I

E
J
Israel
Exploration
Journal

59 VOLUME 59 • NUMBER 2
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL • 2009
ISRAEL EXPLORATION JOURNAL

Published twice yearly by the Israel Exploration Society

and the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University,
with the assistance of the Nathan Davidson Publication
Fund in Archaeology, Samis Foundation, Seattle, WA,
Dorot Foundation, Providence, RI, and P.E.F. Israel
Endowment Funds Inc., New York

FOUNDED BY A. REIFENBERG
EDITED BY M. AVI-YONAH FROM 1950 TO 1973

Shmuel A¢ituv and Miriam Tadmor, Editors

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Joseph Aviram, Administrative Editor
Tsipi Kuper-Blau, Production Editor

Editorial Advisory Board: D. Barag, O. Bar-Yosef, I. Ephªal,

B.A. Levine, A. Malamat, A. Mazar, J. Naveh, M. Rosen-Ayalon

Israel Exploration Society website: www.hum.huji.ac.il/ies

All correspondence, papers for publication and books for review should be addressed to:
The Editor, Israel Exploration Journal, P.O.B. 7041, Jerusalem 91070, Israel.

Copyright © 2009 Israel Exploration Society

ISSN 0021-2059

The Editors are not responsible for opinions expressed by the contributors.
VOLUME 59 • NUMBER 2 • 2009

CONTENTS

137 DAVID USSISHKIN: On the So-called Aramaean ‘Siege Trench’ in Tell e§-¥afi,
Ancient Gath

158 DAVID GAL: A Stamp Seal from Tel ªAzeka, Judaean Shephelah
E
164 MORDECHAI COGAN: Sennacherib and the Angry Gods of Babylon and Israel

175 RONNY REICH: The Distribution of Stone Scale Weights from the Early
Roman Period and Its Possible Meaning

185 ITAMAR TAXEL: Late Byzantine/Early Islamic Stamped Jar Handles from
Jerusalem and Tell Qatra

194 ZECHARIA KALLAI: The Beginnings of Israel: A Methodological Working

Hypothesis

204 NOTES AND NEWS

234 REVIEWS

253 HEBREW BOOKS AND PAPERS

Page layout by Avraham Pladot

Typesetting by Marzel A.S. — Jerusalem 59
Printed by Old City Press, Jerusalem
 ABBREVIATIONS
AASOR Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research
ADAJ Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan
AJA American Journal of Archaeology
AfO Archiv für Orientforschung
ANET Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament3, ed. J.B. Pritchard,
Princeton, 1969
BA The Biblical Archaeologist
BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
BT Babylonian Talmud
CAD Chicago Assyrian Dictionary
CIS Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum
DJD Discoveries in the Judaean Desert
DSD Dead Sea Discoveries
EI Eretz-Israel: Archaeological, Historical and Geographical Studies
ESI Excavations and Surveys in Israel
IAA Reports Israel Antiquities Authority Reports
IEJ Israel Exploration Journal
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies
JEA Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
KAI W. Donner and W. Röllig: Kanaanäische und aramäische Inschriften 1–3,
Wiesbaden, 1962–1964; 15, 2002
NEAEHL The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (English
Edition), Jerusalem, 1993
PEQ Palestine Exploration Quarterly
PT Palestinian Talmud
QDAP Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine
RA Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archéologie Orientale
RB Revue Biblique
RE Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft
RQ Revue de Qumran
VT Vetus Testamentum
ZA Zeitschrift für Assyriologie
ZDPV Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins

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 Sennacherib and the Angry Gods
of Babylon and Israel
MORDECHAI COGAN
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

