In search of a less obscure King Hezekiah of Judah

by

 

Damien F. Mackey

  

 

‘I’ve never read a King Hezekiah of Judah like that before’.

 

 

 

Such was basically the comment made by professor Rifaat Ebied of the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies (University of Sydney), upon having read the draft of my thesis:

 

A Revised History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah

and its Background

 

AMAIC_Final_Thesis_2009.pdf

 

However, as often occurred to me whilst writing that thesis, King Hezekiah, though presumably the focal point of the thesis, remained for the most part a largely obscure figure, unlike some of his contemporaries whom I was able to develop in far more detail.

 

But, firstly, how did this thesis come about?

Providentially, I would suggest.

 

In the Year 2000 AD, professor Ebied asked me if I would like to do a doctoral thesis, and he gave me the choice of the era of King Hezekiah of Judah, or the era of King Josiah of Judah.

I, having at that stage absolutely no clear cut ideas about the era of king Josiah, jumped at the chance to write about the era of King Hezekiah. The reason for this was that I had already spent almost two decades trying to ascertain an historical locus for the Book of Judith and had finally come to, what was all along the obvious conclusion, that the Judith drama was all about the destruction of Sennacherib of Assyria’s 185,000-strong army during the reign of Hezekiah.   

 

King Hezekiah of Judah

 

King Hezekiah, a formidable historical figure, whom his Assyrian opponent King Sennacherib described as “the strong, proud Hezekiah” (Sennacherib’s Bull Inscriptions), and who reigned for almost three decades (2 Kings 18:2), tends to disappear from the scene of conflict after about his 14^th year, the year of his sickness.

Yet this was well before the confrontation with the ill-fated army of Sennacherib.

 

More recently, though, I have managed to enlarge Hezekiah considerably, by identifying him with the similarly good and pious king of Judah, Josiah (prof. Ebied’s two points of reference). For my arguments on this, and for my radical revision of the later kings of Judah, see e.g. my article:

 

'Taking aim on' king Amon - such a wicked king of Judah

 

https://www.academia.edu/37575781/Taking_aim_on_king_Amon_-_such_a_wicked_king_of_Judah

 

This article, if correct, takes us far deeper at least into the reign of King Hezekiah, and it even tells of his violent death at the hands of pharaoh Necho (2 Kings 23:29-30).

 

King Sennacherib of Assyria

 

This notorious king of Assyria I had already enlarged in my thesis by multi-identifying him, especially in Volume One, Chapter 6.  

His chief alter ego, I had concluded, was the potent Sargon II. I have since written further articles on this fusion of supposedly two Assyrian mega-kings, along the lines of e.g:

 

Assyrian King Sargon II, Otherwise Known As Sennacherib

 

https://www.academia.edu/6708474/Assyrian_King_Sargon_II_Otherwise_Known_As_Sennacherib

 

My other move on Sennacherib at that time involved the necessary (in terms of the revision) folding of Middle Assyro-Babylonian history with Neo Assyro-Babylonian history.

Revised attempts at this so far do not seem to have been very successful.

I thought that I had found the perfect solution with my folding of the mighty Middle Babylonian king, Nebuchednezzar I, conventionally dated to the C12th BC - he, I then declared to have been ‘the Babylonian face’ of Sargon II/Sennacherib.

Such an identification, which seemed to have massive support from the succession of Shutrukid-Elamite kings of the time having names virtually identical to the succession of Elamite kings at the time of Sargon II/Sennacherib (see Table 1 below), had the further advantage of providing Sargon II/Sennacherib with the name, “Nebuchednezzar”, just as the Assyrian king is named in the Book of Judith (“Nebuchadnezzar”).

 

My more recent collapsing of the late neo-Assyrian era into the early neo-Babylonian era has caused me to drop the identification of Nebuchednezzar I with Sargon II/Sennacherib.

 

Aligning Neo Babylonia with Book of Daniel. Part One: Shortening the Chaldean Dynasty

 

https://www.academia.edu/38330231/Aligning_Neo_Babylonia_with_Book_of_Daniel._Part_One_Shortening_the_Chaldean_Dynasty

 

Aligning Neo-Babylonia with Book of Daniel. Part Two: Merging late neo-Assyrians with Chaldeans

 

https://www.academia.edu/38330399/Aligning_Neo-Babylonia_with_Book_of_Daniel._Part_Two_Merging_late_neo-Assyrians_with_Chaldeans

 

More appropriately, now, Nebuchednezzar I might be found to have been Nebuchednezzar II.

 

Fortunately though, with this tightened chronology, the impressive Shutrukid-Elamite parallels that I had established in my thesis might still remain viable.

 

Having rejected my former folding of Nebuchednezzar I with Sargon II/Sennacherib the question must be asked, ‘At what point does Middle fold with Neo?’

