ASSYRIAN POWER, THE PROPHET ISAIAH, AND A DISASTROUS TALE OF TWO KINGDOMS

After two centuries of political instability in the northern kingdom of Israel, due to a series of revolts, political assassinations, and general palace intrigues, King Pekah of Israel, in 734 BCE, foolishly decided to join a coalition of other small kings and kingdoms so as to stage a rebellion against the ruler of the number one world superpower of the time – King Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BCE) of the Assyrian Empire, an empire headquartered in the royal capital of Kalhu in what is now northeastern Iraq. Right off the bat, anyone familiar with the history of the Assyrian kings and their vast, well-equipped armies would have had to advise King Pekah and his little alliance that their decision to take on Assyria was a really bad move. How the two-step, royal Assyrian action-and-reaction program basically worked was:

A) Challenge the King of Assyria, Ruler and Controller of the Four Quarters of the World, and
B) Then you die and your people get deported to the four corners of the Assyrian Empire.

The Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III naturally crushed King Pekah and his alliance, and he then renamed the northern Kingdom of Israel, “Samaria.”(5) By 724 BCE, after two more invasions by the new Assyrian king, Shalmaneser V (726-722 BCE), the northern kingdom of Israel came under full Assyrian control, and much of its population was deported and scattered throughout the Assyrian empire, i.e. the Middle East. From these Assyrian deportation events, we have the origins of the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel” tradition.(6) As was the Assyrian imperial practice, the deported people of the northern kingdom of Israel were replaced by transplanted and resettled people brought in from around the Assyrian Empire. Among these were Cathaeans, Babylonians, Elamites, and Sushanites from southwestern Iran. These people, who the Assyrian ruler Shalmaneser V had transplanted into his new province of Samaria, became collectively known as the Samaritans. Many of them, such as the Elamites and Babylonians, spoke Semitic languages.(7)

During this period of Assyrian consolidation of the northern kingdom, the king of the southern kingdom of Judah, King Hezekiah, decided wisely not to provoke the mighty and vast armies of the Assyrian kings. For a while, he counseled his people in the ways of peace, but militant courtiers and military men within Hezekiah’s administration eventually clamored for, and plotted, a full rebellion against the new Assyrian monarch, Sargon II (721-705 BCE). They did this by seeking alliances with the Egyptians and the Phoenicians. At Hezekiah’s court, the Prophet Isaiah begged the king to stick to the path of peace and shun the advice of his anxious, frothing courtiers and military advisors. Getting no audience at the Palace for his message of peace and non-alliance, Isaiah took his message beyond the Palace to the streets of Jerusalem, where he wandered in protest, barefooted and wearing sackcloth, begging the people not to rebel against the power of the Assyrian Empire. He had already personally seen the ruination of the northern kingdom of Israel through its rebellions against two previous Assyrian kings.

Despite all wise counsel, in 714 BCE King Hezekiah gave in to the “war party” and joined the alliance of the Phoenicians and the Egyptian armies of the 25th Dynasty under the Nubian Pharaoh, Shebitku (or Djed-Ka-Ra). In 701 BCE, Sargon II’s successor, the new king of Assyria, a ruler named Sennacherib (704-681 BCE), crushed this triad alliance, sacked Jerusalem, and carried off King Hezekiah’s daughters to his new Assyrian royal capital at Nineveh.(8) Huge carved reliefs of this conquest (now in the British Museum) were found by 19th century archaeologists on the walls of King Sennacherib’s southwest palace at Nineveh in northern Iraq. King Hezekiah in these reliefs is shown kissing the feet of the Assyrian king in vassal-like submission. In the next section of this history we will look at other kings of Judah who neglected to listen to the advice of a famous Prophet.