant invaders’ humiliation; after all, via the Rab-shakeh, the Assyrians had earlier mocked this same Egypt.

Following this logic, Cyrus the Great’s conquest of Babylon and his emancipation of the Hebrews never took place—for the reason that the Bible draws lessons from these events.

What we do know from this reconstructed text is that as the Kushite-Egyptian forces advance, the Assyrians withdraw. What could be clearer?

What causes the Assyrians to leave is not disease, a distant crisis or Hezekiah’s surrender but rather war, as symbolized by the sword.

the turning point is abrupt: soldiers drop the banner and run.

The original Hebrew vocabulary is also revealing. The verb “tread,” which describes the action against the Assyrians, contains the same root (bs) as the word used to describe the Kushite nation in Isaiah 18:7: “a nation that is sturdy and treadeth down.”16 In Isaiah 18.2, the word also describes the Kushites.17 The passage’s vocabulary, in short, fits the Kushite-rescue theory precisely.

Stretching one and a half miles across the Nile, the dam has created a lake that extends southward 300 miles.

In the 33 years up to and including 701, Assyria invaded Khor six times. Now, starting in 679, or within two years of Sen-nacherib’s death, Assyrian armies would return with dogged regularity to Khor. In 679, 674, 671 and 667 Assyria mounted expeditions that reached the Egyptian border or beyond, a policy that climaxed with the capture of Thebes in 663. With this ferocious pattern, it is easier to appreciate how the peace between Assyria and Khor/Egypt that lasted 21 years12 represented a truly radical shift in Nineveh’s foreign policy. No other theory for Sen-nacherib’s withdrawal can account for this extraordinary hiatus. Assyria might have left Judah alone if it were paying bounteous tribute, but that would not explain why during this period the empire did not even try to attack the land that was so patently the apple of its eye—Egypt itself.

Strabo then adds: “I refer to Madys the Scythian, Tearko the Ethiopian, Cobus the Treran, Sesostris and Psammetichus the Egyptians, and to Persians from Cyrus to Xerxes.”42 Tearko is Taharqa. The company in which Strabo places Taharqa is elite.

Mainstream scholars’ view that the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament expresses contempt for the Kushites is a delusion. In fact, the experts have it backwards. The opposite of contempt is honor, and that’s just what the Bible shows.

Ham-mershaimb says the meaning of the passage is that Yahwists “must not think they have an advantage at all, even over so despised a nation as the Kushites.”

Two other recent American commentaries on Amos state similar opinions, one going so far as to say that the passage “serves to desacralize Israel.”12 This consensus view that the verse casts Kushites as contemptible or lowly is simply missing its point. In equating Israelites and Kushites, the biblical writer is not putting Israelites down. Other interpretations present themselves. One is that the comparison is neutral. Today someone might say to Americans, “Why should God look out for the United States’ interests any more than, say, Mexico’s? Or Japan’s?” That would not necessarily imply contempt toward those countries. Another possibility—or likelihood—is that the comparison reflects on the Israelites in a manner that is actually quite positive. Far-fetched? Let’s see.

Judahites, the prophet of the late seventh and early sixth centuries BC says: Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to evil.

leopards. A white person today who used such an example might be deemed insensitive, but only because racism is all around us; the racial climate in the eastern Mediterranean region in ancient times was relatively benign.

The longest is the Book of Numbers 12. All 16 verses of that chapter describe the aftermath of Moses’ marriage, during the Exodus, to a Kushite woman.

Jeremiah, the same prophet whom Hammershaimb sees, in effect, as racist. Prior to the Babylonian army’s destruction of Jerusalem in 586, Jeremiah here predicts the Babylonians’ victory

Like Moses’ wife, Ebedmelech is only a minor biblical character, but his portrayal is highly sympathetic. Nothing in these two characterizations supports the prevailing scholarly view that ancient Hebrews looked askance at Kushites. Quite the contrary.

Many enemies of racism have pointed out the blatant fallacy of seeing in the Ham story a justification for subjugation.28 Noah never curses Ham. Instead, he curses one of Ham’s four sons, Canaan, who became the ancestor of the Hebrews’ Canaanite neighbors29—who happen to be as Semitic as the Hebrews them-slves.

Fran-colino Gonçalves makes this acute observation on the prophet’s thought: “In seeking their security in Egyptian power, Judahites are exchanging Yahweh, their only true refuge, for Egypt, and that makes them guilty of real idolatry.”

In other words, the Kushites are more than military allies: they are also potential theological allies.

at the Gihon, anointed there with holy oil. Clifford supports the identification of the river in Genesis with Jerusalem’s stream.

The origin of the rivers-of-Eden passage is probably post-701. 62 It would be reasonable, then, to suggest that the allusion to Kush as the Gihon’s destination reflects the special relationship that flourished between Jerusalem and its southern ally during Hezekiah’s reign.

“Kush” should be taken as that African kingdom but that it is “possibly an allusion to the special contact of Jerusalem under Hezekiah [with] the Egyptian neighbor dominated by the 25th Dynasty”

Each of the two sentences is of unusual interest. In listing the sons of Ham in the first sentence, the author of the passage places Kush at the beginning—giving it precedence over the great civilization of Egypt.

If Astour is right, the passage would mean that these two 25th Dynasty pharaohs carried significant weight in Hebrew tradition. For a monarch to merit a place in the genealogical tree of humanity is already quite extraordinary, and here we have two contemporaries from the same nation.

Let us go back to the verse from Amos with which this chapter began: “Are not you Israelites the same to me as the Kushites?” declares the Lord. “Did I not bring Israel up from Egypt . . . ?” Does a positive interpretation of Kush in this passage still seem so far-fetched? Far from such a comparison being humiliating to Judah, it is, to say the least, glowingly favorable.