Hopefully, I had identified that very point of fusion in my thesis (see next).

 

King Merodach-baladan of Babylonia

 

Here, I shall simply reproduce part of what I wrote about the best point of folding in my thesis (Chapter 7, beginning on p. 180):

 

So, with what ‘Middle’ Babylonian period are we to merge the ‘Neo’ Babylonian Merodach-baladan [II], in order to show that VLTF [Velikovsky’s Lowering on Timescale by 500 Years] is convincing for this part of the world as well at this particular time?

Actually, there is a perfect opportunity for such a merger with one who is considered - perhaps rightly - to have been one of the last Kassite kings: namely, Merodach-baladan [I] (c. 1173-1161 BC, conventional dates). Now, as I have emphasized in the course of this thesis, identical names do not mean identical persons. However, there is more similarity between Merodach-baladan I and II than just the name I would suggest. For instance:

 

• There is the (perhaps suspicious?) difficulty in distinguishing between the building efforts of Merodach-baladan [I] and Merodach-baladan [II]:[1]
   
  Four kudurrus ..., taken together with evidence of his building activity in Borsippa ... show Merodach-baladan I still master in his own domain. The bricks recording the building of the temple of Eanna in Uruk ..., assigned to Merodach-baladan I by the British Museum’s A Guide to the Babylonian and Assyrian Antiquities ... cannot now be readily located in the Museum for consultation; it is highly probable, however, that these bricks belong to Merodach-baladan II (see Studies Oppenheim, p. 42 ...).
   
  Further:
   
• Wiseman contends that Merodach-baladan I was in fact a king of the Second Isin Dynasty which is thought to have succeeded the Kassites.[2] Brinkman, whilst calling this view “erroneous”, has conceded that:[3] “The beginnings of [the Second Dynasty of Isin] ... are relatively obscure”.
• There is the same approximate length of reign over Babylonia for Merodach-baladan [I] and [II]. Twelve years as king of Babylon for Merodach-baladan II, as we have already discussed. And virtually the same in the case of Merodach-baladan I:[4]
• 
  
  The Kassite Dynasty, then, continued relatively vigorous down through the next two reigns, including that of Merodach-baladan I, the thirty-fourth and third-last king of the dynasty, who reigned some thirteen years .... Up through this time, kudurrus show the king in control of the land in Babylonia.
   
• Merodach-baladan I was approximately contemporaneous with the Elamite succession called Shutrukids. Whilst there is some doubt as to the actual sequence of events[5] - Shutruk-Nahhunte is said to have been the father of Kudur-Nahhunte - the names of three of these kings are identical to those of Sargon II’s/ Sennacherib’s Elamite foes, supposedly about four centuries later.
   
  Now, consider further these striking parallels between the C12th BC and the neo-Assyrian period, to be developed below:
   
  Table 1: Comparison of the C12th BC (conventional) and C8th BC
   

C12th BC   ·         Some time before Nebuchednezzar I, there reigned in Babylon a Merodach-baladan [I]. ·         The Elamite kings of this era carried names such as Shutruk-Nahhunte and his son, Kudur-Nahhunte. ·         Nebuchednezzar I fought a hard battle with a ‘Hulteludish’ (Hultelutush-Inshushinak).

C8th BC   ·         The Babylonian ruler for king Sargon II’s first twelve years was a Merodach-baladan [II]. ·         SargonII/Sennacherib fought against the Elamites, Shutur-Nakhkhunte & Kutir-Nakhkhunte. ·         Sennacherib had trouble also with a ‘Hallushu’ (Halutush-Inshushinak).

 

Too spectacular I think to be mere coincidence!

[End of quotes]

 

 

 

---

[1] Brinkman, op. cit, p. 87, footnote (456).

[2] Ibid, footnote (455), with reference to D. J. Wiseman in CAH, vol. ii, part 2, xxxi, p. 39.

[3] Ibid, p. 90.

[4] Ibid, p. 87.

[5] Ibid, p. 109.

Important lapse of ‘many years’ in Tobit, in Acts

 

by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

“But after a long time, Salmanasar [Shalamneser] the king being dead,

… Sennacherib his son, who reigned in his place, had a hatred for the children of Israel”.

 

Tobit 1:18

 

“The governor [Felix] then motioned for Paul to speak. Paul said, ‘I know, sir, that you have been a judge of Jewish affairs for many years, so I gladly present my defense before you’.”

 

Acts 24:10

 

 

This attested lapse of a long time opens up the door for a possible extension of the reign of the conventionally brief Shalmaneser [V], c. 727-722 BC, and for the conventionally brief procurator, Felix, c. 52-60 AD.

