Endnote 3 – Jerusalem Under Siege

It has been suggested that perhaps Tirhakah accompanied the Egyptian foray into Philistia in 701 B.C. as a prince or general and that he was subsequently given the title of king by the (later) Biblical writer, who knew about that development by the time he was writing.This solution does not work because Tirhakah tells us in his Kawa inscriptions that he first went down the river (north) from Nubia to Egypt when his brother Shebitku was king (M. Frederick L. Macadam, The Temples of Kawa: I. The Inscriptions [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949], pp. 14–21). In 701 B.C. Shabako was the reigning king; Shebitku did not come to the throne until 698 or later. Thus Tirhakah could not accompany the troops to Asia as a prince in 701 because he had not yet come to Lower Egypt by that time.In response to an article I published including this chronological point (William H. Shea, “Sennacherib’s Second Palestinian Campaign,” Journal of Biblical Literature [JBL] 104 [1985], pp. 401–418, esp. 415–416), Frank Yurco argued that there must have been an overlapping co-regency between Shabako and Shebitku (Frank J. Yurco, “The Shabaka-Shebitku Co-regency and the Supposed Second Campaign of Sennacherib Against Judah: A Critical Assessment,” JBL 110 [1991], pp. 35–45, esp. 39, 45). As Yurco points out here, Shabako came to the throne in 713, the earliest date in his inscriptions, and ruled for at least 15 years. Thus he ruled until at least 698; hence the necessity for the creation of this supposed co-regency. This would move the dates for Shebitku higher (earlier), thus permitting Tirhakah to go with the army in 701. As Yurco admits, however, there is no direct evidence from Egyptian reliefs or inscriptions for the existence of such a co-regency. It is simply a modern invention to solve a problem in an ancient text.