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2 Kings 19; 2 Chronicles 32
The rumor had already reached him by the time Rabshakeh joined him at Libnah. It was that Tirhakah, the great king of Ethiopia, whose warlike exploits remain to this day recorded on the walls of a Theban temple, had undertaken the task to which the king then reigning in Lower Egypt was unequal; and in the determination not to allow the Assyrians a footing in that country, was moving down in great force against them. This made Sennacherib anxious to proceed to Egypt at once, without any longer delay in Judah; and he was therefore highly exasperated at the ill success of Rabshakeh’s threatening mission to Hezekiah—and not the less so as he had no leisure to punish his obduracy, and saw reason to conclude that the reduction of the strong fortresses would be a less easy matter than he had reckoned. He, however, sent a terrible letter to Hezekiah, threatening what he would do on his return, and full of even more awful blasphemies than those of his foul-mouthed commissioners against the God in whom Hezekiah trusted, and deriding his power to save.
The king took the letter, and having read it, went at once to the house of the Lord, spread out the letter as it were before him, and poured out his soul in earnest prayer. The answer was a strong denunciation of the pride and blasphemy of Sennacherib; and the Lord’s determination to bring him low, is expressed in most strong and decided language, concluding with the remarkable words—“I know thy abode, and thy going in, and thy coming out, and thy rage against me. Because thy rage against me, and thy tumult is come into mine ears, therefore will I put my hook in thy nose, and my bridle in thy lips, and I will turn thee back by the way that thou camest.” The mode of punishment thus indicated, is curiously illustrated by a bas-relief from Khorsabad, where captives are led before the king by a rope passed through the mouth and nose.
What followed between this and the great judgment upon the Assyrian host, is not recorded in Scripture; and we are left to collect it from other sources—as Herodotus, Josephus, and, as cited by him, the Chaldean historian Berosus. By all these accounts Sennacherib did go to Egypt; and the Egyptian account, as preserved by Herodotus, is, that the king Sethos, having prayed to his god, and being encouraged by a dream, resolved to march against the invaders with a body of artisans and shopkeepers, seeing the soldiery would not follow him. The night before the expected action, an army of mice invaded the Assyrian quarters, and gnawed asunder their bow-strings and the thongs of their shields, whereby, being for the time disarmed, and thunder-struck by the prodigy, they retreated in confusion “by the way that they came,”—intimidated, perhaps, also by the rumor of Tirhakah’s near approach, and by the dread of meeting him in this condition. The historian adds, that this current tradition was in his days attested by a statue of the king in the temple of Vulcan, bearing in his hand a mouse, with the inscription, “Whoever looks at me, let him be pious.”
One does not know what to make of this story. The omission of Tirhakah’s name in it is suspicious; and it may be conjectured, that the Assyrians were actually driven back by him; and that the rest is an appropriation to Egypt of a disjointed version of the judgment that afterwards actually befell the Egyptian host. But that the resemblance suggests such imitation, the story fits in well enough to the sequel, as it supplies or strengthens the motive for an abandonment of the design upon Egypt; whence, it would seem, the army returned through Judah, perhaps with the intention of resuming operations against Hezekiah. Accordingly, it is stated by Berosus, that it was on the return from the Egyptian war to Jerusalem, and in the first night of the siege, that the calamity befell the Assyrian which broke his strength. And this we take to be an important testimony, from an indifferent authority, to settle the question where and when the doom that befell him took place. The prediction, also, in Isa_37:33, that the king should not come into the city, nor exhibit any of the usual operations of siege before its walls, seems to become more emphatic when understood to imply that he should come to the city, but should not be allowed time to commence the usual proceedings.
