Transcription
You're telling me the Assyrian Empire was destroyed by an angel of the Lord in the middle of the night, and they broke camp, and then the Assyrian king withdrew, and he was killed by his own sons. How likely is that to have really happened? This is one of those Bible stories, right? Well, here's what we know archaeologically.
[Music]
Okay, I'm going to shift gears a little bit today. Today I'm going to start with a story. This is not—well, I won't say it has nothing to do with intelligent design, but it's a bit of a departure. How many of you have been to the science and faith conference before and heard Titus Kennedy speak? Okay. So you know we have a, we have a, a budding project at Discovery on ancient and Near Eastern archaeology. We're particularly interested in the Bible at Discovery Institute. Not because we're a sectarian institute, but because the Bible has been so formative in, in, in shaping Western civilization, and part of our mission is to, to affirm and to defend the principles and ideas that made Western civilization exceptional, and the Bible is part of that.
So we have this budding program on archaeology, in particular on the historical witness of the Bible as it's revealed by recent archaeological discoveries. And so last year, two years ago, Titus talked about the evidence for the biblical Exodus. Last year, he talked about the evidence for the trial of Jesus. Um, and he can't be here this year. And so I offered to step into the gap and give one of my favorite lectures. I had to nudge Titus out of the way. I used to teach a course that had an extensive unit on, on biblical archaeology. And then when Titus came along with actual expertise, I had to kind of yield the floor. But he's not here this year. So I'm going to get to do one of my favorite, favorite talks.
This is also a talk that was part of a unit we did last summer at Cambridge in our cosmos and creator seminar. We were not only looking at the question of whether or not there's evidence for the existence of God, but also whether there is evidence for the historical reliability of the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and the New Testament, looking at both of those things.
So, um, and you may well, how did you get into that? Well, the story is, uh, 1989, I'm in the third year of my, uh, graduate work at Cambridge, deep into the PhD. It's not going terribly fast. And, um, I needed a break from staring into a computer screen. So, Lane and I decided that we'd go and take a tour of the Holy Land, to take a tour of Israel. And we got there, and there were all kinds of crazy things going on because there's always crazy things going on there. But we kept, we, we took some walking tours of Jerusalem, and there was a guide that had these tours. His name was David, and his tours were called David's, uh, City of David's walking tours. And he took us to this place which I'll show you. It was, it's called the Ohel. It's a, it's a large 10th century Iron Age structure. It's a kind of stepping stone structure. And in 1989, they didn't know exactly what it was. They thought it was somehow connected to a, a 10th century palace, possibly the palace of King David, but it seemed to be some kind of a buttressing of a, of a larger structure.
And then in these little rooms on the side of, in, on this Ohel structure, there were little rooms, and in the rooms there were clay vases. And inside the vases, the, the vases, uh, they discovered all of these, uh, bullae or singular bulla. Now, what eventually was discovered was that these, the, the bullae had been preserved because there had been a big fire. And the fire, they ended up realizing, was correlated with a Babylonian conquest of Judah in 587, 586 BC, something that's described extensively in the Bible, and also they have, there's extensive historical record of this. So there's a massive convergence of testimony with this, this destruction of Jerusalem and then the subsequent exile of the Jews from Judah to, uh, off to Babylon.
Now, it turns out that this was the second great exile and the second great invasion of what was originally the, the kingdom of King David. So David was a king in 10th century BC, and then he's followed by Solomon. Eventually, that kingdom of Israel splits. There's a northern kingdom, 10 tribes, southern kingdom with two tribes. In 722 BC, the Assyrians came, conquered the northern tribes, the northern 10 tribes, took them into captivity, and that's a very well-attested event. And then in 701, they came to try to conquer the remaining two tribes of Judah under an Assyrian king named, anyone, Sennacherib. Okay. Arville just told me that he named his dog Asher Banipal. So you know we have some Assyrian afficionados here in the audience today, which is very cool. All right. So that's very interesting.
