It is probable in that in the year B.C. 699 Sennacherib conducted his second expedition into Palestine. Hezekiah, after his enforced submission two years earlier, had entered into negotiations with the Egyptians, and looking to receive important succors from this quarter, had again thrown off his allegiance. Sennacherib, understanding that the real enemy whom he had to fear on his south-western frontier was not Judaea, but Egypt, marched his army through Palestine—probably by the coast route—and without stopping to chastise Jerusalem, pressed southwards to Libnah and Lachish, which were at the extreme verge of the Holy Land, and were probably at this tune subject to Egypt. He first commenced the siege of Lachish with all his power; and while engaged in this operation, finding that Hezekiah was not alarmed by his proximity, and did not send in his submission, he detached a body of troops from Ins main force, and sent it under a Tartan or general, supported by two high officers of the court—the Rabshakeh or Chief Cupbearer, and the Rob-saris or Chief Eunuch—to summon the rebellious city to surrender. Hezekiah was willing to treat, and sent out to the Assyrian camp, which was pitched just outside the walls, three high officials of his own to open negotiations. But the Assyrian envoys had not cone to debate or even to offer terms, but to require the unconditional submission of both king and people. The Rabshakeh or cupbearer, who was familiar with the Hebrew language, took the word and delivered his message in insulting phrase, laughing at the simplicity which could trust in Egypt, and the superstitious folly which could expect a divine deliverance, and defying Hezekiah to produce so many as two thousand trained soldiers capable of serving as cavalry. When requested to use a foreign rather than the native dialect, lest the people who were upon the walls should hear, the bold envoy, with an entire disregard of diplomatic forms, raised his voice and made a direct appeal to the popular fears and hopes thinking to produce a tumultuary surrender of the place, or at least an outbreak of which his troops might have taken advantage. His expectations, however, were disappointed; the people made no response to his appeal, but listened in profound silence; and the ambassadors, finding that they could obtain nothing from the fears of either king or people, and regarding the force that they had brought with them as insufficient for a siege, returned to their master with the intelligence of their ill-success. The Assyrian monarch had either taken Lachish or raised its siege, and was gone on to Libnah, where the envoys found him. On receiving their report, he determined to make still another effort to overcome Hezckiah’s obstinacy and accordingly he despatched fresh messengers with a letter to the Jewish king, in which he was reminded of the fate of various other kingdoms and peoples which had resisted the Assyrians, and once more urged to submit himself. It was this letter perhaps a royal autograph—which Hezekiah took into the temple and there “spread it before the Lord,” praying God to “bow down his ear and hear; to open his eyes and see, and hear the words of Sennacherib, which had sent to reproach the living God.” Upon this Isaiah was commissioned to declare to his afflicted sovereign that the kings of Assyria were mere instruments in God’s hands to destroy such, nations as He pleased, and that none of Sennacherib’s threats against Jerusalem should be accomplished. God, Isaiah told him would “put his hook in Sennacherib’s nose, and his bridle in his lips, and turn him back by the way by which he came.” The Lord had said, concerning the king of Assyria, “He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with shield, nor cast a bank against it. By the way that he came, by the same shall he return, and shall not come into this city. For I will defend this city, to save it, for my own sake, and for my servant David’s sake.”
Meanwhile it is probable that Sennacherib, having received the submission of Libnah, had advanced upon Egypt. It was important to crush an Egyptian army which had been collected against him by a certain Sethos, one of the many native princes who at this time ruled in the Lower country before the great Ethiopian monarch Tehrak or Tirhakah, who was known to be on his march, should effect a junction with the troops of this minor potentate. Sethos, with his army, was at Pelusium; and Sennacherib, advancing to attack him, had arrived within sight of the Egyptian host, and pitched his camp over against the camp of the enemy, just at the time to when Hezekiah received his letter and made the prayer to which Isaiah was instructed to respond. The two hosts lay down at night in their respective stations, the Egyptians and their king full of anxious alarm, Sennacherib and his Assyrians proudly confident, intending on the morrow to advance to the combat and repeat the lesson taught at Raphia and Altaku. But no morrow was to break on the great mass of those who took their rest in the tents of the Assyrians. The divine fiat had gone forth. In the night, as they slept, destruction fell upon them. “The angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand; and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.” A miracle, like the destruction of the first-born, had been wrought, but this time on the enemies of the Egyptians, who naturally ascribed their deliverance to the interposition of their own gods; and seeing the enemy in confusion and retreat, pressed hastily after him, distressed his flying columns, and cut off his stragglers. The Assyrian king returned home to Nineveh, shorn of his glory, with the shattered remains of his great host, and cast that proud capital into a state of despair and grief, which the genius of an AEschylus might have rejoiced to depict, but which no less powerful pen could adequately portray.
