Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

So, I want to start with a strange passage from the Old Testament.

It's Isaiah 37, verse 36, and it says that the angel of the Lord went forth and killed 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians.

And when men arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies.

So, this is a strange passage for a number of reasons.

Number one, it's this really striking kind of image of an angel going and killing the enemies of Israel.

It has that combination of features where it seems violent and sort of mythological.

It's the kind of thing that I think people hear about and then think, What do we do with this?

As Christians, it may be hard to know how to incorporate that into the faith of Jesus.

As non-Christians, you may look at that and say, This is weird.

What is going on in your Bible here, guys?

And so, I want to explore, like, well, is that really what happened?

What's great about this, as we're going to see, is this is a really well-documented historical event.

Now, before I unpack that and explore this from the Egyptian, Greek, Babylonian, and Assyrian perspectives, I want to give two quick announcements.

Number one, as you may have already noticed, my voice is a little bit shot.

I lost my voice over the weekend, so I'm doing the best I can.

But if the sound is a little weird today, that's on me.

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This is something I've been talking about doing for a while now, and I finally got it up and running.

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One of the cool things we're doing at even the $5 a month level is there's like an online weekly Q&A where you can ask your questions directly, and I leave an hour to just respond to people's questions.

I'm super excited about it.

I'm excited to kind of see how this works.

I just did a Discord Q&A a week or two ago with a ton of young people, and it was amazing.

It was a real blast.

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So, if that's something that you want to support, great!

I'll try not to be too pushy; I don't like when people push their stuff too much.

So, with that, let's turn towards the topic at hand.

As I said, this is one of the best-documented events in biblical history.

Now, why do I say that?

Well, let me introduce you to Dr. Isaac Kalimi.

Dr. Isaac Kalimi is a professor for the Hebrew Bible, the history of ancient Israel, and Jewish studies.

He has worked at distinguished institutions in Europe, the USA, and Israel before being invited to the University of Mainz.

Dr. Isaac Kalimi talks about how this campaign of the Assyrian king Sennacherib, including the siege of Jerusalem, compared to many other events in the history of the ancient Near East.

This third campaign, the western campaign from the Assyrian perspective in the fourth year of his reign, so 701, is very well documented.

He says it is definitely the best-documented event of the history of Israel in the First Temple period.

So, here's why I'm excited about this: because on the one hand, you have this event that seems really strange and mythological-sounding, you know, angels beating armies.

And on the other hand, you have a bunch of really old historical evidence from a variety of cultures.

As Kalimi says, the event is recounted in various Assyrian sources like the Annals of Sennacherib, which were composed shortly after the campaign, in the bull inscriptions, and in later condensed summary inscriptions.

It's also in Assyrian reliefs; you know, you've got carvings of the events, and it's testified to by an abundance of archaeological excavations.

So, there are all sorts of things—pots and coins and bowls, as they're called—that attest to the historicity that the Assyrians really did invade, they really did try to conquer Jerusalem, and something really did happen.

But I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit.

So, for this video, I'm going to give you kind of an overview of, okay, what is even this story?

Maybe you've never heard of Sennacherib's campaign—totally normal.

So, let's look at it first from the Israelites' account, or the Judeans' or Jewish account.

This is a Hebrew or biblical kind of version of events, and then we'll look at it from their enemies' perspective, from the Assyrian perspective.

And then the Greek perspective with Herodotus.

He's relying on Egyptian sources, so I'm calling it kind of the Greek/Egyptian perspective.

And then finally, from the Babylonian perspective.

So, it's going to be really cool because it's not just people who were the combatants in this particular fight, and each of the four perspectives has a different angle.

But I think we can draw out a particular picture that emerges; you'll see as we go.

Let's start with what the Bible says.

This is going to be the Jewish perspective on the event.

There are really two sources for this: you've got 2 Kings 18-19 and Isaiah 36-37. They're clearly using the same material, or one of them is using the other one.

There are large passages that are just verbatim the same.

Since I quoted from Isaiah earlier, I'll switch here to 2 Kings.

2 Kings 18 sets kind of the background that King Hezekiah was favored by the Lord.

The Lord was with him wherever he went forth; he prospered, and he rebelled against the king of Assyria, whom we know as Sennacherib, and would not serve him.

Now, you might think, given that context, it's going to be great.

Well, okay, the Lord's anointed, right?

The guy walking with the Lord rebels against the king of the Assyrians, and I bet it's going to go great.

It does not.

