"Like a Bird in a Cage": The Invasion of Sennacherib in 701 BCE

Currents in Theology and Mission, Feb, 2005

"Like a Bird in a Cage": The Invasion of Sennacherib in 701 BCE. Edited by Lester L. Grabbe (Sheffield-Continuum, $135). The nine essays in this volume attempt to understand the divergent accounts of Sennacherib's invasion of Judah in 701: 2 Kgs 18:13-16, 2 Kgs 18:17-19:37, 2 Chronicles 32, the Assyrian royal annals, the depictions of this campaign in Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh, the excavations of archaeologists, and the account of Egypt's interaction with Assyria in Herodotus.

The problems are manifold: Did Sennacherib come once or twice? How does one interpret the self-contradictory biblical accounts? Did Sennacherib capture 205,000 prisoners as he claimed, or were 185,000 Assyrians killed by an angel, as the Bible claims? On the whole the writers give more credence to the Assyrian account than to the biblical accounts, while admitting that 2 Kgs 18:13-16 agrees more or less with the Assyrian data. But all of the sources tell the story from a "point of view," including the Assyrian artistic depictions, the essay on which is the longest in the volume. The editor underscores that Hezekiah's survival on the throne is perhaps the biggest conundrum in all of our sources. If Sennacherib's invasion was in response to Hezekiah's rebellion, why did Hezekiah survive after all? The writers seem to agree that there was not a siege of Jerusalem, as there was of Lachish. Hezekiah was shut up like a bird in a cage (as Sennacherib put it) because his roads and supply routes were blockaded. After two centuries of intense investigation, a definitive historical understanding of 701 in biblical and Assyrian history remains elusive. RWK