Thus, when an emissary from the besieging Assyrian army offered Hezekiah,
the king of Judah, the opportunity to surrender and spare his people,
Hezekiah was caught between the pragmatic choice in the face of a seemingly
insurmountable Assyrian force, and faith in a divine promise. The situation
recalled Saul’s predicament several centuries earlier. Unlike Saul, who acted
without prophetic sanction, Hezekiah consulted the prophet Isaiah, who
instructed him not to surrender (“The City of Jerusalem will not be delivered
into the hands of the king of Assyria” – Isaiah 37:10). Hezekiah accordingly
refused to surrender, consistent with his overall religious outlook. More than
a decade before the siege, he had implemented a series of pro–Yahwist
reforms. He had suppressed the worship of Ba’al and other foreign gods,
attempted to centralize the cult of Yahweh and discourage syncretic religious
practices by suppressing local Israelite altars, and generally tried to enforce
the laws of the covenant.
At this point, the biblical accounts diverge. According to the Book of
Isaiah, the 185,000 Assyrian soldiers laying siege to the city were struck
down by an angel. More plausible is the account from Chronicles, which
claims that Hezekiah, while refusing to allow the Assyrians to enter, bought
the survival of the city with a promise of tribute. Interestingly, the outcome
of this episode was affirmed, implicitly at least, by the diary of the besieging
general. In recounting the defeat of other cities, the general uniformly noted,
“I came, I surrounded, I besieged, I conquered, I burn.” With respect to
Jerusalem, the diary noted, “I came, I surrounded, I besieged, I held the king
in my hand like a bird in a cage.” While not attesting to the divine interven-
tion of an angel, the diary affirms that Jerusalem was one of the few towns
that survived an Assyrian siege.
The failure of the Assyrians to take Jerusalem coincided with the begin-
ning of the decline of Assyria itself during the seventh century, which allowed
for the subsequent resurgence of Israelite independence. Coupled with the
seemingly miraculous survival of Jerusalem in the face of impossible odds,
this strengthened the Israelite belief in the promissory covenant to the point
of overconfidence. From this point on, there would be an increasingly bold
mood in the face of foreign threats. If Jerusalem could survive the Assyrians –
the strongest army that had existed in the ancient Near East to that point – it
could survive any threat. This growing overconfidence was noted by Isaiah in
the last of his oracles in Isaiah 39 (Isaiah 40–65 are the oracles of a different
prophet of the same name). When Hezekiah is greeted by an emissary from a
little-known, faraway kingdom named Babylon who asks to see the royal trea-
sury and armory, Hezekiah assents over the protests and warnings of Isaiah.
Prophets, the first to identity a threat, were often ignored. Nearly a century
later, the prophet Jeremiah would spend considerable energy trying to com-
bat this lack of caution.
20 The world of the Hebrew Bible