So, Sennacherib, in the 14th year of King Hezekiah, comes up against all the fortified cities of Judah and took them.

So, he has this mass conquest of the other cities of Judah.

Lord Byron has a great poem called The Destruction of Sennacherib that I think does a good job of kind of painting the picture here.

So, here's just a little taste where you can imagine these massive Assyrian armies coming in on the relatively small Judeans.

I love that depiction—just like, here comes the wolf, here comes this sheen of spears like stars on the sea.

And as I say, it does not go well at first.

In fact, Hezekiah regrets rebelling against the Assyrians.

So, in verse 14 of 2 Kings 18, he sends to the king of Assyria at Lachish.

This is one of Hezekiah's own cities that has been conquered, and he says, I have done wrong.

Withdraw from me; whatever you impose on me, I will bear.

The king of Assyria requested 300 talents of silver and 30 talents of gold, and Hezekiah gave him all the silver that was to be found in the house of the Lord and in the treasuries of the king's house.

In fact, he's even reduced to having to strip the doors of the temple of the Lord for their gold and from the doorposts which he had overlaid.

He gives all that to Sennacherib for some reason, and none of the historical accounts are clear about why this is not good enough.

Now, it may be that he didn't get as much as he had asked for, and so the massive donations—let's say the massive kind of penalty that he's extracted from Hezekiah—is not enough for Sennacherib.

But whatever the case, he doesn't stop.

So, Ira Spahr, who is a researcher and a cuneiform specialist for the MET, talks about this, and he does a good job kind of laying out the history here.

He says, It is not known why Hezekiah's tribute did not succeed in preventing further attacks.

The whole point of tribute is that one small country sends a bunch of money to a larger country so they don't get invaded.

Here, the money, by all accounts, was sent, or at least some money was sent, and they're invaded nevertheless.

As Iris Spahr says, The Assyrians bore down on Lachish.

Remember, that's where we find the tribute being given.

The Assyrians are already there; they battered down its walls, slaughtered thousands of its inhabitants, and impaled the bodies of its leaders on stakes outside of the city walls.

Jerusalem, meanwhile, is only 30 miles away.

So, in advance of the arrival in Jerusalem, Sennacherib sends a delegation of high-powered military and administrative officials to negotiate terms of surrender and to remind Hezekiah that Egypt had been defeated and Judah's God would be of no help against the might of the great king of Assyria.

At this time, Judah is trying to rely on Egypt for help, but Egypt is just no match for Assyria.

Meanwhile, all of these other nations that have fought against the Assyrians looked to their pagan gods, and one after another has been knocked down by the great king of Assyria.

It does seem, from a secular perspective, like a hopeless situation.

How is tiny Israel, or rather Judah, going to be able to survive this?

Iris Barth suggests that undoubtedly the negotiations broke down, possibly in part—now how you can say undoubtedly and possibly in the same breath, I don't know.

Undoubtedly, the negotiations broke down possibly as a result of Hezekiah's reliance on the words of Isaiah, who assured the king once again that God would protect Jerusalem and crush the Assyrian army.

So, Hezekiah is clearly regretting this course of action, but meanwhile, the prophet Isaiah is saying, God is going to protect you.

The Egyptians can't do anything for you; the God of Israel can do something for you.

He will protect you.

That delegation that came down—I actually alluded to this like two weeks ago—just how you see all these interesting imperial kind of offices, and it shows the royal authority.

2 Kings 18, verse 16, talks about how Sennacherib sends the tartan, the rabsaris, and the rapshaka with a great army from Lachish.

This is the delegation; they're not coming to invade.

They come up with enough force that, you know, their top administrative officials aren't going to get killed while going to propose terms of surrender and/or taunt the people of Jerusalem.

They break the apparent protocol.

So, they have the high-ranking delegates, and the king sends out his high-ranking people, people like Eliakim, and they're just kind of ignored.

Rather than speaking to them in Aramaic, which they both understand, the Assyrians turn and speak in the language of the people so that the people on the wall—the soldiers who are protecting the city of Jerusalem—can hear.

You just have this incredible taunt of Hezekiah and of God made by the Assyrian officials.

This is from the children's show Superbook, but it pretty closely follows the biblical account.

So, here’s a little taste of a much longer kind of taunt that the Assyrians give: Don't let Hezekiah mislead you by saying, 'The Lord will rescue us.'

Have the gods of any other nations ever saved their people from the king of Assyria?

What happened to the gods of Hamath and Arpad?

And what about the gods of Sepharvaim?

