Judah’s African Ally: Taharqa and the Kingdom of Cush

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When King Hezekiah of Judah was bracing for Assyrian attack at the close of the eighth century BCE, he fortified Jerusalem and sought alliances. According to the Bible and Assyrian sources, one unexpected ally arrived from the kingdom of Cush in present-day Sudan. Known as Tirhaqah in the Bible, he must have been only a young prince when he led Cush’s army to Judah’s defense in 701.

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Footnotes

1. See Nitzva Rosovsky, “A Thousand Years of History in Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter,” BAR, May/June 1992; and Dan Gill, “How They Met: Geology Solves Long-Standing Mystery of Hezekiah’s Tunnelers,” BAR, July/August 1994.

Endnotes

1. M.F. Laming Macadam, who discovered and originally published the Kawa stelae, maintained that Taharqa was only eight years old in 701 BC. See The Temples of Kawa, I. The Inscriptions (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), p. xii.

2. Kenneth A. Kitchen, “The Kawa Stelae of Taharqa,” in K. Lawson Younger, ed., Context of Scripture IV (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 18–19.