The Assyrian Siege and the Miraculous Deliverance

As for Hezekiah the Judahite who had not sub-mitted to my yoke, I surrounded 46 of his strong walled towns, and innumerable small places around them, and conquered them…He [Hezekiah] himself I shut up in Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage (the Sennacherib Prism).

As birds hovering, so will the Lord of hosts protect Jerusalem…then shall Asshur fall with the sword, not of man…

Isaiah 31:5–8

In 701 BCE the armies of King Sennacherib of Assyria assaulted Jerusalem, but the siege failed and the Assyrians withdrew. The Bible relates that an angel of the Lord came out and killed 185,000 men in the Assyrian camp.

In Nineveh, the capital of Assyria (northern Iraq of today) copies were found in the nineteenth century of an inscription on a clay prism, which Sennacherib had ordered written to describe his campaign. Sennacherib said he withdrew from the city after extracting a heavy tax.

Sennacherib boasted that he closed up Hezekiah “like a bird in a cage” and perhaps it is not by chance that in the prophet Isaiah, an actual eye-witness to these events, uses similar imagery (“as birds hovering”) to depict the miraculous deliverance of the city from the Assyrians.