It is difficult to say how soon Assyria recovered from this terrible blow. The annals of Sennacherib, as might have been expected, omit it altogether, and represent the Assyrian monarch as engaged in a continuous series of successful campaigns, which seem to extend uninterruptedly from his third to his tenth year. It is possible that while the Assyrian expedition was in progress, under the eye of Sennacherib himself, a successful war was being conducted by one of his generals in the mountains of Armenia, and that Sennacherib was thus enabled, without absolutely falsifying history, to parade as his own certain victories gained by this leader in the very year of his own reverse. It is even conceivable that the power of Assyria was not so injured by the loss of a single great army, as to make it necessary for her to stop even for one year in the course of her aggressive warfare; and thus the expeditions of Sennacherib may form an uninterrupted series, the eight campaigns which are assigned to him occupying eight consecutive years. But on the other hand it is quite as probable that there are gaps in the history, some years having been omitted altogether. The Taylor Cylinder records but eight campaigns, yet it was certainly written as late as Sennacherib’s fifteenth year. It contains no notice of any events in Sennacherib’s first or second year; and it may consequently make other omissions covering equal or larger intervals. Thus the destruction of the Assyrian army at Pelusium may have been followed by a pause of some years’ duration in the usual aggressive expeditions; and it may very probably have encouraged the Babylonians in the attempt to shake off the Assyrian yoke, which they certainly made towards the middle of Sennacherib’s reign.
But while it appears to be probable that consequences of some importance followed on the Pelusiac calamity, it is tolerably certain that no such tremendous results flowed from it as some writers have imagined. The murder of the disgraced Sennacherib “within fifty-five days” of his return to Nineveh, seems to be an invention of the Alexandrian Jew who wrote the Book of Tobit. The total destruction of the empire in consequence of the blow, is an exaggeration of Josephus, rashly credited by some moderns. Sennacherib did not die till B.C. 681, seventeen years after his misfortune; and the Empire suffered so little that we find Esar-haddon, a few years later, in full possession of all the territory that any king before him had over held, ruling from Babylonia to Egypt, or (as he himself expresses it) “from the rising up of the sun to the going down of the same.” Even Sennacherib himself was not prevented by his calamity from undertaking important wars during the latter part of his reign. We shall see shortly that he recovered Babylon, chastised Susiana, and invaded Cilicia, in the course of the seventeen years which intervened between his flight from Pelusium and his decease. Moreover, there is evidence that he employed himself during this part of his reign in the consolidation of the Western provinces, which first appear about his twelfth year as integral portions of the Empire, furnishing eponyms in their turn, and thus taking equal rank with the ancient provinces of Assyria Proper, Adiabene, and Mesopotamia.
The fifth campaign of Sennacherib, according to his own annals, was partly in a mountainous country which he calls Nipur or Nibur—probably the most northern portion of the Zagros range where it abuts on Ararat. He there took a number of small towns, after which he proceeded westward and contended with a certain Maniya king of Dayan, which was a part of Taurus bordering on Cilicia. He boasts that he penetrated further into this region than any king before him; and the boast is confirmed by the fact that the geographical names which appear are almost entirely new to us. The expedition was a plundering raid, not an attempt at conquest. Sennacherib ravaged the country, burnt the towns, and carried away with him all the valuables, the flocks and herds, and the inhabitants.
