Archaeological discoveries appear to confirm an epic battle that took place around 2,700 years ago and was recorded in the Bible.
Nearly 2,700 years ago, the Assyrian armies of King Sennacherib attempted to besiege Jerusalem. King Hezekiah of Judah is said to have prayed for a miracle to prevent the city from falling.
According to the Bible, an “Angel of the Lord” descended upon the Assyrian army that was invading to besiege Jerusalem. The “Angel of the Lord” is said to have “struck down” 185,000 Assyrian troops in one night. The Assyrian king, Sennacherib, realized the devastation and forced his army to retreat. According to the account detailed in 2 Kings 19:35 and Isaiah 37:36, the “Angel of the Lord” prevented the Assyrian army from conquering Jerusalem.
2 Kings 19:35:
“And that night the angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians one hundred and eighty-five thousand men: and when they rose early in the morning, they found them all dead.”
Historical records indicate that the Assyrian army attempted to besiege Jerusalem in 701 BCE, but Sennacherib’s chronicles state that the Assyrian forces returned to Assyria after receiving tribute from King Hezekiah, who was allegedly allowed to maintain power as a vassal of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which included parts of present-day Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria and Kuwait.
Archaeologists had previously found scenes carved into the stone walls of King Sennacherib’s palace that depicted the Assyrian conquest of Lachish, a city 42 miles south of Jerusalem. The carvings showed how the Assyrian military base was laid out.
Archaeologist Stephen Compton carefully studied these ancient carvings and pinpointed the location of an ancient military camp established by King Sennacherib in the Levant.
Compton authored a peer-reviewed paper titled “The Locus of Sennacherib’s Siege Camp,” recently published in the journal Nature. Near Eastern ArchaeologyIn his paper, Compton maps the likely location of an ancient Assyrian military camp around 700 BC.
Compton used World War II aerial photographs of Lachish, landscape images, satellite imagery, field surveys, ancient pottery, and archaeological data to create a virtual map of Sennacherib’s camp.
After Sennacherib invaded Lachish, ruins near the city were abandoned for about 2,600 years. The site’s ancient Arabic name is Khirbet al-Mudawara, which means “ruins of the camp of an invading ruler.” Prehistoric Chalcolithic pottery shards found there lead Compton to speculate that the site may have been an Assyrian military camp used in an invasion and abandoned after the city was conquered.
Similar ruins were found north of Jerusalem, on a hill known in Arabic as Jebel el-Mudawara, or “Mountain of the Invaders’ Camp.”
Some archaeologists have thought the site was a Roman military camp built by Titus during the later Roman invasion of Jerusalem, but Compton points out that Roman camps were always rectangular, while Assyrian camps were oval.
“I knew it was an oval shape, and what I did was take an image of the relief, matched it to real landscape and recognizable features and superimposed the two,” Compton said. Fox News“I used a photograph of a World War II landscape, just before the big changes were happening, and it fit perfectly.”
Compton said he used the location of military camps to pinpoint the location of the lost ancient cities of Libnah and Nob. Both cities are known to have been conquered by Assyria, but their exact locations were unknown. Nob is described in 1 Samuel 22:19 as a “city of the priests” near Jerusalem. Compton said Nob “contained the tabernacle, the holiest place in Judaism, before the temple was built.”
Compton, an independent scholar of Near Eastern archaeology, believes the remains of the Assyrian military camp tell the story of a place invaded and conquered by King Sennacherib’s armies. He concludes that the discovery of the camp proves that Sennacherib’s infamous siege of Jerusalem actually happened.
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