Did any god rescue Samaria from my power?

What god of any nation has ever been able to save its people from my power?

So, what makes you think that the Lord can rescue Jerusalem from me?

As taunts go, this is pretty effective because he's raising all these military and theological objections, saying, Hey, you relied on your gods; a bunch of other nations relied on their gods, and it didn't work out great for them.

Instead, you should consent to our terms.

The terms are that they're going to be exiled and sent away from Jerusalem, which is pretty similar to what happens to the ten northern tribes, what becomes Samaria.

King Hezekiah does the right thing here; he turns to God and he prays.

His prayer is a really fascinating kind of prayer because he basically points out, Yeah, the Assyrians are right; all these other gods failed them because they weren't real gods.

So show that you are the true God by having Jerusalem survive when all these other nations fell.

In 2 Kings chapter 19, verse 17, he prays, Of a truth, O Lord, the king of Assyria has laid waste the nations and their lands and has cast their gods into the fire, for they were no gods but the work of men's hands, wood and stone; therefore, they were destroyed.

So now, O Lord our God, save us, I beseech thee, from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that thou, O Lord, art God alone.

And through the prophet, the reply comes: Therefore, thus says the Lord concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city, or shoot an arrow there, or come before it with a shield, or cast up a siege mound against it.

Okay, so that's the promise: Israel, specifically Jerusalem, will be spared.

So, Israel is a little bit of a misnomer here because you've got the northern tribes, which were sometimes called Israel; we now call them Samaria.

It's very confusing, but when I talk about Israel here, I actually mean Judea and the city of Jerusalem.

So, the city of Jerusalem, the capital, God is promising that it will be spared.

They won't even fire an arrow in the city.

Instead, God says, By the way, he came by the same way he shall return, and he shall not come into this city, for I will defend this city to save it for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.

So, that's the promise, right?

It's not enough that Jerusalem will survive; Jerusalem will literally not be, you know, they will not be successful in the siege.

They won't even fire an arrow in the city.

Something miraculous is going to have to happen because all of the military forces of the Judeans are clearly no match; Jerusalem is clearly outmatched here.

And so it happened.

Well, in the next verse, you get very much the same story that we heard in Isaiah: that night, the angel of the Lord went forth and slew 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians.

When men arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies.

So, something happened seemingly overnight in which there is a divine angelic visitation resulting in the mass death of the Assyrians.

When they wake up in the morning, they're surrounded by dead bodies, and Sennacherib departs, goes home, goes back to Nineveh.

So, let's summarize all that.

The Jewish account is basically this: with Sennacherib successful early on, he's conquering Judean cities, he's forcing Hezekiah to pay tribute.

The Assyrian siege of Jerusalem is thwarted by sudden divine intervention—the death of 185,000—sending the remaining Assyrians home.

That's the account.

I completely understand if you say, I don't know what to make of that account.

I don't know how historical that account is.

So, let's hear some more.

Let's turn to the Assyrian perspective because they surely have some thoughts about this, right?

One of the cool things here is that the Assyrians keep really good records, including very ancient records.

Remember the Annals of Sennacherib that we heard referenced before?

Well, Antti Lato, the Finnish professor of Old Testament exegesis, I believe, warns us that on the pro side, these are extremely ancient records.

But on the other hand, the con side, if you will, is that these are also government propaganda.

The fact that these are written around in the lifetime of Sennacherib, and then in some cases, we're going to look at some that are a little bit later but still very early on, these are not neutral third-party accounts.

What's striking when you read the Jewish accounts is how they're not particularly glowing accounts, even of Hezekiah.

Hezekiah is a good guy, but he loses pretty badly at first.

He has to pay tribute; he strips the gold from the doors of the temple.

These are not the kind of things you write in propaganda about how great your king is.

These are just things that actually happen, and so there's a pretty honest account.

The Assyrian accounts are not encumbered by the same need for honesty, we'll say.

Antti Lato says that there's a general tendency in Assyrian annals to avoid mentioning setbacks altogether.

Like, if they were writing from Hezekiah's point of view, they would just skip all the stuff about paying tribute; they'd skip all the stuff about having to strip the gold from the temple.

They'd just mention the high points, right?

At many points, Sennacherib has attempted to give the impression that his military campaigns were successful, even if, in fact, we know from other sources that he suffered some military setbacks.

So, he's putting obviously a good face on things, and we should know that as we're listening to what he's going to have to say.

