King of Judah
Hezekiah
Active
c. 715 BCE to c. 686 BCE
He faced Sennacherib's campaign in 701 BCE; Jerusalem survived although much of Judah was devastated.
What the sources say
Each block is a sourced statement. Click the number to see the cited page.
4 statements
Assyrian records corroborate the 701 BCE conquest of most Judah described in 2 Kings 18 and 19. Particularly detailed palace reliefs commissioned by Sennacherib portray the siege of the Judahite city Lachish.
A few decades later Sennacherib's Assyria also conquered Judah, an episode in 2 Kings 18 and 19 that external evidence partly corroborates. Verses 18:13 and 14 say Sennacherib captured every fortified Judahite city, while Hezekiah contacted him at Lachish and paid three hundred silver talents and thirty gold talents.
Sennacherib's own annals say, in compatible terms, that Hezekiah did not submit, that he besieged 46 fortified cities and countless villages, deported 200,150 people along with their animals and treated the rest as booty, and that he shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem 'like a bird in a cage'.
Contested interpretation
Sennacherib did not destroy Jerusalem, as the Assyrians had done with Samaria, perhaps because Hezekiah agreed to pay a fine, as 2 Kings 18:14 says. But the Bible says what saved the city was divine intervention: an angel struck down 185,000 Assyrian soldiers, and Sennacherib went home. None of this is in the Assyrian version, which describes a typical victory. Each author had reasons to give his own account: the biblical one stresses God's power; the Assyrian one, Sennacherib's.