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The narrative of 2 Kings 18:17–19:9a, 36–37 (“Source B1”) recounts pre-exilic religious collective trauma surrounding Sennacherib’s military advance against Judah in 710 BCE and its aftermath. In this narrative, the Rabshakeh uses the keywords “בטח” and “נצל” to assert that Yhwh has turned against Judah. However, his claims were subverted by the withdrawal of the Assyrian army and the later death of Sennacherib, facilitated by the divine intervention of Yhwh following Hezekiah’s supplication. Despite its significance, only a few studies have examined this narrative as that of trauma. Drawing on Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of the social process of cultural or collective trauma, this study argues that the function of this narrative is that of religious trauma narrative. It reconstructs the collective trauma of Sennacherib’s campaign to theologically defend the Davidic kingship and Yhwh and ultimately suggests a revised identity for the Judaean community to foster solidarity, even under the ongoing influence of Assyria following the military campaign.

Forty-three years after the publication of Simo Parpola’s article “The Murderer of Sennacherib,” the events of his assassination in 681 BC and Esarhaddon’s accession to the throne continue to provoke debate. More than a simple act of murder, the assassination of Sennacherib should be understood as an attempted , a strategically planned attempt to use force to bring about a change in political leadership. Combining a new examination of the many sources associated with this event with fresh theoretical perspectives derived from the study of modern , this article refutes recent suggestions that Esarhaddon played a role in the murder of his father. It argues that Sennacherib did in fact disinherit Urad-Mullissu in favor of Esarhaddon, that Urad-Mullissu successfully recruited professional chariot units based in Nineveh to participate in his conspiracy, and that Esarhaddon was likely based in the city of Dur-Katlimmu at the time of his father’s assassination. Esarhaddon avoided assassination and prevailed in the conflict which followed by leveraging his status as the designated heir to create the perception that his candidacy for the throne was endorsed by the gods and therefore his victory was inevitable. Nevertheless, the assassination and the brief civil war that followed cast a pall over Esarhaddon’s reign, shaping his own succession arrangements as well as the atmosphere of paranoia which marked his final years.

This book examines 2 Kings 18-19 employing both source-critical and rhetorical-critical methodologies in an effort to answer the question of how the biblical text should be used in a historical reconstruction of Sennacherib's invasion into Judah in 701 BCE.

Despite the frequency of rebellions against the Neo-Assyrian king Sennacherib, very few events in his annals are described as such. Instead rebels are often described as having never submitted to Sennacherib before. This reluctance to write about rebellion is unusual in Assyrian inscriptions, but has not been commented upon in the previous scholarship. This study investigates the reasons for this peculiarity of Sennacherib’s inscriptions. It is argued that the description of rebels in this fashion was intended to draw attention away from the connection between these events and the death of Sennacherib’s father, Sargon II. A second instance of a death in Sennacherib’s family affecting the content of his inscriptions is also identified. His son Aššur-nādin-šumi’s death followed a pair of campaigns to the borders of Tabal, the location of Sargon’s death. Because of this it was viewed as a “punishment” for undertaking these campaigns to regions tainted by association with Sargon. After his death, Aššur-nādin-šumi is never mentioned in the same inscription as these campaigns. Although Sennacherib generally avoids mentioning rebellion, overcoming such events was an important facet of Assyrian royal ideology. Because of this, events in some ideologically or historically significant regions are explicitly stated to be rebellions in the annals. Sennacherib’s inscriptions therefore demonstrate, perhaps better than those of any other Assyrian king, the two sides of rebellion’s ideological importance as both an obstacle overcome by a heroic king, and as a punishment for a poor one. His attempts to obscure some occurrences of rebellion demonstrate a fear of the more negative ideological aspect of rebellion which is not usually present in the inscriptions of other kings. This provides new insight into the factors which influenced the composition of Sennacherib’s inscriptions.

The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZAW) covers all areas of research into the Old Testament, focusing on the Hebrew Bible, its early and later forms in Ancient Judaism, as well as its branching into many neighboring cultures of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world.

This paper examines the Assyrian records of Sennacherib’s third campaign from a literary perspective by investigating the structure of the text, the means of participant reference, and terms and expressions with ideological connotations. It focuses especially on the representation of the Assyrian king and other participants for or against his rule, elucidating how the author portrays the participants through the use of literary structure as well as particular forms, terms or expressions. It also shows how the author makes use of these devices to paint the Judean king Hezekiah as an archenemy and the target of the third campaign.

No detailed description available for \"The Royal Inscriptions of Sennacherib, King of Assyria (704-681 BC), Part 1\".

Who was responsible for the murder of Sennacherib? This question fascinated Assyriologists for most of the twentieth century, until a new interpretation of an obscure, fragmentary letter convinced many that a disenfranchised elder son of Sennacherib, Urad-Mullissu, had hatched the conspiracy. Since the (re)publication of this text in 1980 by Simo Parpola, near consensus has developed about these events. In this paper I reexamine the issue and revive the theory that Esarhaddon, Sennacherib's son and successor, may have been behind the assassination, rather than his elder brother. I do not question the coherence of Parpola's interpretation, but I suggest that the field may place undue confidence in a single broken, decontextualized letter. More importantly, the evidence implicating Esarhaddon is ample. I extend six arguments that point toward Esarhaddon's guilt, most of which are derived from Esarhaddon's own account of events in his famous Nineveh A inscription. I do not propose that we can establish Esarhaddon's guilt conclusively at this remove, but I conclude that the weight of this evidence equals, if not surpasses, that which points to a plot concocted by Urad-Mullissu.

In Sennacherib at the Gates of Jerusalem, twelve scholars of the ancient world examine the histories, myths, and tales that formed around the Assyrian campaign of 701 B.C.E. over the course of more than a millennium of re-tellings.