Abraham Rabinovich<\/b><\/p>\n
Victory albums have gone out of fashion in Israel since 1967, but Tel Aviv University\u2019s Archeology Institute has now apparently come up with a new form of the genre \u2014 a Defeat Album. It records a major beating for Our Side. And to rub salt in the wound, the album\u2019s price is $70.<\/p>\n
But, The Conquest of Lachish by Sennacherib<\/i> by David Ussishkin recounts a chapter in biblical archeology so tremendous as to transcend partisan emotion.<\/p>\n
The story includes one of the greatest and earliest examples extant of com bat \u201cphotography.\u201d It was executed by an Assyrian artist accompanying his nation\u2019s army in an expedition against Judea 2, 700 years ago. His sketches, translated into stone reliefs, provide the only portraits we have of Jews from the biblical period.<\/p>\n
The story also includes one of the great adventures of archeology \u2014 the unearthing of Sennacherib\u2019s palace by a British aristocrat in the great tradition of inspired archeological amateurs, Austen Henry Layard, and the carrying off of its treasures, in the best colonial tradition, to the British Museum.<\/p>\n
The story concludes with the current dig at Lachish, headed by the book\u2019s author, Dr. Ussishkin, which has determined the <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 12:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1983) p. 67<\/p>\n
destruction layer marking Sennacherib\u2019s victory and uncovered one of the ramps used by Sennacherib\u2019s assault force.1 <\/p>\n
The Kingdom of Assyria, based in the area of today\u2019s Iraq, became the superpower of the Near East towards the end of the 8th century BCE. The powerful battering rams designed by its royal engineers toppled the walls of fortified cities that stood in the way of the growing empire. The last of the Kingdom of Israel, embracing 10 of the 12 Israelite tribes, fell to Assyria in 720.<\/p>\n
Judah was one of the few states in the region that remained independent. In 701, Sennacherib set out to rectify that. There is a remarkable diversity of sources to tell us what happened. The Bible was the first, but the sculptings and texts uncovered by Layard in Sennacherib\u2019s palace at Nineveh giving the Assyrian version of events and the evidence found in Lachish itself by British and Israeli archeologists provide a rare perspective on a single historical event.<\/p>\n
Judah was ruled by Hezekiah when the Assyrian hosts approached from Nineveh, almost 1,000 kilometres away. He had been king for 26 years and proved himself a vigorous and foresighted ruler. He had shored up Jerusalem as his capital spiritually by abolishing shrines outside the city. He strengthened it physically with stout walls and, as a hedge against siege, with the remarkable conduit \u2014 hewn through rock from the Gihon spring outside the city wall to a pool within the city.2 <\/p>\n
Lachish was the most powerful city in the kingdom outside Jerusalem. Ussishkin notes that it may have been a chariot city \u2014 equivalent of a modern armoured corps base. With the approach of Sennacherib, the battlements were augmented with galleries providing more space for soldiers, and archeologists were to find the main drainage channel blocked to prevent Assyrian infantry from penetrating beneath the walls.<\/p>\n
Sennacherib headed first for the Phoenecian coast where he took Sidon and Acre. After sweeping through Philistine towns on the coastal plain and defeating an Egyptian expeditionary force, he headed inland and laid siege to Lachish.<\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 12:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1983) p. 68<\/p>\n
It is clear to archeologists that the siege camp lay where today\u2019s Moshav Lachish lies, a fairly level hilltop attached by a topographic saddle to the mound on which the city was built. The fierce battle is witnessed today by the ashes and debris including arrowheads and slingstones.<\/p>\n
The biblical version is terse. \u201cIn the 14th year of King Hezekiah [a dating that differs from the historians] did Sennacherib, King of Assyria, come up against all the fenced cities of Judah and took them.\u201d (II Kings 18:13, Isaiah 36:1).<\/p>\n
In the Assyrian archives, Sennacherib offers more details. After describing his earlier victories, he says, \u201cBut as for Hezekiah, the Jew, who did not bow in submission to my yoke, 46 of his strong walled towns and innumerable smaller villages in their neighbourhoods I besieged and conquered by stamping down earth ramps and then by bringing up battering rams, by the assault of foot soldiers, by breaches, tunnelling and sapper operations. I made to come out from them 200,150 people, <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 12:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1983) p. 69<\/p>\n
