Sennacherib

Sennacherib was king of Assyria from 705 to 681 BC, the son and successor of Sargon II. In 701 BC, the fourteenth year of Hezekiah king of Judah, he invaded Judah (2 Kings 18:13). He made Nineveh the capital of the empire and rebuilt it.

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Hezekiah's revolt and the invasion of Judah

Hezekiah's father Ahaz had sent word to Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, "I am your servant and your son," but Hezekiah "rebelled against the king of Assyria and refused to serve him" (2 Kings 16:7; 18:1, 7). Other western cities resisted as well: Padi, ruler of Ekron, was put in iron fetters and handed over to Hezekiah, and Sennacherib later had him released from Jerusalem and restored to his throne. He also took Ashkelon, sent its ruler Sidqa and his family into exile and set a new king over the city. In Hezekiah's fourteenth year Sennacherib attacked and captured all the fortified cities of Judah (2 Kings 18:13; Isaiah 36:1); Chronicles says he besieged them, meaning to take them for himself (2 Chronicles 32:1). Hezekiah sent word to him at Lachish, "I have done wrong," and paid 300 talents of silver and 30 talents of gold, emptying the temple and palace treasuries of silver and stripping the gold from the temple doors (2 Kings 18:14-16). Hezekiah also stopped the springs outside the city, rebuilt the wall and channeled the Gihon spring to the west side of the City of David (2 Chronicles 32:3-5, 30; see Hezekiah's Tunnel).

Nevertheless, from Lachish the king of Assyria sent the Tartan, the Rabsaris and the Rabshakeh with a great army to Jerusalem (2 Kings 18:17). There the Rabshakeh mocked the city's trust in Egypt and in the LORD and called on its people to make peace and come out (2 Kings 18:19-35; see Sennacherib Threatens). The Rabshakeh returned to find the king gone from Lachish and fighting against Libnah (2 Kings 19:8); Chronicles places Sennacherib and all his forces at the siege of Lachish (2 Chronicles 32:9). Warned that Tirhakah king of Cush had set out to fight him, Sennacherib sent messengers again, telling Hezekiah not to let his God deceive him (2 Kings 19:9-13). Hezekiah spread the letter before the LORD and prayed, and Isaiah sent word that the king of Assyria would not enter the city or shoot an arrow into it but would go back the way he came (2 Kings 19:14-34). That night the angel of the LORD struck down 185,000 men in the Assyrian camp, and Sennacherib broke camp, returned to Nineveh and stayed there (2 Kings 19:35-36; Isaiah 37:36-37). Chronicles adds that he wrote letters mocking the LORD and that he "withdrew to his own land in disgrace" (2 Chronicles 32:17, 21). Isaiah 36-37 tells the same story in nearly the same words, without the payment of tribute.

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His death in Scripture

While he was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisroch, his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer put him to the sword and escaped to the land of Ararat (Urartu), and his son Esarhaddon reigned in his place (2 Kings 19:37; Isaiah 37:38). Chronicles says "some of his own sons struck him down with the sword" when he entered the temple of his god (2 Chronicles 32:21).

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His own annals

Sennacherib's annals survive on clay prisms, among them the Chicago Prism, the Jerusalem Prism and the Taylor Prism. The Chicago Prism is held in Chicago at the Oriental Institute, today the "Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures." A. R. Millard, in a 1985 article in the Tyndale Bulletin, describes the Taylor Prism of Sennacherib as a clay prism in the British Museum, acquired at Nineveh in 1830 by Colonel R. Taylor, the British Resident in Baghdad, and copied in 691 BC; he dates the Oriental Institute Prism to 689 BC. Eight campaigns are recorded on the Taylor Prism; the march to the Levant was the third. The annals claim that he besieged and took 46 of Hezekiah's walled towns, with countless small places around them. Of Hezekiah, Sennacherib says, "I shut up in Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage." The annals say Hezekiah later sent his payment after the king to Nineveh, listing "30 talents of gold, 800 talents of silver," where 2 Kings gives 300 talents of silver and 30 of gold (2 Kings 18:14). The annals claim no capture of Jerusalem, which was not taken, while 2 Kings ends the campaign with the angel of the LORD and the king's return to Nineveh (2 Kings 19:35-36). On Tirhakah, Millard answers the objection that he "was too young to lead an army in 701 B.C.": two French Egyptologists re-translated his inscriptions in 1952 and put him at about twenty at the time.

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Lachish, Nineveh and Babylon

Stone reliefs of the siege and capture of Lachish lined a special room of his palace at Nineveh, and an inscription on one of them names the city (see Lachish Reliefs). Austen Henry Layard, excavating the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib at Kuyunjik for the British Museum, uncovered them and sent them to the museum. Sennacherib left his father's new capital, Dur-Sharrukin, for Nineveh. There he built a new palace that he called "the palace which has no equal," planted a botanical garden with trees from across the empire and dug canals for irrigation. Remains of his aqueduct were found at Jerwan, where it bridged a ravine as part of the system that brought water to Nineveh.

In Babylonia, Merodach-baladan (Marduk-apla-iddina), the king of Babylon who once sent letters and a gift to Hezekiah (2 Kings 20:12), fled the battlefield before him and later escaped by ship to Elam. Sennacherib made his eldest son, Ashur-nadin-shumi, king of Babylon, but the son was taken prisoner and carried off to Elam, and Sennacherib campaigned against Elam in revenge. Babylon revolted again with Elam's support, and Sennacherib destroyed the city in 689 BC, the year modern historians give.

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His murder in the outside records

His reign ended in 681 BC. His death appears in the Babylonian Chronicle: he "was killed by his son in a rebellion," and the revolt went on in Assyria until 2 Addaru. His son Esarhaddon took the throne on 18 Addaru. The Chronicle speaks of one son, 2 Kings of two (2 Kings 19:37). Andrew Knapp, writing in the Journal of the American Oriental Society in 2020, reports a "near consensus" since Simo Parpola's 1980 publication of a letter naming the murderer; the name can be linked to the Adrammelech of 2 Kings 19:37. Knapp himself warns that the field "may place undue confidence in a single broken, decontextualized letter."

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Later accounts

Herodotus, in his Histories, tells of a march by "Sanacharib" against Egypt in which field mice swarmed by night upon the Assyrian army and gnawed its quivers, bows and shield handles. Lord Byron's 1815 poem "The Destruction of Sennacherib," based on the account in 2 Kings 19, opens "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold."