When Sargon II was killed in battle in 705, the Jerusalemites, even Isaiah, hoped it marked the fall of the evil empire. Egypt promised support; the city of Babylon rebelled and sent ambassadors to Hezekiah, who felt his moment had come: he joined a new coalition against Assyria and prepared for war. But, unfortunately for the Judaeans, the new Great King of Assyria was a warlord of apparently endless confidence and energy: his name was Sennacherib.
He called himself ‘King of the World, King of Assyria’ at a time when the titles were synonymous. Assyria ruled from the Persian Gulf to Cyprus. Its landlocked heartland in today’s Iraq was defended by mountains to the north and the Euphrates in the west but was vulnerable to attack from south and east. The empire resembled a shark that could survive only by constant consumption. For the Assyrians, conquest was a religious duty. Each new king swore at his accession to expand what they called ‘the land of God Ashur’ – the country was named after its patron god. The kings were both high priests and commanders who led their 200,000-strong armies in person, and like the tyrants of modern times, they cowed their subjects using not just terror but vast deportations of peoples from one end of the empire to another.
The body of Sennacherib’s father was never recovered from the battlefield, a terrible sign of divine displeasure, and the empire started to break up. But Sennacherib smashed all the rebellions and when he recaptured Babylon, he destroyed the entire city. But once order was restored, he tried to consolidate, extravagantly rebuilding his capital Nineveh, city of Ishtar, goddess of war and passion, with canals irrigating its gardens and his massive Palace Without Rival. The Assyrian kings were avid propagandists, whose triumphalist decorations on the walls of their palaces advertised Assyrian victories and the gruesome deaths of their enemies – mass-impalings, flayings and beheadings. The courtiers of conquered cities paraded through Nineveh wearing the heads of their kings on ghoulish necklaces around their necks. But their depredations were probably no more vicious than other conquerors: the Egyptians, for example, collected the hands and penises of their enemies. Ironically Assyria’s most brutal era was over; Sennacherib preferred to negotiate if possible.
Sennacherib buried records of his achievements in the foundations of his palaces. In Iraq, archaeologists have found the remains of his city, revealing Assyria at its apogee, made rich by conquest and agriculture, administered by scribes whose records were preserved in royal archives. Their libraries contained collections of omens to aid royal decision-making, and of incantations, rituals and hymns to maintain divine support, but also tablets of literary classics such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Worshipping many gods, revering magical figurines and spirits and calling upon the power of divination, the Assyrians studied medicine, writing prescriptions on tablets that read: ‘If the man is suffering from the following symptoms, the problem is …Take the following drugs …’
Israelite prisoners, toiling far from home in the resplendently gaudy cities of Assyria with their Babel-like ziggurat towers and painted palaces, saw them as metropolises ‘of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims!’ The prophet Nahum described ‘the crack of whips, the clatter of wheels, galloping horses and jolting chariots!’ Now those eight-spoked chariots, those vast armies and Sennacherib himself were marching on Jerusalem, swooping down, says Deuteronomy, ‘like a vulture in flight’.
HEZEKIAH’S TUNNEL
Hezekiah knew what horrors had befallen Babylon; he frantically built fortifications around Jerusalem’s new quarters. Sections of his ‘broad wall’, 25 feet wide, survive today in several places but most impressively in the Jewish Quarter. He prepared for a siege by ordering two groups craftsmen to hack a tunnel 1,700 feet through the rock to link the Gihon Spring outside the city to the Siloam Pool, south of the Temple Mount below the City of David, which now, thanks to his new fortifications, lay inside the walls. When the two teams met up deep in the rock, they celebrated by carving an inscription to record their amazing achievement:
[When the tunnel] was driven through. And this was the way in which it was cut through. While [they were] still [excavating with their] axes, each man toward his fellow, and while there were still three cubits to cut through, [they heard] the voice of a man calling to his fellows, for there was a fissure in the rock on the right [and the left]. And when the tunnel was driven through, the quarrymen hewed [the rock], each man toward his fellow, axe against axe; and the water flowed from the spring toward the reservoir for 1,200 cubits and the height of the rock above the heads of the quarrymen was 100 cubits.*
North of the Temple Mount, Hezekiah dammed a valley to create one of the Bethesda Pools to deliver more water into the city, and he seems to have distributed food – oil, wine, grain – to his forces, ready for siege and war. Jar handles have been found at sites across Judah marked lmlk – ‘for the king’ – stamped with his emblem, the four-winged scarab.
‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,’ wrote Byron. Sennacherib and his vast armies were now very close to Jerusalem. The Great King would have travelled, like most Assyrian kings, in a hulking three-horse chariot, shaded under the royal parasol, horses splendidly caparisoned with shimmering headcrests while he himself would have worn a long embroidered robe, a flat hat with a pointed peak, a square-cut, long, braided beard and rosette bracelets, and often carried a bow in his hands and a sword at his belt in a scabbard decorated with lions. He saw himself more as a lion than a biblical vulture or Byronic wolf – Assyrian kings wore lionskins to celebrate their victories in the Temple of Ishtar, decorated their palaces with lion sphinxes and avidly hunted lions as the sport of great kings.
He bypassed Jerusalem to besiege Hezekiah’s second city, fortified Lachish, to the south. We know from the bas-reliefs at his Nineveh palace what his troops (and the Judaeans) looked like: the Assyrians, a polyglot imperial army, wore their hair braided, and dressed in tunics and chainmail, with plumed and pointed helmets, arrayed in contingents of charioteers, spearmen, archers and slingers. They built siege-ramps; sappers undermined the walls, a fearsomely spiked siege-engine shattered the fortifications. Archers and slingers laid down withering fire as Sennacherib’s infantry stormed upscaling ladders to take the city. Archaeologists have excavated a mass grave of 1,500 men, women and children, some impaled or skinned, just as the bas-relief shows; throngs of refugees fled the mayhem. Jerusalem knew what to expect.17
Sennacherib swiftly defeated an Egyptian army that had come to aid Hezekiah, ravaged Judah and then closed on Jerusalem, camping to the north, the same place chosen by Titus over five hundred years later.
Hezekiah poisoned any wells outside Jerusalem. His troops, manning his new walls, wore turbans fastened with headbands and long earflaps, short kilts, leg armour and boots. As the siege set in, there must have been panic in the city. Sennacherib sent his generals to parley – resistance was hopeless. The prophet Micah foresaw the destruction of Zion. However, old Isaiah counselled patience: Yahweh would provide.
Hezekiah prayed in the Temple. Sennacherib bragged that he had surrounded Jerusalem ‘like a bird in a cage’. But Isaiah was right: God intervened.
MANASSEH: CHILD SACRIFICE IN THE VALLEY OF HELL
‘The angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians … and when they arose in the morning, they were all dead corpses.’ The Assyrians suddenly packed up their camp, probably to suppress a rebellion in the east. ‘So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed.’ Yahweh told Sennacherib that ‘The daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee.’ This was the Jerusalem version, but Sennacherib’s annals describe Hezekiah’s crushing tribute, including 30 talents of gold and 800 of silver: he seems to have paid them to leave. Sennacherib reduced Judah to a rump not much larger than the district of Jerusalem and boasted that he had deported 200,150 people.18