And the Assyrian Will Fall ‘by the Hand of a Woman’
by
Damien F. Mackey
A Consideration
of the Agent of destruction of
King Sennacherib
of Assyria’s army of 185,000.
Introduction
Some
scriptures attribute this great victory for the kingdom of Judah to an angel of the Lord.
2 Kings 19:35: “That very night
the LORD’s messenger went out and killed 185,000 men in the Assyrian camp. When
they got up early the next morning, there were all the corpses”.
2 Chronicles 13:21 gives this slightly different
version: “And the LORD sent an angel, who cut off all the mighty warriors and
commanders and officers in the camp of the king of Assyria”.
Isaiah 37:36: “Then
the angel of the Lord
went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian
camp. When the people got up the next morning—there were all the dead bodies!”
1 Maccabees 7:41 Judas Maccabeus likewise, in a
prayer, attributes it to angelic intervention: “Lord, the
Scriptures tell us that when a king sent messengers to insult you, your angel
went out and killed 185,000 of his soldiers”. (Cf. 2 Maccabees 15:22: “Judas said: Lord, when Hezekiah was king
of Judah, you sent your angel, who killed 185,000 of King Sennacherib's men”).
The prophet
Isaiah, earlier, had been somewhat more cryptic.
Isaiah 31:8: “And the Assyrian shall
fall by the sword, not of man; and the sword, not of men, shall devour him; and
he shall flee from the sword, and his young men shall become subject to
taskwork”.
Whilst Sirach
(Ecclesiasticus) will name Isaiah himself as a ‘rescuer’ of King Hezekiah’s
Judah in the face of the Assyrian threat:
Sirach 48:18-20:
During [Hezekiah’s] rule, Sennacherib moved on
Jerusalem,
commissioned the field commander, and departed.
The field commander attacked Zion,
and made great boasts in his arrogance.
Then the people’s hearts and hands were shaken,
and they were in agony
like a woman who is in labor.
They called upon the Lord who is merciful,
reaching out their hands to him.
The holy one at once heard them from heaven,
and he rescued them through Isaiah.
commissioned the field commander, and departed.
The field commander attacked Zion,
and made great boasts in his arrogance.
Then the people’s hearts and hands were shaken,
and they were in agony
like a woman who is in labor.
They called upon the Lord who is merciful,
reaching out their hands to him.
The holy one at once heard them from heaven,
and he rescued them through Isaiah.
Differently
again, Judith - the Jewish (Simeonite) heroine - will claim, in her victory
song, that she herself had been the Lord’s agent.
Judith 16:5. “But the Lord Almighty has foiled them
by the hand of a woman”.
What are we to
make of all of this?
This famous
incident has provoked a whole lot of interpretations and hopeful explanations,
going right back to antiquity. I wrote briefly on this as follows in my
university thesis:
A Revised
History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its
Background
A Rout Involved
Some think -
based on the Hebrew word רַעַשׁ in
Isaiah 29:6; sometimes translated as “blast” - that 185,000 Assyrian soldiers
must have been destroyed instantly, on the spot. Perhaps by an angel of the
Lord (cf. Isaiah 37:36). Or perhaps, as Velikovsky had argued, by a cosmic
collision … his unique interpretation of רַעַשׁ.
For Herodotus,
the agent of the army’s demise was a plague of mice. [Histories, Book 2, p. 185. Herodotus may in fact have picked up the
idea of mice from the Book of Judith, according to which the Assyrian
soldiers likened the emboldened Israelites to “mice, coming out of their holes”
(14:12, Douay version); a typical Assyrian simile. The Greek version of the Book
of Judith has “slaves” instead of “mice”].
[End of
quote]
Putting it All Together
Despite the
impression given by some of the above accounts of the incident, “killed 185,000
men”, “killed 185,000 of his soldiers”, “killed 185,000
of King Sennacherib's men”, common sense, I think, would tell us
that - even in the greatest of catastrophes - every single person (here the sum
total of Sennacherib’s army) does not die. So I would immediately prefer the
version given in 2
Chronicles 13:21, whereby the angel “cut off all the mighty warriors and
commanders and officers in the camp of the king of Assyria”.