In fact, or rather, excuse me, Lato says the fact that Sennacherib's own inscriptions were recorded soon after the time of the campaigns they described does not change their propagandistic nature.

So, the fact that he knows what he's talking about doesn't mean that he's telling us the full truth because the whole point of these is to say, I'm an amazing king, and he's not going to lead with, Here are all the ways I screwed up, or Here are all the military setbacks, or any of those things.

But I actually want to look at not the direct annals of Sennacherib, although we do have good sources there, but I like the version given in what's called the Rassam Cylinder.

The Rassam Cylinder is slightly later; it's from 634. The siege happens in about 701, and Sennacherib dies in 681, so this is later in that century—634. But nevertheless, it's still a lifetime or one generation after, and it's recording Sennacherib's own view.

Again, these are part of Assyrian governmental propaganda; these are the official accounts, and it's told from Sennacherib's perspective.

It may actually be based on one of the older sources, like the annals and other sources that may be lost to us now.

But in the Rassam Cylinder, it says literally, I made it taboo for him to exit by the city gate, referring to Hezekiah.

It goes on from there, and there are a couple of things that are striking about this.

First, there's just like this, okay, he's clearly winning.

Sennacherib's conquering dozens of major cities, you know, 48 cities, and then he's got Hezekiah trapped.

He's in the royal city, and he's coming in, and then the story kind of falters for a second.

The next thing we hear is that Hezekiah sends him tribute as he's going back to Nineveh.

Now, everything about that is really sketchy.

Like, wait, why didn't you just take Jerusalem?

You were just about to do that, and now we're just hearing about you going home?

And we're to believe that Hezekiah was just so impressed that he's sending you soldiers in gold and silver?

That story doesn't make a lot of sense, right?

Antti Lato points this out.

He says the first problem encountered in reading this account is the question of why Sennacherib suddenly returned to Nineveh.

He doesn't explain it, right?

He's just like, Oh yeah, then back when I was home.

Like, why were you going home?

Something is not being told here.

So, Lato says, Well, you know, what caused this sudden withdrawal from Jerusalem?

Sennacherib does not say.

Instead, he goes on to tell how Hezekiah sent a great tribute after him to Nineveh.

Now, I'll just say at the outset, the account that the Judeans give—that they were losing, they started paying tribute, he keeps coming, and then he's defeated and goes home—that makes sense.

You give tribute when you're losing.

The idea that he just gives up the siege for no reason and Hezekiah, for no reason, sends him money after he's left?

Why would he be giving tribute after he's given up the siege?

Like, why give tribute after you've said, Okay, we're not going to fight this anymore?

Now, there are any number of things you could imagine there.

You know, maybe something came up at home; he had to get back there.

He'd left a tea kettle on.

Or more seriously, there were theories that maybe the Babylonians or somebody else rose up and started giving them problems in the east, and they had to turn their forces back.

But even in those cases, it doesn't really make sense that Hezekiah would be just so impressed by the Assyrians that he's voluntarily sending a massive tribute of soldiers and silver and gold.

It makes much more sense to say tribute was being given when the Judeans were losing, and then something happens, and the Assyrians have to turn back.

Nevertheless, here's the Assyrian account in a nutshell: Number one, Sennacherib is successful early on; everybody agrees on this.

There are some concrete accounts of Judean cities.

Number two, Sennacherib, for no clear reason in the Assyrian version, returns home to Nineveh.

That he does return home is actually something everybody's going to agree on.

Number three, he receives tribute from Hezekiah.

Now, the difference is in timing.

He's going to claim that happens after he goes home; the other sources are going to say it happens while he's winning early on.

As I say, I think that makes much more sense, but that's the Assyrian account in a nutshell.

All right, so the third place I want to look is what I'm calling the Greco-Egyptian account.

Now, here we're looking at the work of Herodotus.

If you don't know who Herodotus is, he's generally considered the world's first historian.

He invents the idea of history, you know, writing about the past in kind of an organized way to record it for the future.

His book is called Histories, fittingly enough, I guess; if you're first, you get to have that title.

Confusingly, some versions of it are also called The Persian Wars because it's not just like a history of the world; it's a history of the Persian Wars.

He's writing about 250 years after the events in question, but he's relying on older sources, some of which are lost to us today.

So, when he talks about Sennacherib's siege, he quotes Egyptian sources.

The fascinating thing is the Egyptians tell the story about Sennacherib being divinely thwarted and sent home, with one major difference: even though the Judeans, the Assyrians, and, as we're going to see, the Babylonians all agree this happens in Jerusalem, the Egyptians are like, No, no, no, no, it happened to us.

