Isaiah37chapter 37

Spreading the letter before the LORD is a legal gesture, not a poetic one. When a subject received a document he could not answer, he laid it before his sovereign and asked for a ruling. Hezekiah carries the Assyrian ultimatum into the temple, unrolls it, and puts it down — the whole prayer that follows is a plaintiff handing over the evidence.

Tirhakah, named here as king of Cush, is a real Nubian ruler whose monuments survive. Critics point out that he became pharaoh some years after 701, so he could not have held the title yet; the traditional answer is the ordinary one used in history writing everywhere — a man is named by the title he is best known for, even in an account of his earlier years. Egyptian and Assyrian records agree that an Egyptian-Nubian army did march north in this campaign.

The taunt God sends back to Sennacherib uses Assyria's own boasts. The king had bragged of cutting down the tall cedars of Lebanon and digging wells in foreign lands and drying up rivers with the soles of his troops' feet — all of which appear almost word for word in Assyrian royal inscriptions. God's answer is that he planned it long ago and the emperor was the tool. Then a farmer's promise for the survivors: this year eat what grows of itself, next year what springs from that, and in the third year sow and reap and plant vineyards — two years lost to the war, and normal life in the third.

The deliverance is stated plainly: the angel of the LORD went out and struck a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp, and in the morning they were dead bodies. Herodotus preserves an Egyptian version of a disaster to Sennacherib's army in which field mice swarmed the camp overnight and ate the bowstrings and shield straps, which many take as a garbled memory of plague, since rodents carry it. What is not in dispute is the silence in Sennacherib's own record: he lists the tribute and the shut-up bird in the cage, and he never claims the one thing he would have shouted about — taking Jerusalem.

The last verses jump twenty years. Sennacherib was murdered by two of his sons while worshipping in the temple of his god Nisroch, and Esarhaddon reigned in his place. Babylonian chronicles record the assassination in 681 BC.