young and old, male and female, innumerable horses, mules, donkeys, camels, large and small cattle, and counted them as the spoils of war.\u201d<\/p>\n
After its fall, the city was put to the torch and Sennacherib marched on Jerusalem to which he laid siege. \u201cI shut (Hezekiah) up like a caged bird,\u201d says the Assyrian monarch\u2019s annals.<\/p>\n
The Bible recounts that the Assyrian siege camp was struck by a plague which forced Sennacherib to withdraw. The latter makes no mention of plague and tells us instead that Hezekiah \u201csent a personal messenger to deliver the tribute and make a slavish obeisance.\u201d The tribute included not only gold and other precious materials but the king\u2019s daughters, concubines, and male and female musicians. These were sent to Nineveh.<\/p>\n
In any event, the Assyrians did not enter the city, which survived intact until the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezer laid it waste 115 years later, destroying the First Temple.<\/p>\n
Amateur archeologist Layard began digging in 1847 into a dusty tel<\/i> on the Tigris River near Mosul in Iraq. His instincts told him a great Assyrian city had once stood there, even though previous excavations had uncovered nothing. He chose a corner of the high mound overlooking the river and within a few days began uncovering a series of chambers with stone reliefs and cuneiform inscriptions, clearly part of a magnificent royal palace.<\/p>\n
He returned two years later, by which time the cuneiform inscriptions had been deciphered, including the name Sennacherib. Pushing long tunnels into the mound, lit by vertical shafts from the surface, he quickly came to the main part of the palace. Leading off the central court were three chambers in a row, the entrance to each flanked by two huge bull colosi. The gates and colosi were progressively smaller \u2014 from six metres to four \u2014 to give an impression of depth. The innermost chamber, to which the eye was drawn by this impressive architectural arrangement, was lined by sculpted reliefs about 26 metres long depicting the conquest of Lachish. The setting made clear the importance Sennacherib attributed to that hard-fought victory.3 <\/p>\n
The Lachish panels were the best preserved of the many lining <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 12:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1983) p. 70<\/p>\n
Artist\u2019s reconstruction of the hall which led to the \u201cLachish Room\u201d in Sennacherib\u2019s palace<\/i><\/b>.<\/b><\/p>\n
the palace\u2019s rooms. Most of them \u2014 about\u2019 19 metres in all \u2014 were packed in cases and floated by raft down to the sea where they were placed aboard a British frigate.<\/p>\n
It was another British archeologist, James Leslie Starkey, who in 1932 \u2014 85 years after Layard\u2019s probe of Nineveh \u2014 began digging at Lachish itself. The tel<\/i> had been identified as Lachish only three years before by W.F. Albright, a giant of biblical archeology, but not all experts agreed. Unlike Layard, Starkey was a trained archeologist, and he executed a controlled excavation, uncovering the layers of settlement from the top <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 12:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1983) p. 71<\/p>\n
downwards. The second level from the top was clearly identified by pottery as the remains of the city destroyed by Nebuchadnezer in 586 BCE. However, there was considerable controversy about the level beneath, which showed massive signs of destruction by fire. Because of the close resemblance of the pottery found at this level \u2014 level 3 \u2014 with the pottery of level 2, Starkey concluded that very little time had passed between these two periods. He attributed the destruction of level 3 to Nebuchadnezer\u2019s campaign in 597, a decade before he destroyed Lachish \u2014 presumably a second time \u2014 and Jerusalem.<\/p>\n
Starkey ws shot dead in 1938 by an Arab as he drove from Lachish to Jerusalem to attend the opening of what is today known as the Rockefeller Museum. One of his assistants, Olga Tufnell, who was to continue working on the material from the six seasons of excavations, came to her own conclusion about level 3. Closer examination of the pottery convinced her that there was a marked difference between the material in levels 2 and 3 and that the latter had been manufactured well before the destruction of 586. She concluded that level 3 should be dated to the Assyrian destruction of 701 BCE.<\/p>\n
