Hezekiah and the Deliverance of Jerusalem from Sennacherib
Assyria had taken all of Judah and stood before Jerusalem. In a single night an angel struck down 185,000 of Sennacherib's soldiers, and he went home empty-handed.
Hezekiah came to the throne as the northern kingdom was dying. He purged the land—removed the high places, broke the pillars, and smashed the copper serpent Moses had made, because people had begun to burn incense to it. And he did something greater: he turned Judah into a nation of students. The Sages say that in his days you could not find a child who did not know the laws of purity.
In his fourteenth year Sennacherib of Assyria took forty-six fortified towns of Judah and came up to Jerusalem. His officer Rabshakeh stood at the wall and deliberately spoke Hebrew so the defenders would hear: do not trust Hezekiah, do not trust your God—where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Hezekiah tore his clothes, went to the Temple and spread Sennacherib's letter before God. Isaiah sent the answer: "He shall not come into this city nor shoot an arrow there… by the way he came, he shall return."
That night an angel struck 185,000 in the Assyrian camp. "They rose early in the morning, and behold, they were all dead corpses." Sennacherib withdrew to Nineveh and was killed there by his own sons. Jerusalem lived another hundred and twenty-five years.
How we know
On the chronology
Academic history dates this event differently. In the age of the kings the divergence is not the one familiar from the Persian period, where Seder Olam runs about a hundred and sixty-five years short. Here academic chronology reckons some reigns as overlapping — father and son on the throne together — so its span from the division of the kingdom to the destruction of the Temple comes out nearly three decades shorter. The gap therefore grows: a hundred and thirty-five years at the division, a hundred and fifty-four at Sennacherib, a hundred and sixty-four at the destruction. The anchors of the academic count are external documents: the battle of Qarqar (853), Jehu's tribute on the Black Obelisk (841), the fall of Samaria (722), Sennacherib's campaign (701), Megiddo and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns in the Babylonian Chronicles (609, 605, 597). Both dates appear on the timeline when the divergence layer is on.
Sources
Tanakh
- Melachim II 18–19 — Chizkiyahu’s reform, the siege, and the destruction of the army in a single night
- Yeshayahu 36–37 — the same account in the prophet — an eyewitness to the events
- Divrei HaYamim II 29–32 — the purification of the Temple and Chizkiyahu’s great Pesach
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Sanhedrin 94a–b — a sword at the door of the study hall; why Chizkiyahu did not become the Messiah
- Pesachim 56a — Chizkiyahu’s six acts — which the sages approved and which they did not
Basis: stated in the Tanakh.
People and places
Isaiah · Hezekiah · Jerusalem · Assyria (Nineveh) · Kings · Isaiah · Ahaz · Micah the Morashtite