THE case of the murder of Sennacherib was wrapped up about 25 years ago when
the identity of the murderer was finally settled by the deft detective work of Simo
Parpola (1980), who attributed the deed to Arda-Mullissi, the oldest living son of
the king. The bare facts of the assassination, according to the Babylonian Chroni-
cle, are these: ‘On the twentieth of the month of Tebeth (winter 681/80 BCE),
Sennacherib, king of Assyria, his son killed him in a rebellion’ (Grayson 1975: 81,
ll. 34–35). The motive, if we credit Esarhaddon’s testimony, seems rather straight-
forward: Sennacherib’s designation of Esarhaddon as crown prince1 met with the
opposition of Esarhaddon’s older brothers, and he was forced into hiding because
of their slanderous machinations against him.2 The brothers eventually staged a
coup d’état, during which they murdered their father, but Esarhaddon’s swift mili-
tary action saved the day, and although the ringleaders of the revolt escaped,3 the
throne became his.4
In view of these facts, the modern ‘inquest’ into the murder ended.5 In the
seventh century BCE, however, when the particulars of the case were certainly no

1 The suggestions that Sennacherib’s selection of Esarhaddon had been influenced by

his wife Naqiºa-Zakutu, Esarhaddon’s mother, or that it was tied to a plan for the future
rapprochement with Babylon have no basis in the sources; see Brinkman 1984: 71.
2 The location of Esarhaddon’s ‘exile’ from the centre of power is unknown. Leichty
(2007) now suggests that he found a safe haven with family in Harran; see, earlier,
Parpola 1980: 178–179, nn. 39–41; Porter 1993: 22–23.
3 Assyrian sources do not indicate their place of refuge, but 2 Kings 19:37 tells of their
flight to ‘the land of Ararat’. Leichty (1991) has speculated that the brothers moved on
to Shubria from Ararat (Urartu) and that Esarhaddon’s campaign of 673 BCE to
Shubria was instigated by the refusal of its king to extradite Arda-Mullissi and
company.
4 Esarhaddon was, by his own admission, ‘younger than his older brothers’. See
Esarhaddon’s apologia in Borger 1956: 40–45, Nin A, episode 2; translated in ANET,
289–290. The historical circumstances prompting the composition of the apologia
were discussed by Tadmor 1983.
5 Grayson continues to view the ‘circumstances… and the causes leading up to’ the
assassination as ‘unsolved puzzles’ (1991: 121), a position that seems a bit excessive.
The old view that implicated Esarhaddon in the murder was recently resurrected by
Dalley (2007: 37–41), whose case rests on the assertion that he was ‘the one who
benefits most from the crime’.

IEJ 59 (2009): 164–174 164

 SENNACHERIB AND THE ANGRY GODS OF BABYLON AND ISRAEL 165

less known than they are to us, and probably more so, the murder was not simply
registered in a list of royal patricides and shelved. Indeed, it continued to reverber-
ate for over a century in sundry historiographical writings produced in two distant
corners of the ancient Near East — Babylon and Judah. An investigation of their
views on the events and the possible relation between them sheds light upon the
murder’s afterlife.

I
In Babylon, the demise of Sennacherib could only have been seen as an encourag-
ing turn of events. After all, he was the savage foreign king who had destroyed the
city of Babylon and spread havoc throughout the land eight years earlier (Brink-
man 1973; Frame 1992: 52–63), and now he was gone. Yet if one expects to find
an expression of Schadenfreude in contemporary Babylonian writing, one will
discover nothing but the formal note on the assassination in the Babylonian
Chronicle cited above.6 In contemporary Babylonian writing, there seems to have
been no place for Sennacherib in the native understanding of the country’s misfor-
tune, which maintained that the destruction it had suffered was due to divine
disfavour, i.e., it had been ordered by Marduk, Babylon’s chief god. This view
finds expression in a number of inscriptions from the reign of Esarhaddon, e.g.,
the recently discovered text marking the restoration of the temple of Nabu in
Babylon (al-Mutawalli 1999):
ullânua bçlu rabû Marduk itti Esagil u Babili eziz libbašu zenûtu irši
nišišu anna ulla a¤âmeš etappalâ idabbubâ lâ šalimtu ana makkur
bçli rabi Marduk qâssunu ubilûma ana mât Elamti iddinû ©aºtu
epšçtišina eli Marduk Zarbanitu imra§amma iqbû sapa¤šin eli âli mê
ušbiºma ušeme kišubbêš ilânišu ištarâtišu ipridûma çlû šamâmeš
šubat âli innasi¤ma ul inna©al temmçnšu
Before my time, the great lord Marduk was enraged with (the temple)
Esagil and Babylon, and he became angry. His people were answering
each other ‘Yes’ (for) ‘No’. They were speaking untruths. They laid
their hands on property of the great lord Marduk and gave it to Elam as
a bribe. Their deeds were offensive to Marduk and Zarpanitu, so they
ordered their dispersal. They caused water to flow over the city and
turned it into a wasteland. The gods and goddesses were terrified and
went up to heaven. The site of the city was eradicated and its founda-
tion could not be seen.