So, they have their own kind of version of the story, and in their version, there's a high priest of one of the Egyptian gods named Sethos.

And he had no regard for the warrior Egyptians because he thought he would never need them, and so he dishonors them.

He takes away special lands that had been given to them, and they don't want to work for him.

So, when Sennacherib comes against Egypt, the warrior Egyptians are just like, We're not going to defend you because you've betrayed us.

The priest—he's a priest-king, high priest and king—in his quandary goes into the temple shrine and there, before the god's image, bitterly laments over what he was expected to suffer.

Then he falls asleep, and while he's asleep, it seemed to him that the gods stood over him and told him to take heart, that he would come to no harm in countering the power of Arabia.

I shall send you champions, said the god.

So, he trusts the visions, and together with those Egyptians who would follow him, he goes to Pelasium, where the road comes into Egypt.

You'll notice it's even kind of like the way the story's being told from the Egyptian perspective; it's close to Judea, like it's on the way into Egypt.

None of the warriors would go with him, but there were some merchants, craftsmen, and traders who came with him.

Then the Assyrians show up, and during the night, they are overrun by a horde of field mice that gnaw quivers and bows in the handles of shields, with the result that many were killed fleeing unarmed the next day.

So, in this version, the way the Assyrians are turned back is that there are mice sent by the gods that leave them disarmed.

Now, there's some question here about whether this means literally field mice or whether we should be reading here pestilence and plague, or both, because we know that this is one of the ancient Greek images of pestilence: mice.

This makes sense; mice are dirty and gross.

Stephen Cesar, who at the time is the senior docent in the Semitic Museum at Harvard, has an article about this on the annihilation of Sennacherib's army, in which he writes, Although Herodotus never mentions plague, the scholarly consensus is that this is what he was in fact referring to due to the presence of mice in the story.

Now, I actually find this scholarly consensus questionable.

It might be right, but the mice seem like actual mice; they're chewing stuff up.

I don't know how plague is going to chew up the bow and arrow.

But nevertheless, Stephen Cesar points out that Robert Strassler, who is the editor of the Landmark Herodotus, had said, This is Strassler here: this is Herodotus' version of the Jewish story of the pestilence which destroyed the Assyrian army before Jerusalem.

Mice are a Greek symbol of pestilence.

It is Apollo Sementheus, the mouse god, who sends and then ends the plague in Homer in the Iliad.

So, possibly, right?

Like, we know these things.

In the Greco-Egyptian account, it's Egypt rather than Judea, but they're militarily powerless against the Assyrians.

Then the king prays to, in their case, the gods or one of the gods.

Sennacherib's invasion of Egypt is thwarted by sudden divine intervention, either in the form of literal mice or in the form of pestilence.

Both of which then send the Assyrians home, but there is this sense of sudden divine intervention when the military was not going to be able to win the fight.

That's the Egyptian account.

It's fascinating both in the obvious diversions of the thing; it's clear to see where they've stolen the story, but also how much it resembles the biblical account in other regards.

Okay, the fourth and final one I want to look at is the Babylonian account.

Here again, we've lost the original sources.

The original source is an early 3rd century BC Babylonian historian by the name of Berossus.

We don't have his writings; we have little fragments of his writing and other people.

In this case, we have his account of Sennacherib's invasion from the 1st century AD Jewish historian Josephus.

Here's how Berossus kind of presents it from a Babylonian point of view.

They were no friends of the Assyrians, by the way.

He said, Now when Sennacherib was returning from his Egyptian war to Jerusalem.

Now, that's an interesting kind of detail because it reminds us, right?

The Jewish version, or the Judean version, is that Egypt has gotten crushed and then Judea is looking like they're going to be next.

That matches up with Berossus' version that he's coming back from Egypt.

This is why relying on the Egyptians was such a foolhardy move, as the Assyrian delegation points out.

But it also would explain why Egypt might be hungry to say they were the ones who were going to get this victory that was about to happen because they seemingly just suffered a pretty major defeat, and this happens right kind of outside their borders in Jerusalem.

Now, when Sennacherib was returning from his Egyptian war to Jerusalem, he found his army under Rabshakeh—this is again the high-ranking leader, his general—in danger, and then seemingly by a plague, for God had sent a pestilential distemper upon his army.

So, the Babylonian account is that there was some kind of pestilence, a pestilential distemper that God had sent upon his army.

On the very first night of the siege, 104 score and 5,000—so 185,000—with their captains and generals were destroyed.