ONE WAY TO test a theory is to examine why people have rejected it in the past. Who knows, perhaps the reason does contain truths that would deal the theory a fatal blow.

The reason Sennacherib withdrew, explains the book with impressive-sounding detail, was that “plague-infested winds from the malarial shores of the eastern Delta had scattered death among his troops.”

Nubia, for it recalls the one brief appearance of Kush upon the stage of world history.

The key passage presents the Rab-shakeh as hostile to three things: Hezekiah’s dependence on the pharaoh, Hezekiah’s dependence on Yahweh and Hezekiah’s exaltation of Jerusalem. Critics cannot choose which of these hostilities are justified and which are not. According to the passage’s internal logic, the three are joined and indivisible.

In earlier chapters, I have been careful so far to avoid suggesting that the Kushite-Egyptian success took the form of an outright (as distinct from de facto) “victory” or “triumph”: such terms would assume that after the clash at Eltekeh a major battle (or battles) took place that produced a decisive military outcome for the pharaonic army. I subscribe to the near-unanimous view1 that, sometime well after Eltekeh, the Assyrians brought their campaign to a halt before any such major confrontation involving Sen-nacherib’s main body of troops necessarily took place. There is simply no evidence of such a battle.

If Herodotus, and also the Book of Isaiah, are accurate, the Kushite-Egyptian forces give them pursuit and inflict significant losses.

Yet no evidence exists of a battle. Why would there not have been one? Why would Taharqa prefer to let Sennacherib leave peaceably and to negotiate a treaty with him?

Nor is it the ethos of the Kushite Dynasty to go for the jugular. Witness how Piye in 728 dealt with his foes—Tefnahkt and others. Instead of annihilating them and their forces, he achieved a modus vivendi with them. In return for forgiving them and letting them keep some of their privileges, he was spared casualties, received bountiful tribute and gained a political situation that, if uncomfortable (notably because of Tefnakht’s comeback in Lower Egypt), he could at least live with. When he went to war against Tefnakht, Piye states that his objective was not to destroy the rebel but to “make him turn back from fighting, forever.”

What is certain is that for the rest of his life Sennacherib abstained from fighting in Khor. Never again did he pose a threat to Egypt.

In modern society, with racism all around us, it may seem only natural to suspect that disdain for black Africa tainted the B2 writers’ perspective.

By the time of B2, the reverse was true: the 25th Dynasty of the Kushites was long gone, and Egypt had become Assyria’s ally and Judah’s enemy.

After defeating the Kushites in Egypt and permanently pushing them back to Kush itself in c. 656, Assurbanipal set up a Sais-based family as Egypt’s docile 26th Dynasty.

In the battle, the victorious Egyptians killed the popular Josiah.

Because King Josiah’s son and successor displeased him, Pharaoh Necho deported him to Egypt after the young man had ruled just three months and replaced him with his more pliable half brother. The prophet Jeremiah denounced this king, Jehoiakim, as a petty

After many years of mulling over the reasoning for the B2 text, Clements has become confident that it was composed during the Exile when many deportees saw Jerusalem, reduced to rubble, as “discredited and no longer suitable as a focus of hope and protection.” The idea behind the B2 account was to show that “when the right precondition of faith and obedience on the part of the king was present, God may give a miraculous victory.”

As we’ve seen, that history gets its name because its strong philosophical viewpoint reflects that of the Book of Deuteronomy. This history is an amalgam of old and new texts.

The Book of Deuteronomy purports to have been authored centuries before by Moses himself shortly before his death. It represents his farewell instructions to his people.

Deuteronomistic History reviews the reigns of each of Israel and Judah’s monarchs in a manner that reflects Deuteronomy’s philosophy that good things happen to Hebrew society when it is under the rule of kings who respect Yahweh, and that misfortune erupts when kings ignore him.

It is in Deuteronomy 7 that the Bible formally reveals Yahweh’s uniquely high regard for the Hebrews: Moses makes the climactic announcement to his Exodus followers that Yahweh “has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.”11 In addition to making Moses’ followers the Chosen People, this identity seals their right to rule the Holy Land12—so long as they abide by certain conditions.

Deuteronomy 7 presents Moses as addressing his followers as they are about to begin the Conquest, at that moment when their 40-year Exodus wandering is over and the Hebrews are about to enter the Promised Land and battle the existing inhabitants for its possession. The Conquest is most popularly known as the occasion when, under the leadership of Joshua,

In recent years, suspicions have been growing among historians that the Conquest as a whole, like the account of the Exodus journey, is largely fictional.

In Deuteronomy 7, Moses tells his followers that because they are a Chosen People they have certain obligations and, if they are obedient, will win rewards. He therefore tells the Hebrews that when they enter the Promised Land they must destroy pagan temples (7:5). In the Second Kings’ story, in remarkably similar descriptive language, Hezekiah does precisely that after he becomes king (18:4). In Deuteronomy, Moses stresses that Yahweh is loyal to those who “keep his commandments” (7:9); in Second Kings, Hezekiah “kept the commandments that the Lord had commanded Moses” (18:6). In Deuteronomy, Moses says that Yahweh will remove all sickness from those who are loyal to him (7:15); in Second Kings, Yahweh cures Hezekiah precisely because the desperately ill king has been so faithful (20:1-7). As well, Deuteronomy warns that Yahweh does not delay in paying back those who reject him (7:10). Sure enough, Second Kings conforms to this idea of speedy justice, making Sennacherib’s death appear as though it occurred right after his retreat from Jerusalem (19:36-37). As we’ve seen earlier, however, he in fact died about 20 years later.