History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Jerusalem did, in fact, survive a fierce siege, by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, in 701 BC. The instrument of salvation was not so much the new walls and cistern, as a violent outbreak of bubonic plague, carried by mice, which struck the Assyrian camp, to which the Greek historian Herodotus later referred. In the Second Book of Kings it is seen as miraculous: ‘And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning behold, they were all dead corpses.’212 The rulers of Judah also sought safety in various alliances, with small neighbouring states, and even with vast, feeble Egypt, ‘the broken reed’, on which, as the Assyrians sneered, ‘if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it’.213