You'll notice the numbers here match up; you have a sudden death of 185,000. He's pretty explicit that this is disease.

So, the king was in great dread and in terrible agony over this calamity, and being in great fear for his whole army, he fled with the rest of his forces to his own kingdom, into his city, Nineveh.

So, the Babylonian account doesn't take any real effort to harmonize; it fits very nicely with the biblical account.

Returning home from his war with Egypt, Sennacherib lays siege to Jerusalem.

The Assyrian siege is thwarted by sudden divine intervention—plague killing 185,000—sending the remaining Assyrians home.

Okay, so you've now heard the same event described from four very different perspectives, and everybody's got their own motives for telling the story, in many cases to kind of present their nation's greatness or the greatness of their god or gods.

How do we harmonize these accounts?

Well, certainly as Christians, we would say we trust the biblical account because it's divinely inspired.

But I think we can also say, just from a neutral, if you will, historical perspective, there are a few things to note.

Number one, three of the four accounts agree that the Assyrians were suddenly and seemingly miraculously defeated.

Number two, three of the four sources agree that it's at Jerusalem that this happens; Jerusalem is spared in a seemingly miraculous way.

So, the outliers—the Assyrians—don't talk about being defeated; that's not surprising.

And the Egyptians try to make it about them; also not surprising.

So, we have pretty good reasons to just trust the outliers in both those cases and say, Okay, so the clear story is Hezekiah rebels at first, the Assyrians are crushing him, which is totally expected because they're much bigger and stronger.

Then something happens overnight that sends them home immediately; they lift the siege, Judea is freed, and that's the last time that Sennacherib even tries.

He never comes back.

In art depicting this, you often have the heavens open and angels visibly battling the Assyrians.

But it seems to me that that's not really what the accounts, including the biblical accounts, are pointing to.

Because if you notice, the biblical accounts say that when they arose in the morning, 185,000 lay dead.

So, even though it's kind of fun in art to depict the angels just pulling out their swords and fighting, I think it is fair to say that the reading of a sudden pestilence actually makes sense biblically.

For instance, when King David is being punished, the punishment laid upon David and his people, as described in 1 Chronicles 21, is three days of the sword of the Lord—pestilence upon the land—and the angel of the Lord destroying throughout all the territory of Israel.

So, the angel of the Lord is both the image of the movement of pestilence in the land and also the theological understanding of what's going on.

This is not just a random outbreak of disease; this is not just, you know, germs.

Rather, this is actual divine intervention.

Now, to be clear, there are plenty of times where disease is not viewed as the hand of the Lord upon the people.

We totally accept the germ theory of disease.

I'm not saying, Oh, I've got a sore throat; an angel must be hurting my voice.

No, but there are times, just like with the plagues—not every time you see a frog is it a plague from the Lord—but there can be plagues that use natural events or direct them.

For instance, in Revelation chapter 6, you have the...

Now, you can have all those things with or without the angel, but it appears here that the biblical understanding is that messengers of God—which is what the word angel means—broke the Assyrian siege or attempt at siege by unleashing something upon them: mice, pestilence, fill in the blank.

I don't think we have to read—I don't think the biblical account even suggests that angels are engaged in sword-to-sword fighting with the Assyrians.

And so, if that's where our mind goes because of religious art, I would just again point us to the fact that it says when they awoke, something is happening overnight while they're asleep.

A lot of them don't wake up in the morning.

Mice and pestilence—those two things go together very nicely.

So, if they wake up to find that their army supplies are destroyed and a bunch of them are dead from an overnight disease, that explains why they would get out of there.

I mention all this partly because I just find it really fascinating, and I like to do videos on stuff that I'm really interested in.

But also because I think it helps us to understand when we're reading the Bible how to make sense of what's going on here.

This is a real historical event being described, and we have good reason to believe that because the Assyrians, who have no vested interest in talking about this, still find a way to try to draw out the good parts.

It's very obvious that they're omitting something.

Like, Sennacherib talks about having to go back to Nineveh; he doesn't tell us why.

But in the Babylonian account, the Egyptian, and later Greek account, they're all pointing to the fact that something happened here that appears to have been the power of God unleashed upon this powerful enemy.

So, this small army that had no chance of winning doesn't even have to go to war because something happens overnight that sends the Assyrians home, showing that the God of Israel is the true God while all of the pagan idols around him are not.

I think it's a cool story; I think it's really fascinating, and I hope you think the same.

For Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you!