So anyway, I'm at this, I know nothing about this really. I'm, um, know a lot about intelligent design. I'm working on my PhD thesis on this. But I was just fascinated with this history. And when we got to the, we're taking these walking tours, and the, the our guide, who had an accent, I won't try to mimic it, but it was a heavy New York accent, and I kind of associated it with academic atheism. And he says, he says, "So get out your Bibles, you know, and he wants us to read our Bibles." And he starts to read the 36th chapter of the book of Jeremiah. And he starts listing all these figures. And my main man in this, the first one, the first person I heard about, uh, whose existence was corroborated by one of these archaeological finds, was an obscure scribe in the court of King Jehoiakim, one of the kings before the, ba, before the Jews were taken into captivity to Babylon. And his name, the, the obscure little, uh, official was named, uh, Gemariah ben Shaphan. If you read that fairly obscure chapter in the Bible, you may remember that he's the guy that fished the scroll of Jeremiah out of the fire pot after the king who read Jeremiah's message and warning threw it into the fire pot because he didn't like it. And, and, and Ben Shaphan said, "No, no, no, no. You can't. That's the word of God." And he fishes it out.
Well, lo and behold, where we, he, the guide reads this whole section of the text, and then he shows us, well, the bullae had, or the bullae had already been now taken from these vases where they were discovered and taken to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. But he showed us the pictures of the bullae of these different figures. There have been five different figures whose existence have been attested by these personal seals. That's what a bulla is. Um, five pe, five figures from that one chapter in the Bible attested by these, these bullae and bulla. And so there, and this is what basically what they did is if you worked for the king, you'd get a, you'd get a signet ring with a, with a, you know, your name and your title, and then if you were to seal a document, you'd stick it into clay, and the clay would harden, and then they'd put it over a papyrus or a document, and then it would be official. Okay? Be like a stamp or a notary, a notary public today.
Well, I don't know why, but this just, uh, really lit my fire. Just the thought, 2600 years ago, we've got the record of this in the Bible. And then we've got artifacts that are connecting us directly to those events. And the context of the 36th chapter of Jeremiah is we're about to have the, the, the third wave of the Babylonian invasion. And, and sure enough, sure enough, we, where do we find these things? Under the rubble that was created by the fire that destroyed Jerusalem in 586. Why were they preserved? 'Cause they were in a vase. It got really hot. The bullae got really, they were, they got really, the clay was fired, and they were preserved.
Now, as of now, my, my son and I collect these books. Now, there's books that are produced by these archaeologists that compile all this stuff. There's over a hundred, both high-ranking and obscure biblical figures that have been attested by inscriptional evidences, many of them these, these bullae. Okay? And I'll show you one later. So that's how I got into it. And I, I just found it fascinating. You know, I, I remember our guide saying with his heavy New York accent, he said, "Now, I don't know what you want to make of this from a, from a religious point of view," he said, but he said, "From a strictly scientific point of view, I infer the following." And then he just listed all of the facts that have been discovered by the archaeologists that corroborated different facets of the biblical, biblical testimony. So that was that was a new and exciting thing for me. And so that's what I'm going to share today.
But I'm not going to talk about the, the Babylonian conquest of Judah. I'm going to talk about the previous attempt to conquer Judah by a different Mesopotamian Empire. That being the empire of the Assyrians. Okay. So when I give the full lecture, I did this summer in Cambridge, I, I call it a tale of two conquests. But in interest of time, we're only going to do the first of the two conquests of the 10 tribes. They were taken up by the Assyrians. Then they came to get Judah, and what you'll see is they, they, they didn't succeed. And then the Babylonians came later and they did succeed. So there were two conquests, but one failed conquest. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Okay.
So this is the, the, the old structure. By the way, just, uh, if you know anything about what's going on in Israel, uh, with archaeology, they have now discovered the palace. It was discovered by the Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar in, in, uh, 2005. One of the ways they know it was the palace of David was all these bullae through different generations. You see that this was an administrative center where they were, you had official documents that were being sealed by people who were working for various Judahite kings. So pretty cool. Okay. So we're going to fast forward. Oh, yeah. Here's, here's my guy Gemariah ben Shaphan. This is his, his seal. You can, do you notice anything too about the Hebrew writing? If you know anything about Hebrew, what's the shape of a Hebrew letter today? Okay, they're squared off. And when, when the, when the Jews came back from Babylon, the way they did their alphabet changed. So this is evidence that this was pre-Babylonian conquest. It's the, the, really thin, uh, Hebrew script. And, uh, and so this is what we got. Oh, all these guys. I could go on and on, so I won't. All right.