6 Assyrian texts too are silent on this matter, perhaps wishing to avoid discussion of the
disgrace of the assassination.
166 MORDECHAI COGAN

The theodicy expressed here is in keeping with the tenet found in most ancient
Near Eastern historiography: The anger of the gods at the behaviour of their devo-
tees leads to their abandonment (Albrektson 1967: 98–114). Thus, because of
double-dealing and the misappropriation of temple funds, the Babylonians
suffered at the hands of their gods. The Nabu Temple text presents the concise
version of this tale, while other texts exhibit versions that expound, with more
literary flourish, on the sins of Babylon and the 70-year abandonment decreed on
the city by the gods.7 For sure, these texts were circulated by the Assyrian king,
but Esarhaddon’s adoption of the Babylonian viewpoint was meant to rationalise
the troubled past between Assyria and Babylonia and to advance his new policy of
reconciliation with Assyria’s southern neighbour (Cogan 1974: 9–21).8 Of partic-
ular note is the absence of the key player in the events surveyed: Sennacherib is
nowhere referred to. The Assyrian scribes understandably would have ignored all
reference to the king’s father in Babylon’s tragedy. The Babylonians, on their part,
would have been pleased to have Sennacherib’s memory erased from their
history.9
This same historiographical tenet had been invoked a generation earlier by the
Chaldean Merodach-baladan II in explaining his throwing off the Assyrian yoke:
In the past, Marduk, in his anger, had abandoned his people, but now he was
reconciled with them (Gadd 1953: 123–124, ll. 8–15).10
[i]nûšu bçlu rabû Marduk itti mât Akkadi kimiltuš išbusma [x]ma
nakri limnu Subaru ina mât Akkaddi çpuš bçlûtu [ad]i ûmç imlû
ikšuda adanna bçlu rabû Marduk ana mât Akkadi ša ikmilu iršu
salîma [ip]palisma Marduk-apla-iddinna šar Babili rubû pâli¤šu…
iqbi ina §ît pîšu annûmma lû rçºû mupa¤¤ir sap¤ûti
At that time, the great lord Marduk became exceedingly angry with
the land of Akkad (i.e., Babylon) and for [7(?) year]s, the evil enemy,
the Subarian (i.e., the Assyrians), ruled over the land of Akkad, until

7 Brinkman (1983) set out the differences between the various ‘Babylon’ texts of
Esarhaddon and these were later discussed in detail by Porter 1993: 95–105.
8 Brinkman (1983: 41, n. 36) takes exception to my view that this explanation was the
product of the Babylonian priesthood and/or party; he holds that it could also have
arisen in Assyria ‘to satisfy the predilections of an elite group of literates’ who sought
to ‘remove the onus from Esarhaddon in so quickly reversing his father’s work’.
9 For the author of Babylonian Chronicle no. 1 (Grayson 1975: 81, l. 28), this is
expressed by counting the period from the destruction of Babylon (689) until
Sennacherib’s assassination (681) as ‘eight year(s in which) there was no king in
Babylon’.
10 The reference is to the two years of Tiglath-pileser III and five years of Shalmaneser
V, until the ascent of Sargon; see the Babylonian Chronicle (Grayson 1975: 72–73,
ll. 24–32).
 SENNACHERIB AND THE ANGRY GODS OF BABYLON AND ISRAEL 167

