2 Chronicles 32

Sennacherib ruled the Assyrian Empire from the time his father, King Sargon II, died in 705 BC until two of his sons murdered him in 681 BC. He kept records of his campaigns against Judah and Israel, in 702 BC, and some of them survive, confirming key elements of history in the Old Testament report. He confirms, for example, that he didn’t manage to get inside Jerusalem this time.

“Hezekiah was almost 40 years old and into his 14th year as king of Judah when Assyrians invaded” (2 Kings 18:13).

What “Millo” means is a mystery. One theory is that it refers to a terraced part of the ridge with a stairstep citadel. Archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon found in the oldest part of Jerusalem a Stepped Stone Structure, as it’s called. It’s dated to the time of David and his son Solomon, about 1000-900 BC. Some say the structure was the foundation for a royal palace that endured for six centuries—until Babylonian invaders from what is now Iraq— leveled Jerusalem and the Temple in 586 BC.

Lachish was about 30 miles (48 km) southwest of Jerusalem, a walk of about a day and a half. Assyrian chiseled pictures of their attack on Lachish and their impaling of the people there. It has been on display in the British Museum.

Sennacherib’s own records confirm that he didn’t get inside Jerusalem this time. He reports, instead, that he trapped King Hezekiah behind Jerusalem’s walls “like a bird in a cage.” A Greek writer 250 years later, Herodotus, wrote that the army got stopped by a rat infestation that killed some of the soldiers. Some scholars speculate that the rats carried diseases—plagues such as bubonic, septicemic, pneumonic. Those three diseases—all from the same bacterium (yersinia pestis)—affect the immune system, blood, and lungs.

Assyrian documents describe in detail the assassination of Sennacherib in about 681 BC. He died in a coup led by several of his sons. Sennacherib decided to skip past his older sons and declare his youngest son as heir to the throne, Esarhaddon. It was Esarhaddon’s older sons, many scholars agree, who started the coup. They captured the support of Assyria’s elite chariot corps and many senior officials in the Assyrian capital city of Nineveh. Esarhaddon, probably off fighting battles, returned and ran his brothers and their supporters out of the region. He arrived in Nineveh as undisputed king several months after his father’s assassination. A parallel Bible story says this about Sennacherib’s death: “While he was worshiping at the shrine of his god Nisroch, two of his sons killed him with their swords: Adrammelech and Sharezer. Then they escaped to the land of Ararat” (Isaiah 37:38).

The sign may have been the miracle reported in 2 Kings 20:8-11. God promises Hezekiah that he will recover from his illness. And to prove it, God makes the shadow on the Ahaz Staircase Sundial go backwards. The Ahaz staircase was apparently just a stairway that caught the changing shadows of the day in a way that allowed people to measure time. The builder may have designed the stairway as a sundial or not. But it seems people used it that way. As the sun moved from east to west, the shadow moved from west to east. But for Hezekiah that day, the shadow took a different route. How? Would a passing cloud mimic a shadow? The writer doesn’t say how God did it. And there’s no indication Hezekiah asked.

Some scholars guess that it was the sign from God that gave him an exaggerated sense of pride. He felt more important because Almighty God answered his prayer with what sounds like a miracle.

If Hezekiah got sick before Sennacherib’s invasion, as some scholars suggest, the invasion may have been the punishment that the Chronicles writer reports here.

Perhaps the writer is talking about the fact that Sennacherib never made it into Jerusalem. Or the writer might be pointing forward to the coming defeat and decimation of Jerusalem in 586 BC, followed by the massive exile and captivity of many Jerusalem survivors.

Gihon Spring was Jerusalem’s source of water. Before Hezekiah came along, the spring was cut off from the city—outside the city walls. It was hidden in a small cave at the base of the ridge on which Jerusalem was built. Jerusalem couldn’t survive a long siege without water. And the Assyrians in what is now northern Iraq weren’t looking especially friendly. So, Hezekiah ordered a tunnel chiseled through solid rock, connecting the spring to the pool inside the city. Miners worked on it in two teams at opposite ends and met in the middle. The tunnel stretched 583 yards (530 meters). In time, the tunnel got lost in history, hidden in the cave. It was rediscovered in 1880. Inside was an ancient stone plaque about the quarrymen cutting through the stone with axes.

Hezekiah didn’t handle it well. He bragged about his wealth so much that Babylonian messengers took the news back to their king. Babylonians later invaded Judah several times, starting in 597 BC. In 586 BC, Babylonians leveled Jerusalem, deported the survivors from throughout Judah, and erased the Jewish nation from the world map.

Hezekiah’s story here in 2 Chronicles 29-32 and in Isaiah 37-38 seems to grow out of 2 Kings 19-20. Some scholars say it’s the other way around: Isaiah wrote it, and the writer or editors of 2 Kings copied it and added it to the historical record. Some who said Isaiah borrowed it explain that he probably did it with the idea that the Jews would listen to this retold story sometime after their exile abroad—perhaps in Babylon or maybe back in their homeland. There, they would listen to a tale about how great things used to be when King Hezekiah started disobeying God before the hammer came down in the form of an Assyrian invasion force.