So, here's our, here's our context. Uh, we've got the, the, the Davidic kingdom and, and then Solomon's kingdom expands the Davidic kingdom. Eventually, though, the Judahite kingdom and the Israelite kingdom are contracted. They're divided. And in 722, the northern kingdom of Israel, the people there are taken into captivity. And then a very powerful king comes back. His name is Sennacherib. And Assyria at this time is the greatest empire in the ancient world. It's, and, and it was an empire known for its abject cruelty. Uh, we see some of the murals depicting the way they treated the conquered, uh, including a practice called impalement, which is just horrific. Okay. So when they come back in 701 to this surround, this little kingdom, it's serious business. And you can see the size of the Assyrian Empire by this time. It was huge.
And according to the book of, uh, 2 Kings, when they come in first in approximately 732 BC, the Assyrian Empire invades the northern kingdom of Israel. Then in 722 BC, Israel is defeated, and the last king of Israel, King Hoshea, uh, is taken captive, and a great number of these, uh, Israelites are taken into captivity. Now, I've got a little picture here of the seal, another one of these seals of King Hoshea, or actually not of Hoshea. He's mentioned on the seal of one of his attendants or administrators, a guy named Abdi. Can you, do you notice anything about the seal, the, the, the depiction, the dress, the style? What's it look like? Egyptian. Okay. Do you remember that the prophets in the Old Testament were upgrading? They were confronting the, the kings of Israel and later the Judahite kings for putting their trust in the Egyptians to save them from these, the northern superpowers, first Assyria and then Babylon, who are coming. And they, so the, the prophets speaking in the name of God saying, "Don't put your trust in the Egyptians, put your trust in me." Notice the dress. Interesting corroboration of the context text that we, we read about in the, in the, in the Old Testament.
Okay. So, moving forward now, we get to 701 BC, and the Assyrian Empire returns now under a different king, under Sennacherib. And the Bible's very specific. It gives very specific historical information and evidence. And it says here in the 14th year of King King Hezekiah, or Hezekiah, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, came up against the fortified cities of Judah and seized them. So the first, the first bit of historical testimony we get about this is that the Assyrians are conquering all the smaller cities around Jerusalem. And in the Assyrian records, we actually have very specific details about this. It tells us that, um, and this is the, you can see this cuneiform prism. It's called, sometimes it's called the Sennacherib prism, sometimes called the Taylor prism, named for the British archaeologists who discovered it. And this prism records that in 701 BC, there were 46 Judean cities that were conquered by, uh, by Sennacherib. So the Bible tells us that the Judean cities were conquered. The Assyrian records affirm that and tell us exactly how many, and they even tell us how many people were taken into captivity, 201,100 or 200,150. And there are other Assyrian documents that also record other campaigns of Sennacherib during this time.
Now, if you're interested in this, and this was really fun this summer, we had 48 students from, I think Ella said 11 countries, uh, in our summer course, and we did a whole week on the archaeology of the Near East and of the Bible. And we took them, after I gave this lecture on a Friday, on the Saturday, we went to the British Museum to see a lot of this evidence, including the Taylor Prism. And this is the Assyrian room. So, if you have ever a chance, you're in London, this is well worth doing.
So here's, here's what we know. This is on this Taylor Prism. This is a direct quote from King Sennacherib. He says, "As for Hezekiah the Judean, who did not submit to my yoke, I surrounded and conquered 46 of his strong-walled towns by leveling with battering rams and by bringing up siege engines. 200,150 people I brought away from them and counted as spoils." And keep your eye on that idea of a siege because this is part of, this is part of what was very grim in the ancient world. If a city was conquered, the walls of the protective walls of a city were typically battered down by battering rams, and then these things called siege engines, which created a ramp up to the top of the walls where the well-armed troops could then come, come over the walls and conquer the city. And often times cities were put under siege for extended periods of time. And so this was about the worst thing that could happen to you because pe, cities would be deprived of food and water, and, um, very, you know, people would be, would, would resort to drinking their own urine. It was, it was just awful. Okay. Nobody wanted to be in a city that was under siege, still less by one that was being put under siege by the greatest military power on the planet at that time, which was the Assyrian Empire.
So as this, as, as Hezekiah, the king of this small little kingdom of Judah, sees this, he takes precautionary measures. Now, in the Bible, we learn that Hezekiah was one of those few reforming kings in the line of King David. Another one that comes later is Josiah. Hezekiah is his great-great-grandfather, I think, either great or great-great-grandfather. All right? And he, and, and in the book of 2 Kings, there's an extensive accounting of all the things he did to rid the land of idolatry, to restore the Mosaic approach, the mosaic commands about worship. So he's a, he's very devoted to his God, and, um, and, and he's commended, the way the, the book of Second Kings writes, he's, his actions are written in the light, in, he, he's commended by the text for the way he approaches this. But nevertheless, he comes under, there's an invasion, and, and there's a siege. And so as he sees the other cities of Jerusalem falling, the text tells us that he does two things, very smart things.
First, he secures a water supply by redirecting a spring that was outside the city walls of Jerusalem at that time, the Gihon spring, and he redirects the water and creates a tunnel that brings the water into the city underground. Anyone ever been to Jerusalem? Anyone walked in the Hezekiah's water tunnel? Okay. I'm going to show a picture of it in a minute. So, this is something that's attested in, in the, in the Bible. And in the 19th century, the British archaeologists discovered this. And so you can go there today and walk through the tunnel. Now, I have to confess that I have a problem. And that is that I am claustrophobic. I am intentionally interested in archaeology, but this was the one artifact I did not go and see because I thought I'd get halfway in there and go, "I'm stuck." So, I didn't do it, to my shame. But anyway, there it is. And you can see it. So, um, here's a picture someone else got for me. Um, and, uh, we're told in 2 Kings chapter 20 very explicitly, "Hezekiah made the pool and the tunnel by which he brought water into the city." The tunnel was constructed to bring fresh water into, secure a water supply so that the people under siege would not have to resort to drinking their own, you know. So, it, it's this very important military preparation he makes.
Then the, the text also tells us that he built a defensive wall. Now, when we were there in, in Jerusalem in '89, the same David walking tours of the City of David took us to a place where they had verified that this was actually, the archaeologists had verified that this was actually part of the defensive wall that, that, that Hezekiah built. There's a passage in Isaiah chapter 22 where it talks about how you cut down the houses in a rush to build the wall. And you see this place where the wall has been erected in haste, and it's filled in with rubble, and it's cut across existing remains of, of previously existing houses. And so we went right to that spot. The guide read the passage from, from the book of Isaiah describing this, because Isaiah was the contemporary prophet who was alive during the time of, of Hezekiah. So these two things we read in the Bible, there, one of them fairly, with the wall fairly obscure, and we've actually found archaeological evidence that Hezekiah did, in fact, do those exact things. We also have found evidence that he enacted various religious reforms having to do with the way altars were constructed. Those have been discovered at a place called Arad. So lots of points of agreement already. You can kind of see where I'm going with this. It's a kind of lecture on convergence. It's a convergence of testimony between the biblical record making certain factual claims and what we have discovered either archaeologically or through the documentary history recorded by, in this case, the Assyrians. And what we're going to see as the lecture concludes is there are multiple points of agreement. We're already seeing some.
Now the story gets even more, well, back to the water, the water, the water, uh, tunnel. It's really a fascinating feat of engineering. And I know we have a lot of engineers here because for the longest time, the archaeologists couldn't figure out how they had done this because there's a record of an inscription explaining how pick meant pick and axe meant a, meant axe, that there were two groups apparently building the tunnel from two different directions, and they were, uh, and they were able to find each subterranean underground. And the best theory that the archaeologists have now is that they were following a kind of maybe a common mineral seam that, that suggests that, that they trusted would eventually meet up. However, they did it, they didn't have GPS, it met up, and then when they did, it records that the water flows. And here's what the inscription says. It's, it's lovely. Says, "The stone cutters struck each man towards his fellow, axe against axe, and the water flowed from the source of the pool. For 1,200 cubits and 100 cubits was the height of the rock above the head of the stone cutters." So they're way underground. A cubit was 18, roughly 18 inches. So they're, you know, this is 150 feet above ground. So, or below ground. So this is really a feat of, an, a great ancient feat of engineering, and we have the evidence that this took place just as the Bible described it.