the days were fulfilled and the time had arrived. The great lord
Marduk was appeased with the land of Akkad with which he had been
angry. He looked favorably upon Merodach-baladan, king of Baby-
lon, the prince who revered him… he spoke, by his very mouth: This
is indeed the shepherd to gather the scattered (flock).11
Returning to Sennacherib, the Babylonian Chronicle (Grayson 1975: no. 1) did
not refer to the Assyrian king’s destruction of Babylon, although the resulting
cessation of the Akitu festival during ‘the eight years of Sennacherib and twelve
years of Esarhaddon’ was noted in other chronicle texts (Grayson 1975: 127, ll.
31–33; 131, ll. 1–4). It was not until the end of the seventh century that
Sennacherib is referred to in a text attributable to Nabopolassar, who justifies
Babylon’s war against Assyria as retaliation ‘for the crimes committed against
Akkad’ by ‘the plunderer of Akkad’ (Gerardi 1986: 36, l. 10; al-Rawi 1985: 3: col.
i, l. 28–col. ii, l. 5).12 Half a century later, on a stele from the first years of the reign
of Nabonidus (556–539 BCE), a review of Babylon’s past is presented, beginning
with Sennacherib’s desecration of the city (Langdon 1912: 271–273, col. 1, ll.
1–41; cf. Schaudig 2001: 515–516; ANET 309; TUAT 1/4, 407).
[A few lines at the beginning are missing] iktapud lemuttim [§i]ri mâti
libbašu îtama ¤i©îti [ana?] niše mâ[t Akkad]i tayâru ul [irši] lim[ni]š
ana Babili [isni]q unammi ešrçtiš usa¤¤i u§urâti pilludê ušalpit qâti
rubû Marduk i§batma ušçrib qereb Baltil kîma uzzi ilima îtepuš mâti
ul ipšur [k]imiltašu rubû Marduk 21 šanâti qereb Baltil irtame
šubassu [i]mlû ûmç ikšuda adannu inu¤ma uzzašu ša šar ilâni bçl
bçlç Esagila u Babili i¤sus šubat bçlûtišu šar Subartu ša ina uzza
Marduk šalputtim mâti iškunu mâru §ît libbišu ina kakki urassibšu
He (Sennacherib) planned evil;13 he thought out crimes [agai]nst
the country; he had no mercy for the people [of Babylon]. With evil

11 Tadmor discussed the propaganda war that was waged between Merodach-baladan
and Sargon, with the latter plagiarising the Babylonian text in an effort to win the
hearts of the Babylonians; see Tadmor 1997: 333–334.
12 Gerardi’s genre analysis suggests that the text is a unique example of a ‘declaration of
war’, ‘a propaganda device to secure the support of allies and other Babylonian cities
in Babylon’s struggle with Assyria’ (1986: 34). This seems more apt than the sugges-
tion of Beaulieu (1989: 115), adopted by Albertz (2003: 51), to take the theme of
retaliation upon Assyria for its destruction of Babylon as the ‘foundation myth’ of the
Neo-Babylonian empire. The recital of historical grievances before setting out to
battle is a well-documented procedure in many places and periods. Nabonidus’s ‘just’
war against the Medes had its precedent in Nabopolassar’s actions against Assyria.
13 This phrase redirects the evil intentions ascribed to the god Marduk in the Esarhaddon
inscription concerning the destruction of Babylon (Borger 1956: 13, Ep. 5a, l. 37) to
Sennacherib.
168 MORDECHAI COGAN

intentions he advanced on Babylon, he turned its sanctuaries to waste;

