The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (41 page)

Despite the biblical report of the miraculous deliverance of Jerusalem, contemporary Assyrian records provide a very different picture of the outcome of Hezekiah’s revolt. The Assyrian account of Sennacherib’s devastation of the Judahite countryside is presented concisely and coldly:

As to Hezekiah, the Judahite, he did not submit to my yoke. I laid siege to
46
of his strong cities, walled forts and to the countless small villages in their vicinity, and conquered them by means of well-stamped earth ramps, and battering rams brought thus near to the walls combined with the attack by foot soldiers, using mines, breeches as well as sapper work. I drove out of them
200
,
150
people, young and old, male and female, horses, mules, donkeys, camels, big and small cattle beyond counting, and considered them booty. Himself, I made prisoner in Jerusalem, his royal residence, like a bird in a cage. I surrounded him with earthwork in order to molest those who were leaving his city’s gate. His towns which I had plundered, I took away from his country and gave them over to Mitinti, king of Ashdod, Padi, king of Ekron, and Sillibel, king of Gaza. Thus I reduced his country, but I still increased the tribute.

Though the stated number of captives may be a major exaggeration, the combined information from the Assyrian records and archaeological excavations in Judah adequately confirm the intensity of the systematic campaign of siege and pillage—first through Judah’s richest agricultural areas in the Shephelah foothills and then up toward the highland capital. The devastation of the Judahite cities can be seen in almost every mound excavated in the Judean hinterland. The grim archaeological remains mesh perfectly with Assyrian texts recounting, for example, the conquest of the prominent Judahite city of Azekah, which was described as being “located on a mountain ridge, like pointed iron daggers without number reaching high to heaven.” It was taken by storm, pillaged, and then ravaged.

This was not haphazard violence, meant only to terrify the Judahites into submission. It was also a calculated campaign of economic destruction, in which the sources of wealth of the rebellious kingdom would be taken away. The city of Lachish, located in Judah’s most fertile agricultural area, was the single most important regional center of royal Judahite rule. It was the second most important city in the kingdom after Jerusalem. The pivotal role it played in the events of
701
BCE
is hinted at in the biblical text (
2
Kings
18
:
14
,
17
;
19
:
8
). Sennacherib’s attack was meant to bring about its utter destruction. A vivid illustration of the Assyrian siege of this city is preserved in extraordinary detail on a large wall relief that once decorated the palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh, in northern Iraq (
Figure
28
). This relief, about sixty feet long and nine feet high, was discovered in the
1840
s by the British explorer Austen Henry Layard and was subsequently shipped to London, where it remains on display in the British Museum. Its original location on the wall of an inner chamber of Sennacherib’s palace indicates the importance of the events it depicts. A short inscription reveals its subject: “Sennacherib, king of all, king of Assyria, sitting on his throne while the spoil from the city of Lachish passed before him.”

Figure
28
: An Assyrian relief from the palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh, depicting the Conquest of the City of Lachish.
Drawn by Judith Dekel; courtesy of Professor David Ussishkin, Tel Aviv University.

This impressive Lachish relief narrates the whole horrible course of events in a single frame. It shows Lachish as an extremely well fortified city. A ferocious battle is being fought near the walls. The Assyrians constructed a siege ramp, on which they advance their heavily armored battering rams toward the fortification walls. The defenders of Lachish fight back desperately,
trying to prevent the battering rams from approaching the wall. They hurl torches in an attempt to set the war machines on fire, while the Assyrians pour water on the battering rams. Assyrian archers standing behind the battering rams barrage the walls with arrows while the Judahite defenders shoot back. But all of the city’s defensive preparations—and all the defenders’ heroic fighting—are in vain. Captives are taken out of the gate, some of them dead, their lifeless bodies hoisted on spears. Booty is taken from the city, including the sacred vessels of its religious rituals. All the while Sennacherib sits with impassive majesty on a throne in front of his royal tent, not far from the Assyrian camp, overseeing the procession of captives and plunder taken from the houses and public buildings of the rebellious community.

Some scholars have questioned the accuracy of the details of this relief and have argued that this is self-serving imperial propaganda, not a reliable record of what happened in Lachish. But there is hardly a doubt that the relief deals with the specific city of Lachish and with the specific events of
701
BCE
. Not only are the topography of the city and the local vegetation represented accurately; it is even possible to identify the precise vantage point of the artist who made the sketch for the relief. Furthermore, the archaeological excavations at Lachish have provided details about the location of the gate and the nature of the fortifications and the siege system that confirm the accuracy of the relief.

The British excavations at Lachish in the
1930
s and the renewed dig of David Ussishkin on behalf of Tel Aviv University in the
1970
s revealed independent dramatic evidence for the last hours of this great Judahite fortress. The Assyrian siege ramp, which is depicted in the relief, was identified and excavated. It is the only surviving example of such a siege structure from anywhere in the former lands of the Assyrian empire. It is not surprising that it was built on the most vulnerable side of the mound, where it is connected to a ridge; on all other sides the slopes are too steep to allow the construction of a ramp and the deployment of battering rams.

The archaeological finds from inside the city offer evidence for the desperate actions of the defenders. They erected a huge counter–ramp directly opposite the Assyrian ramp, but this last attempt by the defenders to prevent the Assyrians from breaching the wall was a failure. The city was burnt to the ground. Other finds provide evidence for the fierceness of the battle.
Hundreds of arrowheads were found at the foot of the city wall. Perforated boulders, some of them with remains of burnt ropes in the holes—apparently flung from the ramparts by the defenders in an attempt to destroy the siege machines—were retrieved near the point of the assault on the wall. A mass burial of about fifteen hundred people—men, women, and children—was uncovered in the caves on the western slopes of the mound, mixed with late eighth century pottery.