Now the story gets a bit more poignant and intense. There are two cities that you have to go through to get through the mountain passes to get to Jerusalem. One is Azekah, and one is Lachish. And in the Assyrian records, we learn that after, uh, Sennacherib conquered the first batch of these strong walled cities, he then goes to Azekah and he, he conquers that. We don't read about that conquest specifically in the bi, in the biblical text. But then, then we read a lot about the next place, which is Lachish. And there was a, a pitched battle there. And we have Assyrian murals commemorating their conquest of this city. And they're in the British Museum, and you can, you can see them. And they're, they depict the siege ramps. They depict, uh, alas, the impalement of the conquered. And we read about this battle in 2 Chronicles and in 2 Kings. Uh, here's the 2 Chronicles passage: "King of Assyria sent his servants to Jerusalem while he was besieging Lachish." Okay. So basically, they conquer Lachish, and then it gets, then he's got his eye, Sennacherib's got his eye on the big apple. He wants to go to Jerusalem and conquer the, the, the, the capital city. He's got the 46 strong-walled cities. He's got the mountain pass cities conquered. Now nothing remains but for him to go and conquer the remaining city.
Now, this is the again, the most dominant empire on earth at the time. Jerusalem is a town of several thousand people at most. And what are the odds? What are the odds that Jerusalem could withstand such a siege? The Bible interestingly says that Jerusalem was delivered, that Sennacherib failed, that there was a supernatural intervention, and the city was not conquered. From a secular archaeological point of view, just reading that text, that's kind of hard to believe, except that the secular archaeological data tells the same story in slightly different terms, but in ways that are extremely, that render the biblical text extremely credible as well. So let me tell you the story. What happens is after Lachish falls, then we have here, Lachish guards the mountain pass and canyons that lead up to Jerusalem. In order to lay siege on Jerusalem, an invading army would first have to take Lachish. So, oh, here's depicted. You can see the siege ramps. The Assyrian soldiers. When you're in the British Museum, you can look right up close. You can see their style of dress, their style of beard. It's all very realistic. I mean, this was the Assyrian artists and sculptors were incredible. So they, they, they commemorate this. There were hundreds of arrowheads found at Lachish. We happened to go there on a Discovery tour in '99, and Titus took us to this site and gave us some really amazing lectures about what was found. 1500 skulls were also discovered in one of the caves near the site from that period. You can see these guys look really fierce, these Assyrian archers and slingers. Okay.
So we know so far: Hezekiah secures a water supply. He builds a defensive wall. Oh, yeah. Okay. Then the next thing he does, he's scared. So he sends a messenger, and he, he pays tribute. He says, "Look, I, I did wrong to resist you. Let us offer you some money to just leave Jerusalem alone." And so in 2 Kings, it says that "the king of Assyria required of Hezekiah the king 300 talents of silver and 30 talents of gold. And Hezekiah gave him all the silver which was found in the house of the Lord and in the treasuries of the king's house." And so he attempted to buy him off in a way, or what was called at the time, submitting to the status of a vassal. He became, he was willing to become a vassal king under Sennacherib's rule. So he paid him for the privilege of not being conquered. But it turns out, first of all, we know a bit about this from the s, from Sennacherib's records. He also records this. "Hezekiah there felt the fear of the power of my arms, and he sent out to me the chiefs and the elders of Jerusalem with 30 talents of gold and 800 talents of silver." So he, it's a slightly exaggerated perhaps rendering, or there's a slight, slight difference in the account, but silver and gold were paid in tribute, and other, he says, "and diverse treasures."
So now we've got a, a nice list of convergent testimony. Strong walled cities of Judah fall. Hezekiah builds a defensive wall. He builds a, secures a water supply. Azekah falls. Lachish falls. And then Hezekiah pays a tribute. And then we read that Sennacherib sends his officials to taunt Hezekiah. He's paid him off, but it did him no good. And he sends his officials. And here's the account. I'm just going to read from the text itself. It's, it's, I think, extremely poignant. "After all that Hezekiah had so faithfully done, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, came and invaded Judah. He laid siege to the fortified cities, thinking to conquer them for himself. He consulted with his officials and military staff about blocking off the water from the spring outside the city, and they helped him. A large force of men assembled, and they blocked all the springs and the stream that flowed through the land. 'Why should the kings of Assyria come and find plenty of water?' they said. And then they worked hard repairing all the broken sections of the wall and building towers on it. And he built another wall outside the one, uh, that one, and reinforced that the supporting terraces. That's now called the Broad Wall of the City of David. And he also made a large number of weapons and shields. Later, when Sennacherib, king of Assyria, and all his forces were laying siege to Lachish, officers to Jerusalem with this message for Hezekiah, king of Judah, and for the people of Judah who were there: 'This is what Sennacherib, king of Assyria, says: On what are you basing your confidence that you remain in Jerusalem under siege? When Hezekiah says, "The Lord our God will save us from the land of the king of Assyria," he is misleading you to let you die of hunger and thirst. Did not Hezekiah himself remove this God's high places and altars, saying to Judah and Jerusalem, "You must worship before one altar and burn sacrifices to it?"'"
