Between the sixteenth and seventeenth verses of the eighteenth chapter of II Kings, ten silent years roll by. They are voiceless as far as our text is concerned, but they are vocal when we listen to the monuments.
It may have been about 705 B. C. when Hezekiah accepted the yoke of Sennacherib. In the meantime Sennacherib had strengthened his alliances and was prepared to essay a conflict with Egypt. The nephew of So, who is called Tirhakah in the Bible, murdered the successor of So, which was his son, Shabataka. Having gained an empire by this ruthless spilling of the blood of the rightful heir, Tirhakah began an ill-fated reign. He rashly matched strength with Sennacherib, who was more than willing to add Egypt to the nations who bore his yoke. The armies of Assyria and Egypt joined battle at the border at the site of Libnah and a mighty conflict resulted. Realizing the strategic importance of an enemy who would threaten the rear of the Assyrian host, Tirhakah made overtures to Hezekiah and invited him to join in a rebellion to throw off the yoke of Assyria. Hezekiah being willing to save the enormous tribute that beggared his country annually, listened to the voice of Isaiah who advised him to join the rebellion. So Hezekiah pronounced defiance against Sennacherib and all of the Assyrian hordes and announced the independence of Judah. The battle of Libnah was then fought, and Tirhakah was disgracefully defeated. The pitiful remnant of his army fled and left Sennacherib the unchallenged conqueror of his day.
The position of Hezekiah can well be imagined. The strength and might of Egypt had been brushed aside by the armed power of Assyria, and tiny Judah was put in the position of defying the greatest military power of that era. While Sennacherib was busy in a mopping-up campaign at Libnah, he sent three trusted generals to lay siege to Jerusalem and to demand the surrender of Hezekiah. The blasphemous oration of one of these generals, Rab-shakeh, is given voluminously in the eighteenth chapter of II Kings. There was a good deal of truth in some of Rab-shakeh’s arguments. He described Pharaoh as “a bruised reed upon which if a man leaned, it would pierce his hand and wound him to the death.” He rightly said that no other countries had been delivered from Sennacherib by the power of their gods. His error was in assuming that therefore the God of Israel would also be defeated by the power of Sennacherib. He gave the king some short while to think over the policy of surrender, and sat down to invest the city. Hezekiah, in his bitter dilemma, sought out Isaiah, whose advice he had followed with such disastrous results.
The thirty-seventh chapter of Isaiah contains the answer that Isaiah made, and the exact words of his prophecy are also found in the nineteenth chapter of II Kings, verses six and seven. To comfort Hezekiah, Isaiah said to the king’s messenger: “Thus shall ye say to your master, Thus saith the Lord, Be not afraid of the words that thou hast heard wherewith the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me. Behold, I will send a blast upon him, and he shall hear a rumour, and return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land.”
It is well to keep this prophecy of Isaiah’s in mind until we see how perfectly it was fulfilled in complete detail. In the thirty-fifth verse of II Kings, the nineteenth chapter, the “blast” occurred. The statement is made that the angel of the Lord went out and slew 185,000 of the flower of the Assyrian army.
The next verse says in graphic words, “So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed.”
The literal translation in English of that graphic word would be, “So Sennacherib king of Assyria ‘beat it’.” We cannot blame him for the haste of his departure. Arising after a night of slumber to find 185,000 of his best warriors mysteriously slain, terror must have smitten his heart. At that exact moment word reached him of a rebellion in his own land. This was the “rumour” of which Isaiah had prophesied. He returned to put down this rebellion and never again invaded Judah.
Twenty years later he was murdered. Between verses thirty-six and thirty-seven of the nineteenth chapter of II Kings, a full score of years passed by. After his murder, his son, Esar-haddon, came to the throne and continued the story of conquest and intrigue.
In the meantime, the defeated Tirhakah was unquestionably chagrined to learn that little Judah had been delivered from the power that had defeated him. To apologize for his own failure to support Judah, Tirhakah claimed credit for the defeat of the Assyrian horde by claiming that his god, Amon, had caused the camp of the Assyrians to be invaded by millions of field mice. He claimed that these tiny rodents in one night ate up all the bowstrings of the army and thus they were unable to fight. His interpretation of the event is a bit sketchy, to say the least!
In the Assyrian Room at the British Museum, a very important exhibit will be seen in Table Case “E”. This is a six-sided clay prism containing an unabridged record of Sennacherib’s own account of these stirring events. Here he has given us his story of the invasion of Palestine and the siege of Jerusalem in the days of Hezekiah. So important is this record that we produce here, in its entirety, the fifth oblique (or plane) of this great prism: