Destruction of Judean Fortress Portrayed in Dramatic Eighth-Century B.C. Pictures
Stunning new book assembles evidence of the conquest of Lachish

By Hershel Shanks

In the late eighth century B.C., Lachish was the second most important city in the kingdom of Judah. Only Jerusalem surpassed it.

At that time, Assyria had risen to unprecedented power, dominating the known world. On the eve of Sennacherib's accession to the Assyrian throne in 705 B.C., the Assyrian empire extended from Elam and Babylonia on the south, to Anatolia on the north, and to the Mediterranean Sea and the border of Egypt on the west.

Each year the Assyrians expanded their kingdom by a military expedition, often commanded by the king himself. Toward the end of the eighth century, the Assyrians began deporting subjugated peoples in order to blur their national identities. Assyrian domination of the Land of Israel–then composed of the kingdom of Israel in the north and the kingdom of Judah in the south–proceeded step by step. By 732 B.C., Assyria had annexed the northern part of the kingdom of Israel. In 721/720 B.C., Assyria conquered the city of Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom, and annexed the rest of the kingdom of Israel, bringing a permanent end to its existence. The kingdom of Judah in the south would in all probability be the next target.

Soon after Sennacherib ascended the throne in 705 B.C., an anti-Assyrian alliance was formed by Egypt, the Philistine cities of the coastal plain and Judah, hoping to take advantage of the temporary weakness attendant on a change of monarchs. Judah at that time was ruled by one of the most prominent kings of the House of David, King Hezekiah. By the time Sennacherib was ready for his third annual campaign–in 701 B.C.–he was able to direct his attention to the defiance of these three powers.

Many details of Sennacherib's third campaign remain unclear, but two things are certain: although he laid siege to Jerusalem, for some reason or other, he was unable to conquer it; as a result, Judah remained a nation-state for more than a century afterward–until the Babylonians, who had destroyed the Assyrian empire, conquered Jerusalem in 587 B.C. Second, in his third campaign of 701 B.C., Sennacherib devastated much of Judah and utterly destroyed its second most important city, Lachish. As a result, King Hezekiah paid enormous tribute to Sennacherib, and Judah became to a large extent an Assyrian vassal state

The destruction of Lachish is important not only historically, but also because it is uniquely documented. For no other ancient event of comparable significance is so much, and so many different kinds of, source material available. The events surrounding the conquest of Lachish, the destruction of the city and the deportation of its inhabitants are documented (or evidenced) in at least four independent contemporary sources: (1) in the Bible; (2) in Assyrian cuneiform accounts of the same events; (3) in archaeological excavations at the site of Lachish; and (4) remarkably, in monumental pictorial reliefs uncovered at Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh.

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