The Vulgate Tobit 1:18 employs, in the case of Shalmaneser, the Latin phrase, post multum vero temporis (“after a long time”), and the Greek Acts 24:10 employs, in the case of Felix, the phrase, Ἐκ πολλῶν ἐτῶν (“for many years”).

 

King Shalmaneser

 

Whereas the conventional history has Tiglath-pileser III and Shalmaneser V as separate Assyrian kings, my own view, as outlined in my university thesis:

 

A Revised History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah

and its Background

 

AMAIC_Final_Thesis_2009.pdf

 

is that Shalmaneser was Tiglath-pileser.

In Volume One, Chapter 6, I wrote the following brief section on this, in which I took a lead from the Book of Tobit regarding the neo-Assyrian succession:

 

 Shalmaneser V (c. 726-722 BC, conventional dates)

 

Looking at the conventional date for the death of Tiglath-pileser III, c. 727 BC, we can see that it coincides with the biblically-estimated date for the first year of king Hezekiah. But, if the former is to be identified with Shalmaneser V, thought to have reigned for five years, then this date would need to be lowered by about those five years (right to the time of the fall of Samaria), bringing Tiglath-pileser III deeper into the reign of Hezekiah.

Now, that Tiglath-pileser III is to be equated with Shalmaneser V would seem to be deducible from a combination of two pieces of evidence from [the Book of Tobit]: namely,

 

1.       that it was “King Shalmaneser of the Assyrians” who took Tobit’s tribe of Naphtali into captivity (1:1, 2); a deportation generally attributed to Tiglath-pileser III on the basis of 2 Kings 15:29; and

2.        that: “when Shalmaneser died … his son Sennacherib reigned in his place” (1:15).

 

Unfortunately, very little is known of the reign of this ‘Shalmaneser’ [V] to supplement [the Book of Tobit]. According to Roux, for instance:[1] “The short reign of … Shalmaneser V (726-722 B.C.) is obscure”. And Boutflower has written similarly:[2] “The reign of Shalmaneser V (727-722) is a blank in the Assyrian records”. It seems rather strange, though, that a king who was powerful enough to have enforced a three year siege of Israel’s capital of Samaria (probably the Sha-ma-ra-in of the Babylonian Chronicle), resulting in the successful sack of that city, and to have invaded all Phoenicia and even to have besieged the mighty Tyre for five years,[3] and to have earned a hateful reputation amongst the Sargonids, should end up “a blank” and “obscure” in the Assyrian records.

The name Tiglath-pileser was a throne name, as Sargon appears to have been – that is, a name given to (or taken by) the king on his accession to the throne. In Assyrian cuneiform, his name is Tukulti-apil-ešarra, meaning: “My confidence is the son of Esharra”. This being a throne name would make it likely that the king also had a personal name - just as I have argued above that Sargon II had the personal name of Sennacherib. The personal name of Tiglath-pileser III I believe to have been Shalmaneser.

A problem though with my proposed identification of Shalmaneser V with Tiglath-pileser III is that, according to Boutflower,[4] there has been discovered “a treaty between Esarhaddon and Baal of Tyre, in which Shalmaneser is expressly styled the son of Tiglath-pileser”. Boutflower makes reference here to H. Winckler (in Eberhard Schrader’s Keilinschriften, 3^rd Edn. pt. I, p. 62, note 2); Winckler being the Assyriologist, we might recall, who had with Delitzsch spirited Sargon’s name into Eponym Cb6 and whose edition of Sargon’s Annals had disappointed Luckenbill. So far, I have not been able to find any solid evidence for this document.

Boutflower had surmised, on the basis of a flimsy record, that Tiglath-pileser III had died in battle and had been succeeded by Shalmaneser:[5] “That Tiglathpileser died in battle is rendered probable by the entry in the Assyrian Chronicle for the year 727 B.C. [sic]: “Against the city of …. Shalmaneser seated himself on the throne”.” Tiglath-pileser is not even mentioned.

A co-regency between Shalmaneser V and Sargon II can be proposed on the basis that the capture of Samaria is variously attributed to either king. According to my revision, that same co-regency should exist between Tiglath-pileser III and Sargon; and indeed we find that both Tiglath-pileser III and Sargon campaigned on the borders of Egypt; both defeated Hanno the king of Gaza, and established (opened) there a karu “quay”; both received tribute from Queen Tsamsi of Arabia; both had encounters with Merodach-baladan. Further, according to my revision, that proposed co-regency can be extended to accommodate Sennacherib (as Sargon). Perhaps a clear proof is that, whilst Sennacherib claimed that the Medes had not submitted to any of his predecessor kings (see p. 153), both Tiglath-pileser and Sargon claimed to have received tribute from the Medes. 