Though the second book of Kings concentrates on the saving power of YHWH over Jerusalem and only laconically mentions the capture of “all the fortified cities of Judah” (
2
Kings
18
:
13
), other biblical texts disclose the horrors of the Assyrian campaign for those Judahites unfortunate enough to have been victims of Sennacherib’s rampage in the countryside. These passages are to be found not in the Deuteronomistic History but in the prophetic works. Two contemporary witnesses—the prophets Isaiah and Micah—speak of the fear and grief that paralyzed Judah in the wake of the Assyrian advance. Isaiah, who was in Jerusalem at the time of the siege, vividly describes a military campaign that hit the area north of Jerusalem (
10
:
28
–
32
). And Micah, who was a native of the Shephelah from a town not far from Lachish, describes the numbed shock of the homeless survivors, blaming their misfortune on their own idolatry:

Tell it not in Gath, weep not at all; in Beth-le-aphrah roll yourselves in the dust. Pass on your way, inhabitants of Shaphir, in nakedness and shame; the inhabitants of Zaanan do not come forth; the wailing of Beth-ezel shall take away from you its standing place. For the inhabitants of Maroth wait anxiously for good, because evil has come down from the L
ORD
to the gate of Jerusalem. Harness the steeds to the chariots, inhabitants of Lachish; you were the beginning of sin to the daughter of Zion, for in you were found the transgressions of Israel. (M
ICAH
1
:
10
–
13
)

The blow suffered by the Shephelah is also made abundantly clear in the results of archaeological surveys, which show that the region never recovered from Sennacherib’s campaign. Even in the following decades, after the partial revival of Judah, the Shephelah was still sparsely inhabited. Both the
number of sites and the built-up area—on which all population estimates are based—shrank to about a third of what they were in the late eighth century. Some of the main towns were rebuilt, but many small towns, villages, and farmhouses were left in ruins. This fact is particularly significant when we remember that in the eighth century, prior to the Assyrian assault, the population of the Shephelah numbered about fifty thousand, almost half the population of the entire kingdom.

Faith in YHWH alone did not save Hezekiah’s territory against the wrath of the Assyrians. Large parts of Judah were devastated and valuable agricultural land in the Shephelah was given by the Assyrian victors to the city-states of Philistia. Judah’s territory shrank dramatically, Hezekiah was forced to pay a heavy tribute to Assyria, and a significant number of Judahites were deported to Assyria. Only Jerusalem and the Judean hills immediately to the south of the capital were spared. For all the Bible’s talk of Hezekiah’s piety and YHWH’s saving intervention, Assyria was the only victor. Sennacherib fully achieved his goals: he broke the resistance of Judah and subjugated it. Hezekiah had inherited a prosperous state, and Sennacherib destroyed it.

In the aftermath of the failed rebellion against Assyria, Hezekiah’s policy of religious purification and confrontation with Assyria must have seemed to many to have been a terrible, reckless mistake. Some of the rural priesthood may even have argued that it was, in fact, Hezekiah’s blasphemous destruction of the venerated high places and his prohibition against worshiping Asherah, the stars, moon, and other deities along with YHWH that had brought such misfortune on the land. Having mainly the literature of the YHWH-alone camp, we do not know what their opponents might have claimed. What we know is that in
698
BCE
, three years after Sennacherib’s invasion, when Hezekiah died and his twelve-year-old son Manasseh came to the throne, the religious pluralism in the (now considerably shrunken) countryside of Judah was restored. The second book of Kings reports it in great denunciatory outrage. For the Deuteronomistic historian, Manasseh was more than a run-of-the-mill apostate. He was described as the most sinful monarch that the kingdom of Judah had ever
seen (
2
Kings
21
:
3
–
7
). In fact, the book of Kings puts the blame for the “future” destruction of Jerusalem on his head (
2
Kings
21
:
11
–
15
).

There was obviously something more than theological considerations behind this switch in official religious policy. The kingdom’s survival was in the hands of Manasseh and his closest advisers, and they were determined to revive Judah. That necessitated restoring a certain measure of economic autonomy to the countryside—still the greatest potential source of the kingdom’s wealth. The revival of the once devastated rural areas could not be achieved without the cooperation of the networks of village elders and clans—and that meant allowing the worship at long-venerated local high places to resume. In a word, the cults of Baal, Asherah, and the host of heaven returned.

Even as he was compelled to be an obedient vassal, Manasseh apparently calculated correctly that the economic recuperation of Judah could be seen to be in the interest of Assyria. A prosperous Judah would be loyal to the empire and serve as an effective buffer against Egypt—Assyria’s archenemy in the south. And the Assyrians may even have granted a contrite Judah most-favored-vassal status: a seventh century text reporting tribute given by south Levantine states to the Assyrian king indicates that Judah’s tribute was considerably smaller than that paid by the neighboring, poorer Assyrian vassals Ammon and Moab.

Manasseh seems to have justified his Assyrian overlords’ faith in him. A document from the time of Esarhaddon, who replaced Sennacherib on the throne in Assyria, mentions Manasseh among a group of twenty-two kings who were ordered to send building materials for a royal project at Nineveh. The next Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, listed Manasseh among the kings who gave him gifts and helped him to conquer Egypt. Though the second book of Chronicles informs us that at a certain moment in his reign Manasseh was imprisoned by the Assyrians in Babylon (
2
Chronicles
33
:
11
), the circumstances and even historical reliability of that reported imprisonment are the subject of continuing debate. What is clear is that his long reign—fifty-five years—was a peaceful time for Judah. The cities and settlements established during his reign survived until the final destruction of Judah in the following century.