SENNACHERIB (Heb.
san-khay-reeb'), king of Assyria, who, in the four teenth year of King Hezekiah (B. C. 705) came up against all the fenced cities of Judah and took them; on which Hezekiali agreed to pay the Assyrian monarch a tribute of three hundred talents of silver, and thirty talents of gold.
This, however, did not satisfy Sennacherib, who sent an embassy with hostile intentions, charging Hezekiah with trusting on 'this bruised reed Egypt.' The king of Judah in his perplexity had recourse to Isaiah, who counselled confidence and hope, giving a divine promise of miraculous aid. Meanwhile `Tirbakali, king of Ethiopia,' and of Thebes in Egypt, had come out to fight against the Assyrians, who had threatened Lower Egypt with an invasion. On learning this, Sennacherib sent another deputation to Hezekiali, who thereon applied for aid to Jehovah, who promised to defend the capital. 'And it came to pass that night that the angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning. behold they were all dead corpses' (2 Kings xviii :13, sq.). On this, Sennacherib returned to Nineveh. and was shortly after murdered by two of his sons as he was pray ing in the house of Nisroch his god (2 Kings xix: 36. sq.; 2 Chi' On. XXXII ; Is. XXNVII :37).
I. Sennacherib and the Destruction of Nineveh.
In 1895 the world of scholars came in posses sion of a letter from King Nabonidus of Babylon, which had been discovered by Dr. Schiel, the French savant, in the Museum of Constantinople. The letter is a sick of stone with eleven columns of writing, but it has been somewhat injured so that all of the matter is not legible.
(1) Capture of Babylon. On the first column, however, Nabonidus tells of the capture of Baby lon long before by Sennacherib. He says: "He came to Babylon, he leveled its temples, he threw up the earth, he destroyed the reliefs and the in scribed edicts. He took the hand of Lord Mero
dach and carried him to Assyria. As with the anger of the gods he treated the land. The lord Merodach would not restrain his wrath. For twenty years he had his home in Assyria. At last the time came when the wrath of the king of the gods was appeased, and he thought of his temple, E-saggil, and of Babylon. the seat of his dominion. As to the king of Assyria, who, during the wrath of Merodach, had ravaged the land, his son, the offspring of his body, slew him with his weapons." Although it is evident from history that two of Sermacherib's sons plotted his personal de struction. mention is here made of only one of them; it is, however, a direct confirmation of the Biblical record from an entirely independent wit ness, over whose head the dust of many centuries has fallen.
(2) Annals of Sennacherib. We have for a few years been in possession of the annals of Sennacheritt, and by a comparison of the monu ments with Biblical history, which is found in both Is. and 2 Kings, we obtain the facts concerning the reign of Sennacherib. One apparent discrep ancy between the Biblical account and the monu ments may, however, be noted. Sennacherib re ceived from Hezekiah, the king of Jerusalem, a tribute of thirty talents of gold and an amount of silver which, in his own annals, he calls eight hundred talents. but which the Jewish writer calls three hundred talents. The explanation seems to be that there were two sorts of talents, the large and the small, which were to each other in the ratio of three to eight; so that the Assyrian king, who had not much to boast of in this cam paign, made the tribute as large as possible by reckoning the small talents. This tribute was paid while Sennacherib was at Lachish. (See