So, what he's doing is he's saying, "Look, Hezekiah did all the things that your God said to do, but it hasn't done you a bit of good. I've surrounded your city." And then he goes on to say, "'d Do you not know what I and my fathers have done to all the people of the other lands? Were the gods of their, of those nations ever able to deliver their land from my hands? Who of all the gods of these nations that my fathers destroyed has been able to save his people from me? How then can you say that your God can deliver you from my hand? And now do not let Hezekiah deceive you and mislead you like this. Do not believe him. For no god of any nation or any kingdom has been able to deliver his people from my hand or the hand of my fathers, and so how much less will your God deliver you?'" So he makes it, in a sense, a direct religious challenge. It's a challenge to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Israel, on behalf of the God of the Assyrians. He's speaking for him.
So this taunting goes on, and then it's interesting when, when Se, when Sennacherib's guys get to Jerusalem, they go to the, underneath the city wall, and they begin to speak to the people in Hebrew. And the officials of, of Hezekiah say, "No, no, no, don't talk in Hebrew. They mean you're going to scare the people." But that was just the point. So here's, here's this passage. Um, and then, um, then Sennacherib's officers spoke further against the Lord God and against his servant Hezekiah. And the king also wrote letters insulting the Lord, the God of Israel, saying this against him: 'Just as the gods of the people of the other lands did not rescue their people from my hand, so the God of Hezekiah will not rescue his people from my hand.' And then they called out in Hebrew to the people of Jerusalem who were on the wall to terrify them and to make them afraid in order to capture the city. And they spoke about the God of Jerusalem as they did about the gods of other peoples of the world, the work of men's hands. And Hezekiah and the prophet Isaiah, son of Amos, cried out in prayer to heaven about this.
And so this is the next thing that we learn that Hezekiah does. He's done everything humanly possible. He's fortified the city. He's secured a water supply. He's paid tribute. And now he seeks the Lord his God. And he goes to the, he goes to the temple, and he calls on the prophet Isaiah. And there's this extraordinary passage where Hezekiah receives the letter from the messengers, and he reads it. And then he went up to the temple of the Lord and spread it out on the, on the floor of the temple before the Lord. And Hezekiah prayed to the Lord, "O Lord, God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim. You alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. Give ear, O Lord, and hear. Open your eyes, O Lord, and see. Listen to the words Sennacherib has sent to insult the living God. It is true, O Lord, that the Assyrian kings have laid waste these nations, to these nations and their lands. They have thrown their gods into the fire and destroyed them, for they were not gods at all, but only wood and stone fashioned by men's hands. Now, O Lord our God, deliver us from his hand, so that all kingdoms on earth may know that you alone, O Lord, are God."
And then Isaiah, son of Amos, sent a message to Hezekiah. "This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: 'I have heard your prayer concerning Sennacherib, king of Assyria. This is the word that the Lord has spoken against him.' And then he gives this word. He says, he says, "He will not enter the city," meaning Sennacherib, "or shoot an arrow there. He will not come before it with shield or build a siege ramp against it. By the way, by the way he came, he will return. He will not enter this city, declares the Lord. I will defend this city and save it for my sake and for the sake of David my servant." "That night the angel of the Lord went out and put to death 185,000 men in the Assyrian camp. And when the people got up the next morning, there were dead bodies everywhere. And so Sennacherib, king of Assyria, broke camp and withdrew. And he returned to Nineveh and stayed there. And one day while he was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisroch, his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer cut him down with the sword and they escaped to the land of Ararat. And Esarhaddon, his other son, succeeded him as king."