he made the ground plan unrecognisable; he desecrated the cultic
rites. He led the lord Marduk away14 and brought him to the city
Ashur. In accord with the anger of the god, he acted (thus) against the
country. The anger of lord Marduk was not eased. For 21 years, he
established his residence in the city Ashur. (When) the days were
fulfilled (and) the time arrived, the anger of the king of the gods, the
lord of lords, calmed and he remembered Esagil and Babylon, his
lordly residence. The king of Subartu (Sennacherib), who in accord
with Marduk’s anger, had laid waste to the country, his very own son
struck him down.
In this rendition of Babylonian history, the traditional view concerning the
connection between Marduk’s anger and Babylon’s devastation is endorsed, but
with significant modifications. Unlike the Esarhaddon texts, here attention is
focused upon the evil intentions of the Assyrian king, glossing over the sinful
behaviour of the Babylonians and Marduk’s self-imposed departure from his
abode. Moreover, the interruption of the cult of Marduk is highlighted, brought
about by Sennacherib’s destruction of the god’s temple and the exile of Marduk’s
cult image to Ashur. Such desecrations could not go unrequited, and conse-
quently, Sennacherib was cut down by his son.
In this new recitation of Babylonian history, tension is detectable between two
ideas: Marduk’s wish to punish Babylon through the agency of Sennacherib, and
the revenge he took on the Assyrian king for his depredations. One wonders what
it was that moved Marduk to strike out at Sennacherib. Was the destruction that he
wrought on Marduk’s city excessive? Had he somehow misread his mandate to
punish Babylon? The text does not relate to these issues, though the author’s
viewpoint may be inferred from the continuation of the text in the next column, in
which the historical survey reviews the war conducted by the Babylonian-Median
coalition against Assyria in the late seventh century. Though for Babylonia this
was a war of revenge, they did not participate in the destruction of Assyrian
temples; this was perpetrated by the Medes, who are dubbed ‘irreverent barbari-
ans’ (Umman-manda), whose ‘sacrilegious’ (sillatu) behaviour was ‘abhorrent’
(ikkibsu) to Marduk (Langdon 1912: 272–275, col. ii). The devastation of sanc-
tums, even those of Assyria, was a taboo not to be broken under any
circumstances.15 By the same token, Sennacherib had broken a taboo by destroy-
ing Babylon’s temples.

14 The writer puns on the expression qâtam §abâtu, ‘to take the hand, to lead’, which is
the technical term for the king’s conducting the image of the god in cultic procession
(cf. CAD ¥: 30).
15 In another Nabonidus text, the destruction of the temple Eulmash in Sippar-Anunnitu
by Sennacherib is similarly ordered by the angry god Sin (Langdon 1912: no. 4,
 SENNACHERIB AND THE ANGRY GODS OF BABYLON AND ISRAEL 169

II
In Judah, like in Babylon, the murder of Sennacherib gladdened the hearts of
many, for they too had suffered greatly at the hands of the Assyrian conqueror. A
report on his demise found its way into the biblical account of Sennacherib’s
campaign to Judah in 701 BCE. The multi-layered narrative in 2 Kings
18:13–19:37 includes a number of prophecies attributed to Isaiah.16 In the first
one, embedded in the Rabshakeh narrative (2 Kings 18:17–19:9a), Isaiah sought
to calm the fears of Hezekiah and proclaimed on behalf of YHWH, Israel’s God:
Because ‘the attendants of the king of Assyria reviled me, behold, I will put a
spirit in him (Sennacherib), so that he will hear a report and return to his own
country and I will strike him down by the sword in his own country’ (2 Kings
19:7). Isaiah’s words were most assuredly fulfilled: ‘Sennacherib, king of
Assyria, broke camp and left. He returned to Nineveh, where he resided. Now as
he was worshipping in the House of Nisroch, his god, Adrammelech and Sharezer,
his sons, struck him down with the sword, and then fled to the land of Ararat.
Esarhaddon, his son, became king’ (2 Kings 19:36–37). Though 20 years had
elapsed between the end of the Assyrian military campaign to Judah and the
murder of Sennacherib, the juxtaposition of the two events creates the impression
of immediacy and prompts the reader to understand that the blasphemy uttered
against the God of Israel did not go unpunished.17
This action was not the only intervention of YHWH in the narrative. The
divinely marshalled assassination of Sennacherib was the finale of the drama that
had begun with the negotiations before the walls of Jerusalem between the Assyr-
ian Rabshakeh and Hezekiah’s deputies. Rabshakeh tried to convince the
Judaeans of the futility of continued resistance to the overwhelming power of
Assyria. Why, he intoned, even your own god has turned against you because of
Hezekiah’s cultic reform of removing the high places (2 Kings 18:22).18 ‘Now
was it without YHWH that I marched against this place to destroy it? YHWH said
to me, “Attack this country and destroy it!”’ (v. 25). Rabshakeh is depicted as
employing the theme of divine abandonment — YHWH’s handing over of Israel