The sequel is thus told: “Then the angel of the Lord went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians one hundred and fourscore and five thousand; and when they rose early in the morning, behold they were all dead corpses.” How is this to be understood? Not, surely, as Dr. Johnson remarked, “that an angel went about with a sword in his hand, stabbing them one by one.” Either some terrible known agency, such as that of the pestilence, or the hot poisonous wind, was employed, or some extraordinary and unknown operation took place. In either case, the Divine power is equally manifested; and assuredly nothing could he easier than for that power to extinguish so frail a thing as the life of man at a stroke. The tens of thousands were but an aggregate of individuals, whose breath was in their nostrils. Berosus says it was a pestilence. It has been objected that no pestilence is so suddenly destructive. Yet we do read of instantaneously destructive pestilences in Scripture, as in the wilderness and at Bethshemesh; and it may be remarked of even the natural pestilence, that in the same variety of the disease death supervenes at a certain number of days (not more in any case than seven) from the commencement; and if, therefore, any number of men were smitten with this disease at one time, they would all die at the same time, or within a very few hours of each other. If this were the case here, the Assyrians who died before Jerusalem may have been smitten with the pestilence before they left Egypt. But we do not think that it was the plague. The almost immediately mortal pestilence so often mentioned in Scripture, and known from other ancient authorities, was clearly not the plague: none of the symptoms described agree, and it is probably an extinct disease. It is not now known, even in the East, though there is abundant evidence in history, tale, and song of its former existence. Of the glandular plague, the present prevailing epidemic of the East, there is no certain trace in history anterior to the third century, even in Egypt.
Some have thought the powerful natural agent employed was the hot pestilential wind, or simoom, which is often represented as suddenly destroying travellers, and indeed whole caravans. The effects of this wind are felt most strongly in the heart of the great deserts, and with mitigated effects the further one recedes from them. It has become the fashion lately to deny those effects, or to set down the accounts we have received as gross exaggerations. But these denials are founded with too little discrimination on the accounts of travellers who did not traverse the regions where this visitation is most severe, nor do they often occur in the most fatal form even in those regions, or else they would be quite impassable. The counter-evidence is wholly negative, and is not adequate to countervail the evidence of history, and of those who know those regions well. The testimony of five persons who tell us what they did see, is of more importance than that of fifty who tell us what they did not see. In this case, however, the fifty, traversing countries on the distant borders of the desert, did experience some slight inconvenience from a hot wind; and fancied this was the fell simoom of which they had heard, and that, after all, it was not so calamitous as had been reported. But experiences brought from the heart of the desert would be far more conclusive. Dr. Russell, in his Natural History of Aleppo, rightly distinguishes between the weak and strong simoom, calling the latter the “true simoom.” This never reaches so far north as Aleppo, nor is it common in the desert between that city and Basrah on the Euphrates. It is in the great Arabian and African deserts of sand that the effects of the wind are strongest and most disastrous. Dr. Russell was careful to collect and compare the accounts given by the Arabs, and thus states the result—“They assert that its progression is in separate and distinct currents, so that the caravan, which in its march sometimes spreads to a great breadth, suffers only partially in certain places of the line, while the intermediate parts remain untouched. That sometimes those only that are mounted on camels are affected, though most commonly such as are on foot, but that both never suffer alike. That lying flat on the ground till the blast passes over, is the best method of avoiding the danger; but that the attack is sometimes so sudden as to leave no time for precaution. Its effects sometimes prove instantly fatal, the corpse being livid, or black, like that of a person blasted by lightning; at other times it produces putrid fevers, which become mortal in a few hours; and that very few of those who have been struck recover.”
It is willingly granted, that in this strong manifestation the simoom does not naturally reach Palestine. But if this were the agency employed in the destruction of Sennacherib’s host, it had been a small matter for the Lord to cause it to blow beyond its usual range, upon that special mission of doom. It might be an objection to this agency, that such a wind would be destructive to others than the Assyrians. The power of God to prevent it from hurting any but the destined victims, is a sufficient answer to us. But to many it may not be so, and therefore we willingly point to the defined currents in which the wind moves, at a greater or lesser elevation from the ground, as containing an agency—a wheel within a wheel—which, under the Divine guidance, might be made effectual for sparing whom He pleased, and for smiting whom He saw fit. Upon the whole, therefore, it seems probable, that the simoom was indeed the agency by which this great judgment was brought to pass. It also appears that not all the Assyrians were slain. The king himself (reserved for future judgments, and many others, escaped; and these were doubtless such as lay beyond the borders of the current of pestilential air.