This is
confirmed by Isaiah 31:8, which tells of a rout and later servitude of the
enemy soldiers: “… and he shall flee from the sword, and his young men
shall become subject to taskwork”. And it is confirmed again in the victory
song of Judith herself - a rout involving much slaughter (Judith 16:11-12):
When my lowly ones shouted,
and my weak ones cried out,
The enemy was terrified,
screamed and took to flight.
Sons of maidservants pierced them through;
wounded them like deserters’ children.
They perished before the ranks of my Lord.
The “one
hundred seventy thousand infantry and twelve thousand cavalry, not counting the
baggage and the footsoldiers handling it, a very great multitude” of Assyrians
of Judith 7:2, an overall total of 182,000 plus, equates strikingly to the
185,000 men of Sennacherib’s defeated army. This was the massive army upon
which the people of Bethulia and its environs had gazed down in horror (Judith
7:4): “When the Israelites saw this horde, they
were all appalled and said to each other, 'Now they will lick the whole country
clean. Not even the loftiest peaks, the gorges or the hills will be able to
stand the weight of them'.”
For, as we learn from the Book of Judith,
it was Bethulia opposite Dothan, in northern Israel, and not in Jerusalem, that
the Assyrian army had massed and was routed. Sirach, telling of Isaiah’s rescuing
of Judah, was referring to Sennacherib’s earlier successful invasion, right
against Jerusalem itself.
Isaiah 31:8 uses
the word “Ashur” (אַשּׁוּר),
variously translated as “the Assyrian” or “the Assyrians”, and probably intending
both Sennacherib’s ill-fated commander-in-chief and his massive army.
Judith, on the
other hand, whose primary purpose had been the assassination of the
commander-in-chief of the Assyrian army - which action became the catalyst for
the Judaean victory - will focus part of her victory song on the downfall of “Holofernes”
(16:6-9):
For their hero did not fall at the
young men's hands, it was not the sons of Titans struck him down, no proud
giants made that attack, but Judith, the daughter of Merari, who disarmed him
with the beauty of her face.
She laid aside her widow's dress to
raise up those who were oppressed in Israel; she anointed her face with
perfume,
Her sandal ravished his eye, her
beauty took his soul prisoner and the scimitar cut through his neck!
For more on this
“Holofernes”, see my:
The slaughter in
the Book of Judith had started in the camp of the Assyrians, and this accords
with the information given in 2 Chronicles 13:21 “… angel … cut off all the
mighty warriors and commanders and officers in the camp of the king of Assyria”.
It was
in fact, according to Judith’s careful plan of it, a rout (14:1-4):
Judith said, 'Listen to me, brothers. Take this
head and hang it on your battlements.
When morning comes and the sun is
up, let every man take his arms and every able-bodied man leave the town.
Appoint a leader for them, as if you meant to march down to the plain against
the Assyrian advanced post. But you must not do this.
The Assyrians will gather up their
equipment, make for their camp and wake up their commanders; they in turn will rush
to the tent of Holofernes and not be able to find him. They will then be seized
with panic and flee at your advance.
All you and the others who live in
the territory of Israel will have to do is to give chase and slaughter them as
they retreat’.
Judith had not
only started the ball rolling. She had worked out the battle strategy as well.
But it was all
based upon her total trust in God.
So, before she
acts, she prays and fasts (Judith 9).
The
‘angel’ factor, common to the accounts given in 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles and Isaiah,
and also I and II Maccabees, is suitably accommodated in the Douay version of the
Book of Judith, according to which God’s angel, Judith’s protector, was the agent
of the “victory” and of Israel’s “deliverance”. Thus Judith tells (13:20-21):
‘But as the same Lord liveth, his
angel hath been my keeper both going hence, and abiding there, and returning
from thence hither: and the Lord hath not suffered me his handmaid to be
defiled, but hath brought me back to you without pollution of sin, rejoicing
for his victory, for my escape, and for your deliverance.
Give all of you glory to him, because he is good,
because his mercy endureth for ever’.
Judith
well knew that God alone could bring about such a victory against all odds
(8:17-20):
‘… we should ask
God for his help and wait patiently for him to rescue us. If he wants to, he
will answer our cry for help. We
do not worship gods made with human hands. Not one of our clans, tribes, towns,
or cities has ever done that, even though our ancestors used to do so.
That
is why God let their enemies kill them and take everything they had. It was a
great defeat! But since we
worship no other God but the Lord, we can hope that he will not reject us or
any of our people.’
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