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The Siege of Jerusalem in 688 BC

by Yakov ben Judah & DIonysia Xanthippos

Already nearly 50 Judean towns had fallen to Sennacherib, the king of Assyria. Once again he sat outside the walls of the frontier city of Lachish watching its fortress collapse. His leather-canopied siege machines were attacking in force, their battering rams punching huge holes into the walls, while beneath the foundations his engineers were tunnelling into the bedrock. The Judean defenders hurled down stone blocks, boiling water and hot oil on the enemy archers, lancers and slingers, and blazing firebrands on their siege machines. But each machine carried a fireman with a long ladle to pour water on the flames. Within weeks the fortress fell, and its men, women and beasts were led off into slavery, past naked corpses hanging on pointed stakes.

25 miles inland, pent up in Jerusalem like a bird in a cage, King Hezekiah sent a desperate message to Sennacherib at Lachish: “I have done wrong. Leave me, and I will pay whatever tribute you impose on me.” But Sennacherib was not appeased. To punish this rebellious king of Judah, he sent his field marshal, his lord chamberlain, and his commander-in-chief from Lachish with a great army to Jerusalem. On their arrival outside the walled city’s gates, they stopped at the conduit of the upper pool on the highway of the fuller’s field. They called out for the king, who sent out his palace master, his scribe and his herald. The commander addressed them in Hebrew, and in a loud voice that all within could hear:

“Tell Hezekiah, ‘Thus says the great king, the king of Assyria: On what do you base this confidence of yours? Do you think mere words substitute for strategy and might in war? On whom, then do you rely, that you rebel against me? This Egypt, the staff on which you rely, is in fact a broken reed which pierces the hand of anyone who leans on it. That is what Pharaoh, king of Egypt, is to all who rely on him. But if you say to me, We rely on the Lord, our God, is not he the one whose high places and altars Hezekiah has removed, commanding Judah and Jerusalem to worship before this altar in Jerusalem?”
“Now, make a wager with my lord, the king of Assyria: I will give you two thousand horses if you can put riders on them. How then can you repulse even one of the least servants of my lord, relying as you do on Egypt for chariots and horsemen? Was it without the Lord’s will that I have come up to destroy this place? The Lord said to me, “Go up and destroy that land!’”

Hezekiah’s men wanted to negotiate privately in Aramaic, a language the watchers on the wall could not understand. They asked the commander to stop talking in Hebrew “within earshot of the people who are on the wall.”

The commander ignored their request: “Was it to your master and to you that my lord sent me to speak these words: Was it not rather to the men sitting on the wall, who, with you, will have to eat their own excrement and drink their urine?”

The commander then stepped forward and cried out in Hebrew to all those on the wall:

"Listen to the words of the great king, the king of Assyria! Thus says the king: “Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, since he cannot deliver you out of my hand. Let not Hezekiah induce you to rely on the Lord, saying, “The Lord will surely save us; this city will not be handed over to the king of Assyria.” Do not listen to Hezekiah, for the king of Assyria says: Make peace with me and surrender! Then each of you will eat of his own vine and of his own fig-tree, and drink the water of his own cistern, until I come to take you to a land like your own, a land of grain and wine, of bread and orchards, of olives, oil and fruit syrup. Choose life, not death. Do not listen to Hezekiah when he would seduce you by saying, The Lord will rescue us. Has any of the gods of the nations ever rescued his land from the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Avva? Where are the gods of the land of Samaria? Which of the gods for all these lands ever rescued his land from my hand? Will the Lord then rescue Jerusalem from my hand?’”

The palace master, scribe, and herald returned to Hezekiah with their garments torn, and reported what the commander had said. When the king heard it, he tore his own garments, wrapped himself in sackcloth and went into the temple to pray:
“O Lord, God of Israel, enthroned upon the cherubim. Hear the words of Sennacherib which he sent to taunt the living God. Truly, O Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste the nations and their lands, and cast their gods into the fire; they destroyed them because they were not gods, but the work of human hands, wood and stone. Therefore, O Lord, our God, save us from the power of this man, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you alone, O Lord, are God.”

As the citizens stood silent, in despair, Hezekiah turned to his prophet Isaiah, who gave them a spirited patriotic speech, ending with this prophesy: “Therefore, thus says the Lord concerning the king of Assyria: ‘He shall not reach this city, nor shoot an arrow at it, nor come before it with a shield, nor cast up siege-works against it. He shall return by the same way he came, without entering the city, says the Lord. I will shield and save this city for my own sake, and for the sake of my servant David.’” (II Kings 37:6-7)

The decision was made: Resist!

So the Assyrians began their siege. Working behind leather shields, they carted earth for a ramp and stacked brushwood beneath the walls to crack the stones with fire. They set up towers for the archers and positioned the battering rams. Inside the tense and crowded city the people could do nothing - just watch and hope.

“That night," says the Bible's Book of Kings, "the angel of the Lord went forth and struck down one hundred and eighty-five thousand men in the Assyrian camp. Early the next morning, there they were, all the corpses of the dead. So Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, broke camp, and went back home to Nineveh.” (II Kings 19:3. New American Bible)

What really happened? The Greek historian Herodotus claimed that the siege failed because mice ate the Assyrians' bow strings. Unable to shoot their arrows, they packed up and went home. A likely story! And a typical tale from the Father of History, whom some call the Father of Lies. Seizing on the mice tale, Werner Keller, in his popular book, "The Bible as History", speculates that Herodotus' tale hides a germ of truth: that those mice were infested with fleas, and that it was plague that decimated the Assyrians. More likely they were decimated by disentery from drinking bad water. Did the defenders poison or contaminate their own well to make the Assyrians sicken and die? The Bible has many stories of how both the Jews and their enemies poisoned each other's wells. And the Angel of the Lord (the Angel of Death) appears often in the Bible as the agent of a natural disaster such as a famine or an epidemic - what we still call "an act of God." Will the real cause remain a mystery until the end of history?

Also puzzling is that no mention of such a catastrophe appears in the Assyrian account of the siege, carved on one of the colossal winged bulls that guarded the doors to Sennacherib's throne room. That account says he withdrew his army only because Hezekiah agreed to pay him a tribute of 30 talents of gold and 800 talents of silver. Surprisingly, this is supported by the Bible story, which says, just a few verses before the angelic massacre, that Hezekiah agreed to pay Sennacherib a tribute of 30 talents in gold and 300 in silver - his price, apparently, for leaving the city alone (II Kings 18:13-16).

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