2 Chronicles32chapter 32

This campaign is one of the best-documented events in the Old Testament, because both sides wrote it down. Sennacherib's own account, preserved on clay prisms in his palace records, boasts of taking forty-six fortified towns of Judah and shutting Hezekiah up in Jerusalem 'like a bird in a cage' — and then says nothing about capturing the city, which is a remarkable silence in a document designed to celebrate victories.

Hezekiah's preparations are engineering. He stopped the springs outside the city so an invading army would find no water, and he diverted the upper outflow of the Gihon spring straight down to the west side of the city of David. That is the Siloam tunnel: over seventeen hundred feet of channel cut through solid rock, still walkable today, with an inscription carved near its end describing the moment the two crews digging from opposite ends heard each other's picks through the stone and broke through.

He also repaired the broken wall, raised towers, built a second wall outside it, strengthened the terracing, and made large numbers of weapons and shields.

The Assyrian officers' speech from outside the wall was delivered in Hebrew on purpose, so that the men on the wall would hear it and lose heart — psychological warfare was a standard part of a siege, and the argument used was equally standard: no other nation's god has saved anyone from us.

The deliverance comes by an angel, and Sennacherib returns home in shame and is killed in the temple of his god by his own sons — an event Assyrian and Babylonian records confirm for the year 681 BC.

The chapter ends with two warnings. Hezekiah's heart was lifted up after his recovery from illness, and when Babylonian envoys came to enquire about the sign that had been done in the land, God 'left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart.'