Now, if I had just read this text without knowing anything about ancient history, this would be one of those head-scratching passages where you'd think, "Yeah, but did that really happen?" You're telling me the Assyrian Empire was destroyed by an angel of the Lord in the middle of the night, and they broke camp, and then the Assyrian king withdrew, and he was killed by his own sons. How likely is that to have really happened? This is one of those Bible stories, right? Well, here's what we know archaeologically. All these things that I've already mentioned, convergence of testimony, we've read that Hezekiah consults with the prophet Isaiah, and then we learn of this supernatural deliverance. What do the Assyrian records say? Well, it's very interesting. On the Taylor Prism, Sennacherib says of Jerusalem and of Hezekiah, "He himself, Hezekiah, I shut up. The antecedent to this is his discussion of Hezekiah. He says, 'He himself I shut up in Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage. Fear of my lordly splendor overwhelmed that Hezekiah. The warriors and select troops he had brought in to strengthen his royal city, they did not fight. They did not even fight.'"
Dot, dot, dot. There's a conspicuous silence here. What does the text on the Taylor Prism not say? It never mentions that the city was conquered. Guess what we know? The city was not conquered until the Babylonians came 120 years later. The archaeology is really clear. The burn layers are Babylonian. And we also know, when you go to, to, to Nineveh, where all these Assyrian things were discovered, 2 Chronicles records the same thing that, that when, uh, Sennacherib withdrew, that he was killed by his own sons. There's actually a record of that in the Assyrian records that Sennacherib, king of Assyria, departed and returned home and lived at Nineveh. It came about as he was worshiping. Oh, this is Isaiah. Sorry. He's saying the same thing. But on the Taylor Prism and on the Chronicle of Nabonassar, line 34, Sennacherib's assassination by his own sons is recorded in, in an Assyrian stele. So, we have a convergence of testimony. Both the Assyrians and the biblical record that he, he was killed by his own sons.
This is something we noticed when we were in the British Museum with Titus. When you see the mural, this is, um, you notice there's a guy in a chair. This is depicting Sennacherib sitting, commanding his troops at Nineveh. You see some of his, his attendants, his, his officers coming to him. What do, what do you notice about Sennacherib's face? This was discovered in Nineveh by British archaeologists in the 19th century. Gone. It's been defaced. Now, I never, in any of the reading I've done on this, I'd never, no archaeologist has ever pointed this out, but when we were there, we noticed this. Could this be the result of the Assyrians themselves being embarrassed by his defeat? This was often, you, you found this with Egyptian records, too. If Egyptian kings were, were defeated, then their, their memory was erased. Very common in the ancient world. Don't know that that's what's going on here, but it's certainly consistent with what we know.
So, just, just in, in conclusion, then, if we look at this biblical story, let's now call it an historical account. We have all this convergent testimony. Hezekiah fortified his, his city walls. He secured a water supply. He paid tribute to King Sennacherib. He also, we have evidence of the religious reforms that he enacted. Sennacherib conquered the walled cities of Judah. He did not conquer Jerusalem, and he was killed by his two rebellious sons. And on top of all of that, if we can come back to the issue of the bullae or the bullae plural, there have been three, three bullae of Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, discovered in Jerusalem. Two of them are unproven. They turned up on the antiquities market. The script matches the time. They give every evidence of being authentic, but we can't verify that in the same way as if the archaeologist had discovered the artifact in a dig. But a third bulla, bulla of Hezekiah has turned up not in the antiquities market, but it's been discovered in situ, as the archaeologists say, and it's so, it's been attested. It is a well-attested and, and, uh, here's a picture of it. Is provenanced, meaning found in situ, and we can verify the layer where it is found, therefore we can date it. Uh, a provenanced Hezekiah found recently in a layer of the 8th to 7th century BC at the Ohel area in Jerusalem, where those other things were found that I told you about, near a city gate and administrative building. So we actually absolutely know this guy was a real figure of history from multiple sources, Assyrian, biblical, and now even his personal effects have turned up in the historical record. So to me, this is just a fascinating story of, of archaeological discoveries corroborating the historical reliability of the Bible. And we've, we've had one lecture on this in the last few years because it seems appropriate for a conference on science and faith. So I'll stop there.