Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/430

 ISRAEL to be shaken out of their ordinary routine by the gravity of such a crisis as this ; the living work of Jehovah is to them a sealed book ; their piety does not extend beyond the respect they show for certain human precepts learnt .by rote. Senna- Meanwhile Sennacherib, at the head of a great army, was cherib. advancing against Philistia and Judah along the Phoenician coast (701). Having captured Ascalon, he next laid seige to Ekron, which, after the combined Egyptian and Ethiopian army sent to its relief had been defeated at Eltheke, fell into the enemy s hand, and was severely dealt with. Simultaneously various fortresses of Judah were occupied, and the level country was devastated (Isa. i.). The consequence was that Hezekiah, in a state of panic, offered to the Assyrians his submission, which was accepted on payment of a heavy penalty, he being permitted how ever to retain possession of Jerusalem. He seemed to have got cheaply offirom the unequal contest. The way being thus cleared, Sennacherib pressed on southwards, for the Egyptians were collecting their forces against him. The nearer he came to the enemy the more undesirable did he find it that he should leave in his rear so important a fortress as Jerusalem in the hands of a doubtful vassal. Notwithstanding the recently ratified treaty, therefore, he demanded the surrender of the city, believing that a policy of intimidation would be enough to secure it from Hezskiah. But there was another per sonality in Jerusalem of whom his plans had taken no Isaiah s account. Isaiah had indeed regarded the revolt from attitude : Assyria as a rebellion against Jehovah Himself, and there- trium h ^ ore as a P er ^ ecfc ^y hopeless undertaking which could only result in the utmost humiliation and sternest chastisement for Judah. But still more distinctly than those who had gone before him did he hold firm as an article of faith the conviction that the kingdom would not be utterly annihi lated ; all his speeches of solemn warning closed with the announcement that a remnant should return and form the kernel of a new commonwealth to be fashioned after Jehovah s own heart. For him, in contrast to Amos, the great crisis had. a positive character; in contrast to Hosea, he did not expect a temporary suspension of the theocracy, to be followed by its complete reconstruction, but in the pious and God fearing individuals who were still to be met with in this Sodom of iniquity, he saw the threads, thin indeed yet sufficient, which formed the links between the Israel of the present and its batter future. Over against the vain confidence of the multitude Isaiah had hitherto brought into prominence the darker obverse of his religious belief, but now he confronted their present depression with its bright reverse; faint-heartedness was still more alien to his nature than temerity. In the name of Jehovah he bade King Hezekiah be of good courage, and urged tint ha should by no means surrender. The Assyrians would not bs able to take the city, not even to shoot an arrow into it nor to bring up their siege train against it. &quot; I -know thy sitting, thy going, and thy stand ing,&quot; is Jehovah s language to the Assyrian, &quot; and also thy rage against me. And I will put my ring in thy nose, and my bridle in thy lips, and I will turn thee back by the way by which thou earnest.&quot; And thus it proved in the issue. By a still unexplained catastrophe, the main army of Sennacherib was annihilated on the frontier between Egypt and Palestine, and Jerusalem thereby freed from all danger. The Assyrian king had to save himself by a hurried retreat to Ninsveh ; Isaiah was triumphant. A more magnificent close of a period of influential public life can hardly be imagined. What Sennacherib himself relates of his expedition against his rebellious vassals in Palestine (George Smith, Assyrian Eponym p. 67, 68, 131-136) runs parallel with 2 Kings xviii. 14-16, but not with the rest of the Bible narrative. These three verses are Senna- peculiar, and their source is different from that of the context. After cherib s having captured various Phoanician cities, and received tribute from inscrip- a number of kings, his first measure is forcibly to restore the Assyrian tions. governor who had been expelled from Ascalon, and next he turns his arms against Ekron. This city had put in irons its own king Padi (who remained loyal to the suzerain), and handed him over to Hezekiah, who appears as the soul of the rebellion in these quarters. The Egyptians, who as usual have a hand in the matter, advance with an army for the relief of the beleaguered city, but are defeated near Eltheke in the immediate neighbourhood; Ekron is taken, remorse lessly chastised, and forced to take Padi back again as its king. For Hezekiah in the meantime has delivered up his prisoner, and, terri fied by the fall of his fortresses and the devastation of his territory, has accepted the position of a vassal once more, paying at the same time a heavy fine, inclusive of 30 talents of gold and 800 of silver. Such is the Assyrian account. If we treat the 300 talents mentioned in 2 Kings xviii. 14 as Syrian ( = 800 Babylonian), it completely fills iu the vague outlines given ill 2 Kings xviii. 14-1 6, and, while confirm ing in their place immediately after ver. 13 these verses, unrelated as they are to the main connexion of the Biblical narrative, corrects them only in one point by making it probable that the subjection 01 Hezekiah (which is not equivalent to the surrender of his city) took place while Sennacherib was still before Ekron, and not at a later date when he had gone further south towards Libnah. As regards his further advance towards Egypt, and the reasons of his sudden withdrawal (related by Herodotus also from Egyptian tra dition), the great king is silent, having nothing to boast of in it. The battle of Eltheke, which is to be regarded only as an episode in the siege of Ekron, being merely the repulse of the Egyptian relieving army, was not an event of great historical importance, and ought not to be brought into any connexion either with 2 Kings xix. 7 or with
 * xix. 35; Sennacherib s inscription speaks only of the first and pro

sperous stage of the expedition, not of the decisive one which resulted so disastrously for him, as must be clear from the words themselves to every unprejudiced reader. The Assyriologists, in their determi nation to make a history, assume identifications on grounds that do not admit of proof, and in this way do even mole violence to the Assyrian than to the Biblical narrative. 8. Isaiah was so completely a prophet that even his wife was called the prophetess after him. No such title could have been bestowed on the wife of either Ames or Hosea. But what distinguished him more than anything else from those predecessors was that his position was not, like theirs, apart from the government ; he sat close to the helm, and took a very real part in directing the course of the vessel. He was more positive and practical than they ; Practi- he -wished to make his influence felt, and, when for the moment he was unsuccessful in this so far as the great whole of the state was concerned, he busied himself in gathering round him a small circle of like-minded persons on whom his hope for the future rested. Now that Israel had been destroyed, he wished at all events to save Judah. The lofty ideality of his faith (ii. 1 sqq.) did not hinder him from calling in the aid of practical means for this end. But the current of his activities was by the circumstances of the case directed into a channel in which after his death they continued to flow towards a goal which had liardly been contemplated by himself. The political importance of the people of Jehovah was reduced to a minimum when Judah only was left. Already at an earlier period in that kingdom the sacred had come to be of more importance than the secular ; much more was this the case under the suzerainty of Assyria. The circumstances of the time themselves urged that the religion of Israel should divest itself of all politico-national character; but Isaiah also did his best to further this end. It was his most zealous endeavour to hold king and people aloof from every patriotic movement ; to him the true religious attitude was one of quietness and sitting still, non-inter vention in political affairs, concentration on the problems of internal government. But he was compelled to leave over for the coming Messiah (xi. 1 sqq.) that reformation in legal and social matters which seemed to him so neces sary ; all that he could bring the secular rulers of his country to undertake was a reform in worship. This was the most easily solved of the problems alluded to above,