After this it appears that for at least three years he was engaged in a fierce struggle with the combined Babylonians and Susianians. The troubles recommenced by an attempt of the Chaldaeans of Beth-Yakin to withdraw themselves from the Assyrian territory, and to transfer their allegiance to the Elymaean king. Carrying with them their gods and their treasures, they embarked in their ships, and crossing “the Great Sea of the Rising Sun”—i.e., the Persian Gulf—landed on the Elamitic coast, where they were kindly received and allowed to take up their abode. Such voluntary removals are not uncommon in the East; and they constantly give rise to complaints and reclamations, which not unfrequently terminate in an appeal to the arbitrament of the sword. Sennacherib does not inform us whether he made any attempt to recover his lost subjects by diplomatic representations at the court of Susa. If he did, they were unsuccessful; and in order to obtain redress, he was compelled to resort to force, and to undertake an expedition into the Elamitie territory. It is remarkable that he determined to make his invasion by sea. Their frequent wars on the Syrian coasts had by this time familiarized the Assyrians with the idea, if not with the practice, of navigation; and as their suzerainty over Phoenicia placed at their disposal a large body of skilled shipwrights, and a number of the best sailors in the world, it was natural that they should resolve to employ naval as well as military force to advance their dominion. We have seen that, as early as the time of Shalmaneser, the Assyrians ventured themselves in ships, and, in conjunction with the Phoenicians of the mainland, engaged the vessels of the Island Tyre. It is probable that the precedent thus set was followed by later kings, and that both Sargon and Sennacherib had had the permanent, or occasional services of a fleet on the Mediterranean. But there was a wide difference between such an employment of the navies belonging to their subjects on the sea, to which they were accustomed, and the transfer to the opposite extremity of the empire of the naval strength hitherto confined to the Mediterranean. This thought—certainly not an obvious one—seems to have first occurred to Sennacherib. He conceived the idea of having a navy on both the seas that washed his dominions; and, possessing on his western coast only an adequate supply of skilled shipwrights and sailors he resolved on transporting from his western to his eastern shores such a body of Phoenicians as would enable him to accomplish his purpose. The shipwrights of Tyre and Sidon were carried across Mesopotamia to the Tigris, where they constructed for the Assyrian monarch a fleet of ships like their own galleys, which descended the river to its mouth, and astonished the populations bordering on the Persian Gulf with spectacle never before seen in those waters. Though the Chaldaeans had for centuries navigated this inland sea, and may have occasionally ventured beyond its limits, yet neither as sailors nor as ship-builders was their skill to compare with that of the Phoenicians. The masts and sails, the double tiers of oars, the sharp beaks of the Phoenician ships, were (it is probable) novelties to the nations of these parts, who saw now, for the first time, a fleet debouche from the Tigris, with which their own vessels were quite incapable of contending.
When his fleet was ready Sennacherib put to sea, and crossed in his Phoenician ships from the mouth of the Tigris to the tract occupied by the emigrant Chaldaeans, where he landed and destroyed the newly-built city, captured the inhabitants, ravaged the neighborhood, and burnt a number of Susianian towns, finally reembarking with his captives. Chaldaean and Susianian whom he transported across the gulf to the Chaldaean coast, and then took with him into Assyria. This whole expedition seems to have taken the Susianians by surprise. They had probably expected an invasion by land, and had collected their forces towards the north-western frontier, so that when the troops of Sennacherib landed far in their rear, there were no forces in the neighborhood to resist them. However, the departure of the Assyrians on an expedition regarded as extremely perilous, was the signal for a general revolt of the Babylonians, who once more set up a native king in the person of Susub, and collected an army with which they made ready to give the Assyrians battle on their return. Perhaps they cherished the hope that the fleet which had tempted the dangers of an unknown sea would be seen no more, or expected that, at the best, it would bring back the shattered remnants of a defeated army. If so, they were disappointed. The Assyrian troops landed on their coast flushed with success, and finding the Babylonians in revolt, proceeded to chastise them; defeated their forces in a great battle; captured their king, Susub; and when the Susianians came, somewhat tardily, to their succor, attacked and routed their army. A vast number of prisoners, and among them Susub himself, were carried off by the victors and conveyed to Nineveh.
Shortly after this successful campaign, possibly in the very next year, Sennacherib resolved to break the power of Susiana by a great expedition directed solely against that country. The Susianians had, as already related, been strong enough in the reign of Sargon to deprive Assyria of a portion of her territory; and Kudur-Nakhunta, the Elymaean king, still held two cities, Beth-Kahiri and Raza, which were regarded by Sennacherib as a part of his paternal inheritance. The first object of the war was the recovery of these two towns, which were taken without any difficulty and reattached to the Assyrian Empire. Sennacherib then pressed on into the heart of Susiana, taking and destroying thirty-four large cities, whose names he mentions, together with a still greater number of villages, all of which he gave to the flames. Wasting and destroying in this way he drew near to Vadakat or Badaca, the second city of the kingdom, where Kudur-Nakhunta had for the time fixed his residence. The Elamitic king, hearing of his rapid approach, took fright, and, hastily quitting Badaca, fled away to a city called Khidala, at the foot of the mountains, where alone he could feel himself in safety. Sennacherib then advanced to Badaca, besieged it, and took it by assault; after which affairs seem to have required his presence at Nineveh, and, leaving his conquest incomplete, he returned home with a large booty.