Albright, Kathleen Kenyon and other major archeologists continued to support the 597 dating, but Israeli archeologists increasingly inclined to the 701 dating on the basis of their knowledge of pottery elsewhere in the country.<\/p>\n
David Ussishkin began a major excavation at Lachish in 1973 on behalf of Tel Aviv University Institute of Archeology, the Israel Exploration Society and other institutions. The excavations are in their ninth season. He has concluded that level 3 is clearly the remains of the city destroyed by Sennacherib.<\/p>\n
When the current dig began a decade ago, it was visited by Prof. Yigael Yadin, who suggested that stone heaps at one corner of the mound might be the remains of one of the Assyrian siege ramps. Starkey had believed that the stones were remnants of collapsed fortifications. Ussishkin cut a trench into the stone mass and concluded that the stones had not fallen ramdomly but were indeed part of a ramp whose upper layers were cemented by hard mortar.<\/p>\n
In his book, Ussishkin says that if his supposition is correct, <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 12:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1983) p. 72<\/p>\n
The mound of Lachish seen from the west<\/i><\/b>.<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cthen our siege ramp is the only Assyrian siege ramp so far archeologically attested. Moreover, it seems it is the most ancient siege ramp so far discovered in the Near East. The nearest dates from a century later in Smyrna.<\/p>\n
Starkey had uncovered several caves on the mound\u2019s slope into which an estimated 1,500 bodies had been piled. There were indications of death by fire. Starkey had suggested \u2014 \u201cquite convincingly\u201d according to Ussishkin \u2014 that they were victims of the Assyrian attack whose bodies had been removed from the devastated city.<\/p>\n
Remains of 695 skulls were brought to London where an expert found a close racial resemblance to the population of Egypt at that time. \u201cThe relationships found suggest that the population of the town in 700 BCE was entirely, or almost entirely, of Egyptian origin,\u201d prinicpally Upper Egypt. \u201cIf so,\u201d writes Ussishkin, \u201cthis indeed is a conclusion of far-reaching implications.\u201d<\/p>\n
Three of the skulls had been operated on and parts of the bone sawed away in what appear to have been emergency operations. <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 12:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1983) p. 73<\/p>\n
They appear to have died in the process but one skull shows signs of healing after the operation. \u201cCould this perhaps represent desperate attempts to save the lives of people injured in battle?\u201d asks Ussishkin.<\/p>\n
Last year, the Institute of Archeology dispatched artist Judith Dekel to the British Museum to draw the Lachish reliefs to half their original size. The drawings, together with photographs of the reliefs by Avraham Hay and finds from the dig were recently displayed at Tel Aviv University.<\/p>\n
The drawings, which are included in the book, permit a fascinating look at a live biblical scene as viewed by the eye of a talented contemporary artist. Ussishkin believes that the scene was sketched during the battle by the artist and then reproduced in stone in Nineveh. From the perspective of the scene it seems clear that the artist stood where Moshav Lachish\u2019s turkey runs now stand.<\/p>\n
For the first time we are given an idea of what Jews of that period looked like, or at least how they dressed. Women, including little girls, seen emerging from the main gate into captivity wear shawls which cover their heads and which fall down their backs to the bottom of their simple dresses. The men, who have short beards, wear scarves around their heads with the edges hanging down over their ears to their shoulders. \u201cA thick, horizontal line below the belt probably marks the bottom of a sleeveless shirt,\u201d says Ussishkin.<\/p>\n
Judean warriors shown fighting from the battlements wear a variety of headgear, including conical helmets.<\/p>\n
The Assyrian troops are understandably depicted with far greater detail. There are groups of variously clad archers, presumably from different contingents in the army. There are light auxiliary archers and heavily armoured archers and slingers with piles of slingstones at their feet. Some of the soldiers wear boots, some are barefoot.<\/p>\n
