Archaeologists may have found the location of one of the Bible’s most famous battles, when an angel struck down the Assyrian army, killing 185,000 soldiers about 2,700 years ago, the Daily Mail reports.
Oddly, an ancient wall carving played a critical role in the discovery.
In the account recorded in Isaiah 37:36-38, 2 Kings 19:35, and 2 Chronicles 32:21, Assyria’s King Sennacherib was attacking Jerusalem, which at the time was being ruled by King Hezekiah, with the intent of bringing the country into submission.
Sennacherib had previously defeated Israel and had already captured much of Judah’s Northern Territory.
Hezekiah initially tried to pay off Sennacherib, however, the Lord delivered a message to Hezekiah through the prophet Isaiah that Sennacherib would not take Jerusalem. This was fulfilled with the destruction of Sennacherib’s army.
With his army decimated, the Assyrian King was forced to return home, where he was eventually assassinated by one of his sons.
There is even evidence of Sennacherib’s defeat carved on the walls of his palace in Khorsebad, located near Nineveh, where the Assyrian king had a relief made of how he sacked Lachish in Judah.
Since the only real prize in Judah was Jerusalem, for Sennacherib to commemorate the defeat of a minor fortress is almost laughable and further evidence of his failure to take Jerusalem.
Of course, the bigger question is why would Sennacherib feel the need to celebrate the taking of Lachish.
The carving suggests that the king was taking considerable political heat after the massive defeat, and he needed to portray an obvious failure as a victory.
But this carving also provided enough detail that archaeologist Stephen Compton was able to discover the location of the Assyrian camp where the Angel of the Lord wiped out Sennacherib’s army.
In his news release, Compton explains that this relief not only provided clues to its locations but also revealed the layout of the Assyrian camp, helping them to identify it.
Compton writes:
A peer-reviewed paper in the prestigious journal Near Eastern Archaeology reports the first-ever discoveries of ancient Assyrian military camps. Created circa 700 BC during military conquests across the Middle East, they mark the expansion of the Assyrian Empire, which became the prototype for the subsequent Persian, Greek, and Roman empires.
The initial discovery came from a scene carved into the stone walls of the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s palace commemorating his conquest of Lachish, a city to the south of Jerusalem. Matching the landscape in this image to features of the actual landscape (using early aerial photographs of Lachish prior to modern development) created a virtual map to the site of Sennacherib’s camp. This led to ruins similar in size and shape to the camp in Sennacherib’s relief. An archaeological survey of the site found no evidence of human habitation for 2,600 years, followed by pottery shards from the exact time of Sennacherib’s invasion of Lachish, after which it was again abandoned for centuries. Moreover, the ancient Arabic name for the ruins was Khirbet al Mudawwara, “The Ruins of the Camp of the Invading Ruler.”
The Survey of Palestine had investigated a very similar ruin to the north of Jerusalem and found it consistent with a military camp. They hypothesized that it had been built by Titus during the later Roman invasion of Jerusalem. However, Roman military camps were always rectangular, whereas this was oval, the characteristic shape of Assyrian camps. The hill it occupied was known in Arabic as Jebel el Mudawwara, “The Mountain of the Camp of the Invading Ruler.”
This discovery once again confirms the historical accuracy of the Bible.
OpentheWord.org 