Sennacheribs Boastful Catalog of Conquered Nations

When Sennacherib of Assyria marched against Judah in 701 BCE, he sent a second wave of intimidation aimed directly at King Hezekiah's faith. In 2 Kings 19:8-13 (paralleled in Isaiah 37:8-13), Assyrian messengers deliver a letter that catalogs the cities Sennacherib's royal predecessors had already destroyed: 'Have the gods of the nations delivered them which my fathers have destroyed; as Gozan, and Haran, and Rezeph, and the children of Eden which were in Telassar?' Rezeph is named alongside the great Aramean centers of upper Mesopotamia — a town on the caravan road between the Euphrates and Palmyra that the Assyrians had conquered and made the seat of a provincial governor (the eponym Rezeph appears in the Assyrian limmu-lists for 839 BCE). Sennacherib's rhetorical question — if the gods of those famous cities could not save them, how could Hezekiah's God save Jerusalem? — is the boast that drives Hezekiah into the temple to spread the letter before the Lord. The answer comes that night: the angel of the Lord strikes 185,000 in the Assyrian camp, and Sennacherib goes home to be assassinated by his own sons in the temple of his god Nisroch. The catalog of conquered cities thus becomes a permanent biblical record of the Assyrian conquests that swept across upper Mesopotamia in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE.

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