From a military point of view the most intriguing part of the reliefs are the battering rams. There are seven of them pushed up to the city wall on ramps covered with logs to provide easier rolling for the ram\u2019s wheels. Five rams stand close together on the main ramp near the city\u2019s principal gateway, the ramp Ussishkin believes he has identified in the field.<\/p>\n
The rams are advanced under heavy fire coming from the defenders in the form of rocks, arrows and burning torches. The <\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 12:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1983) p. 74<\/p>\n
Excavations in the gate area at Lachish<\/i><\/b>.<\/b><\/p>\n
reliefs indicate that the rams were assembled from a number of parts and held by securing pins. They resemble a baby carriage with the hood up, the hood protecting the soldiers inside. Protruding through the front is the metal ram head supported by a wooden shaft swinging on a rope like a pendulum. Inside the machine, crouching soldiers swing the shaft to the rear and let it race forward to strike the city wall. Under persistent pounding, the wall will presumably give way.4 <\/p>\n
Rows of kneeling Assyrian archers provide cover for their colleagues in the rams under the walls by firing at the defenders on the ramparts who are throwing rocks and firebrands at the rams. Inside each ram one brave soul undertakes the task of dousing fires atop the machine with a giant ladle.<\/p>\n
The vivid reliefs show two barefooted defenders plunging from the walls, presumably after having been hit by arrows. Arrows protrude from shields held by some of the attackers. Three chariots or carts are hurled down by the defenders.<\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 12:3-4 (Summer-Autumn 1983) p. 75<\/p>\n
In the sections depicting the Assyrian victory, columns of deportees are shown streaming out of the city into exile. Some sit on carts piled with goods and drawn by oxen. A woman holds a baby in her lap. Some women walk with sacks over their shoulders.<\/p>\n
Leading the line are male prisoners dressed differently from the others. A supposition raised by R.D. Barnett is that they are \u201cHezekiah\u2019s men\u201d \u2014 representatives of the central government \u2014 some of whom are being tortured or killed. Three prisoners, stripped naked, are impaled on stakes near the city gate. Ussishkin believes that one of them, who apparently wears some kind of headdress, might be the governor. A group of Assyrian soldiers carries booty, apparently from the governor\u2019s palace, including a sceptre, chalices and a ceremonial chair.<\/p>\n
The entire procession moves towards the mighty figure of Sennacherib seated on his elaborately carved royal throne. Behind him are two beardless eunuchs holding fans. In front of him is his senior commander, an imposing figure. A rosette \u2014 the royal emblem \u2014 decorates the scarf binding the commander\u2019s forehead.<\/p>\n
The reliefs conclude with a depiction of the Assyrian siege camp surrounded by a wall and towers. Cooking and maintenance operations are shown.<\/p>\n
In his annals, Sennacherib mentions that his palace in Nineveh was built with the help of captives. Some of the reliefs found there portray the building of the palace with captives carrying large stones and pulling giant pieces of sculpture with ropes. One group is depicted identically with the defenders of Lachish.<\/p>\n
\u201cClearly these are the men of Judah, quite possibly the men of Lachish,\u201d writes Ussishkin.<\/p>\n
Two decades after his victory at Lachish, Sennacherib was murdered. The Bible tells us he was killed by his sons while praying in a temple. The king\u2019s face was deliberately mutilated on the Lachish relief by an unknown hand, probably in the riots that followed his death.<\/p>\n
Thus, while posterity still gazes at the human likenesses of his soldiers and his Jewish victims at Lachish, the great emperor himself has been left to us as a faceless roar of thunder.<\/p>\n
(Reprinted from The Jerusalem Post International Edition<\/i>, July 31-August 6, 1983.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Abraham Rabinovich Victory albums have gone out of fashion in Israel since 1967, but Tel Aviv University\u2019s Archeology Institute has now apparently come up with a new form of the genre \u2014 a Defeat Album. It records a major beating for Our Side. And to rub salt in the wound, the album\u2019s price is $70. … Continue reading “RECORD
\nOF DEFEAT”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14974\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}