restored by CT 35, nos. 26–27; see Langdon 1915: col. ii, ll. 26–29), but in this
instance, the Assyrian king goes unpunished.
16 Concerning the suggestion for a three-fold division of the text, a chronistic record and
two prophetic narratives, see Cogan and Tadmor 1988: 240–241.
17 Joseph Blenkinsopp (2000: 478) suggestively points to the inclusion of the detail that
Sennacherib was attacked ‘while at his devotions before his god Nisroch… (who was)
helpless to intervene’ when YHWH sought revenge.
18 From Rabshakeh’s vantage point, closing down YHWH’s high places was a sacrile-
gious act, but it could also be the view of those Judaeans who opposed Hezekiah’s
interference with time-honoured cultic practice, thus making Rabshakeh’s comment a
clever rhetorical artifice.
170 MORDECHAI COGAN

to the enemy — which looks like a clever rhetorical ploy, and as we saw with
reference to Esarhaddon’s inscriptions, was a theme that Assyrian propagandists
frequently used.
Whatever position one takes on the composition of the Rabshakeh narrative —
its being a prophetic tale that evolved among Isaiah’s disciples, its stemming from
Deuteronomistic circles, or perhaps containing elements of both (Ben Zvi 1990)
— Sennacherib is depicted as playing two roles in the drama: he was sent by
YHWH against Judah, whose king had perpetrated a cultic wrong, and at the same
time, the Assyrian king cast aspersions on YHWH’s ability to save Jerusalem (cf.
2 Kings 18:33–35). These seemingly contradictory depictions echo Isaiah’s view
of Assyria: On the one hand, Assyria is the rod of YHWH’s anger, ‘sent against an
ungodly nation… to take spoil and seize booty’. On the other hand, the rod rebels
against he who wields it. Therefore, Assyria, the ultimate boastful nation, will be
punished because it does not recognise the divine plan, which allowed it to
conquer the world (Isa. 10:5–11, 12–15). In this manner, Rabshakeh’s master,
Sennacherib, may be said to have been sent by YHWH, but because he uttered
blasphemies, he was punished by the murderous hand of his own son.19

III
Is it possible that the portrayals of Sennacherib as both executor of divine punish-
ment and object of divine judgment, in the text of Nabonidus and the Rabshakeh
narrative, are related? Can it be claimed that a biblical writer adopted these themes
from a foreign source during the Babylonian exile? Or might they have developed
independently in Judah during the seventh century?
The author of the Rabshakeh narrative unquestionably harnessed
Sennacherib’s murder to his historiographical purposes, yet one cannot but be
impressed by the accuracy of the information he presented in 2 Kings 19:37:
‘Once, as he was worshipping in the House of Nisroch, his god, Adrammelech and
Sharezer, his sons, struck him down with the sword and then fled to the land of
Ararat. Esarhaddon, his son, became king.’ As we have seen, the murderer was
Arda-Mullissi and his name is preserved in the biblical Adrammelech. 20
Esarhaddon, the heir apparent, did assume the throne after routing the opposition,
whose ringleaders escaped to Urartu. As for the name of Sennacherib’s god,
the form Nisroch is surely garbled, as no deity by that name is known in the

