Sennacherib’s Siege of Jerusalem: Once or Twice?

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The Assyrian monarch Sennacherib’s military campaign against King Hezekiah of Judah is one of the best-documented and most discussed events in the history of ancient Israel. The late-eighth-century B.C.E. encounter is reported in both Kings (2 Kings 18:13–19:37) and Chronicles (2 Chronicles 32:1–23). It is likely the backdrop for several prophetic teachings (for example, Isaiah 1:4–9, 22:1–14; Micah 1:10–16). In addition, we have a detailed cuneiform account of the campaign in the annals of Sennacherib (his third campaign).1 We even have a relief from Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh depicting his conquest of Lachish,2 a visual account complemented by […]

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Footnotes

William H. Shea, “Jerusalem Under Siege,” BAR 25:06.

“Shephelah” is the Hebrew term for the foothills between the coastal plain and the Judean highland. See Harold Brodsky, “The Shephelah—Guardian of Judea,” Bible Review, Winter 1987.

Most scholars believe that one school of authors was responsible for most of Deuteronomy and for Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings.

Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen compares this to modern anachronistic reporting that “Queen Elizabeth was born in 1926.” See “Late-Egyptian Chronology and the Hebrew Monarchy,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University 5 (1973), pp. 225–231.

Endnotes

See James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed. (ANET) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 287–288.

See Pritchard, The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), pls. 371–374; and David Ussishkin, The Conquest of Lachish by Sennacherib (Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv Univ., 1982).

See “Lachish,” in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, 4 vols. (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993), vol. 3, pp. 897–911.

John Bright’s Excursus 1 in A History of Israel, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981), pp. 298–309, remains a masterful defense of this position.

See Donald B. Redford, “Taharqa in Western Asia and Libya,” Eretz-Israel 24 (Avraham Malamat volume) (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society), pp. 188*–191.*

Many of the following points were presented in Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings, Anchor Bible 11 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1988), pp. 240–251.

These are ably set out in Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah and the Assyrian Crisis, Studies in Biblical Theology, 2nd ser., vol. 3 (London: SCM, 1967), pp. 69–103.

For example, the matter of Hezekiah’s illness, related in 2 Kings 20:1–11, preceded the Assyrian invasion, as is clearly implied in verse 6.

The Rassam cylinder, named after its discoverer, Hormuzd Rassam, contains reports of Sennacherib’s first three campaigns. Though known for over a century, it has only recently been fully treated in Eckart Frahm, “Einleitung in die Sanherib-Inschriften,” Beihefte zur Archiv für Orientforschung 26 (1997), pp. 51–61.

10.

See Harold Brodsky, “The Shephelah—Guardian of Judea,” Bible Review, Winter 1987.

11.

Pritchard, ANET, p. 303: entry for the second year, concerning the town of Arza.

12.

See now the translation of the Bavian rock inscription by Cogan in The Context of Scripture, vol. 2, ed. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 305.