A third campaign in these parts, the most important of all, followed. Susub, the Chaldaean prince whom Sennacherib had carried off to Assyria, in the year of his naval expedition escaped from his confinement, and, returning to Babylon, was once more hailed as king by the inhabitants. Aware of his inability to maintain himself on the throne against the will of the Assyrians, unless he were assisted by the arms of a powerful ally, he resolved to obtain, if possible, the immediate aid of the neighboring Elamitic monarch. Kolar-Nakhunta, the late antagonist of Sennacherib, was dead, having survived his disgraceful flight from Badaca only three months; and Ummanminan, his younger brother, held the throne. Susub, bent on contracting an alliance with this prince, did not scruple at an act of sacrilege to obtain his end. He broke open the treasury of the great temple of Bel at Babylon, and seizing the gold and silver belonging to the god, sent it as a present to Ummanminan, with an urgent entreaty that he would instantly collect his troops and march to his aid. The Elamitic monarch, yielding to a request thus powerfully backed, and perhaps sufficiently wise to see that the interests of Susiana required an independent Babylon, set his troops in motion without any delay, and advanced to the banks of the Tigris. At the same time a number of the Aramaean tribes on the middle Euphrates, which Sennacherib had reduced in his third year, revolted, and sent their forces to swell the army of Susub. A great battle was fought at Khaluli, a town on the lower Tigris, between the troops of Sennacherib and this allied host; the combat was long and bloody, but at last the Assyrians conquered. Susub and his Elamitic ally took to flight and made their escape. Nebosumiskun, a son of Merodach-Baladan, and many other chiefs of high rank, were captured. The army was completely routed and broken up. Babylon submitted, and was severely punished; the fortifications were destroyed, the temples plundered and burnt, and the images of the gods broken to pieces. Perhaps the rebel city now received for viceroy Regibelus or Mesesimordachus, whom the Canon of Ptolemy, which is silent about Susub, makes contemporary with the middle portion of Sennacherib’s reign.
The only other expedition which can be assigned, on important evidence, to the reign of Sennacherib, is one against Cilicia, in which he is said to have been opposed by Greeks. According to Abydenus, a Greek fleet guarded the Cilician shore, which the vessels of Sennacherib engaged and defeated. Polyhistor seems to say that the Greeks also suffered a defeat by land in Cilicia itself, after which Sennacherib took possession of the country, and built Tarsus there on the model of Babylon. The prominence here given to Greeks by Greek writers is undoubtedly remarkable, and it throws a certain amount of suspicion over the whole story. Still, as the Greek element in Cyprus was certainly important at this time, and as the occupation of Cilicis, by the Assyrians may have appeared to the Cyprian Greeks to endanger their independence, it is conceivable that they lent some assistance to the natives of the country, who were a hardy race, fond of freedom, and never very easily brought into subjection. The admission af a double defeat makes it evident that the tale is not the invention of Greek national vanity. Abydenus and Polyhistor probably derive it from Berosus, who must also have made the statement that Tarsus was now founded by Sennacherib, and constructed, after the pattern of Babylon. The occupation of newly conquered countries, by the establishnient in them of large cities in which foreign colonists were placed by the conquerors, was practice commenced by Sargon, which his son is not unlikely to have followed. Tarsus was always regarded by the Greeks as an Assyrian town; and although they gave different accounts of the time of its foundation, their disagreement in this respect does not invalidate their evidence as to the main fact itself, which is intrinsically probable. The evidence of Polyhistor and Abydenus as to the date of the foundation, representing, as it must, the testimony of Berosus upon the point, is to be preferred; and we may accept it as a fact, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the native city of St. Paul derived, if not its origin, yet, at any rate, its later splendor and magnificence, from the antagonist of Hezekiah.