19 Evans (2009) has now presented a suggestive dialogic reading of 2 Kings 18–19, in
which the Deuteronomist is seen an ‘unconscious polyphonic author’ who juxtaposed
disparate sources without necessarily seeking coherence.
20 As Parpola suggested, the name Adrammelech preserves the Assyrian name, though it
has suffered in transmission: the miscopying of the graphically similar r and d, and the
exchange of mlk for the inexplicable mls (1980: 174).
 SENNACHERIB AND THE ANGRY GODS OF BABYLON AND ISRAEL 171

Mesopotamian pantheon,21 though the scene of the murder near an Assyrian

shrine looks accurate. This emerges from the notice in the annals of Ashurbanipal,
which reports the punishment meted out to the remnant of the Babylonian army
that had revolted against Assyria with Shamash-shum-ukin. The Ashurbanipal
text relates that on the day of the ancestral funerary offerings (kispu): ‘I cut down
those people near the images of the protective deities where Sennacherib, my
grandfather, had been cut down.’22 Another text, a letter from the god Ashur to
Ashurbanipal, affirms that the slaughter of the Babylonians took place in Nineveh
(Livingstone 1989: 111, ll. 24–25),23 but nowhere in cuneiform sources is the
specific location within the city or the particular shrine, at whose entrance stood a
pair of colossal figures, specified. In sum, as far as the items that can be cross-
checked are concerned, 2 Kings 19:37 proves to be well founded. This suggests
that the information on Sennacherib’s murder reached Judah at a date close to the
event, at a time when the basic facts were still known,24 and was preserved intact
until incorporated into the Rabshakeh narrative. When one adds to this the identi-
fiable Isaianic teachings in the account, the biblical tradition appears to be firmly
anchored in seventh-century Judah and points to its priority and independence of
Babylonian considerations.
As for the reworked Babylonian view of Sennacherib expounded in the text of
Nabonidus, its source and impetus remain unclear. Would it be too rash to suggest
that given the chronological priority of the Rabshakeh narrative, the author of the
Babylonian text learned how Israel’s angry God had dispatched Sennacherib from
a Judaean exiled in Babylon and adapted this judgement to his needs? This may
not be as far-fetched an idea as it first seems, if we consider that the speeches of
the anonymous exilic prophet (‘Second Isaiah’) show evidence of familiarity with

21 A panoply of suggested emendations can be found in the literature. For a recent

review, see Uehlinger 1999, in which he favours the identification with the god
Ninurta (> Nimrud > Nisroch through textual corruption).
22 See Borger 1996: 45, A iv 70–73. By this grizzly act, Ashurbanipal seems to have
recalled the memory of his grandfather, who had been the first to destroy Babylon.
From the evidence at hand, it is impossible to say that this was an act of revenge
against Babylonians who were somehow implicated in the murder.
23 The text providing this information is the divine response to Ashurbanipal’s report on
his war with Babylon, in which it is stated that the slaughter of the Babylonian prison-
ers took place ‘in Nineveh, city of your lordship’. This obviates the suggestion of von
Soden (1990), for whom the identification of Nisroch with Ninurta was decisive; he
proposed that Sennacherib was struck down in the Ninurta temple at Calah inasmuch
as there was no temple to Ninurta in Babylon or Nineveh. For other suggested sites,
see Frahm 1997: 19.
24 Elnathan Weissert (oral communication) proposes that the source of the information
could have been the Assyrian Eponym Chronicle, which he would reconstruct to
include all the facts related in v. 37. See the earlier suggestion by Cogan and Tadmor
1988: 244.
172 MORDECHAI COGAN

current Babylonian affairs and thought (Machinist 2003: 254–256), which the
prophet likely acquired through contact with native savants. In like manner, his
Babylonian interlocutors might have been influenced by Israelite ideas that the
Judaean prophet shared with them.25 Or perhaps it would be more prudent to
consider the similarity between the Israelite and Babylonian points of view
concerning Sennacherib’s punishment by angry gods as an example of the ‘com-
mon theology of the ancient Near East’. On this question, the jury is still out.

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