Interestingly, nowhere in Kings, Chronicles, or in any other of the books traditionally called ‘historical’, do we encounter the name ‘Sargon’. Yet we should expect mention of him if his armies really had made an incursion as close to Jerusalem as ‘Ashdod’ (be it in Philistia or Judah). Certainly, Sargon II claimed that Judah (Iaudi), Philistia (Piliste), Edom and Moab, had revolted against him.[6] If the Assyrian king, Sargon II, can have two different names – as is being agued here – then so might his father. So I conclude that 2 Kings, in the space of 2 chapters, gives us three names for the one Assyrian king:

 

      - 15:19: “King Pul of Assyria came against the land ...”.

      - 15:29: “King Tiglath-pileser of Assyria came and captured …”.

      - 17:3: “King Shalmaneser of Assyria came up”.

 

 

 

 

(iii) [Book of Judith]

 

The testimony of [Book of Judith] should not be dismissed lightly for it is – as we shall discover in Volume Two – a very ancient document that has been copied frequently.

Now, there is only the one Assyrian king, ‘Nebuchadnezzar’,[7] ruling throughout the entire drama of [Book of Judith], and he has likenesses to ‘both’ Sennacherib and Sargon II. Thus:

 

• (As Sennacherib) The incident to which the climax of [the Book of Judith] drama could be referring, if historical, is the defeat of Sennacherib’s army of 185,000; yet
• (As Sargon II) The Assyrian king in [the Book of Judith] 1 seems to equate well with Sargon, inasmuch as he commences a war against a Chaldean king in his Year 12.
   
  So it might be asked: Was [Book of Judith’s] Assyrian king, Sargon or Sennacherib?
  The question of course becomes irrelevant if it is one and the same king. 
   

…. 

(iv) [Book of Tobit]

 

[The Book of Tobit], like [the Book of Judith], was a popular and much copied document. The incidents described in [Book of Tobit] are written down as having occurred during the successive reigns of ‘Shalmaneser’, ‘Sennacherib’ and ‘Esarhaddon’. No mention at all there of Sargon, not even as father of Sennacherib. Instead, we read: “But when Shalmaneser died, and his son Sennacherib reigned in his place ...” (1:15). Moreover this ‘Shalmaneser’, given as father of Sennacherib, is also - as we saw - referred to as the Assyrian king who had taken into captivity Tobit’s tribe of Naphtali (vv. 1-2); a deed generally attributed to Tiglath-pileser III and conventionally dated about a decade before the reign of Sargon II. This would seem to strengthen my suspicion that Shalmaneser V was actually Tiglath-pileser III, despite Boutflower’s claim of a treaty document specifically styling Shalmaneser as son of Tiglath-pileser III.

 

A Summarising and Concluding Note

 

The neo-Assyrian chronology as it currently stands seems to be, like the Sothic chronology of Egypt - though on a far smaller scale - over-extended and thus causing a stretching of contemporaneous reigns, such as those of Merodach baladan II of Babylonia, Mitinti of ‘Ashdod’ and Deioces of Media. There are reasons nonetheless, seemingly based upon solid primary evidence, for believing that the conventional historians have got it right and that their version of the neo-Assyrian succession is basically the correct one. However, much of the primary data is broken and damaged, necessitating heavy bracketting. On at least one significant occasion, the name of a king has been added into a gap based on a preconception. Who is to say that this has not happened more than once? Esarhaddon’s history … is so meagre that recourse must be had to his Display Inscriptions, thereby leaving the door open for “errors” according to Olmstead.

With the compilers of the conventional neo-Assyrian chronology having mistaken one king for two, as I am arguing to have occurred in the case of Sargon II/Sennacherib, and probably also with Tiglath-pileser III/Shalmaneser V, then one ends up with duplicated situations, seemingly unfinished scenarios, and of course anomalous or anachronistic events. Thus, great conquests are claimed for Shalmaneser V whose records are virtually a “blank”. Sargon II is found to have been involved in the affairs of a Cushite king who is well outside Sargon’s chronological range; while Sennacherib is found to be ‘interfering’ in events well within the reign of Sargon II, necessitating a truncation of Sargon’s effective reign in order to allow Sennacherib to step in early, e.g. in 714 BC, “the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah” (2 Kings 18:13; Isaiah 36:1), and in 713 BC (tribute from Azuri of ‘Ashdod’).

[End of quote]

 

 

Governor Felix

 

‘Aren’t you the Egyptian who started a revolt and led four thousand terrorists

out into the wilderness some time ago?’

 

Acts 21:38

Good luck to anyone who is able to convert the Jewish Jesus Christ of the New Testament, whose death occurred early during the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, into a rebel insurgent leading a force of 4000 murderous sicarii (assassins) at Mount Olivet, or into the wilderness, at a point late in the procuratorship of Felix - and an “Egyptian” rebel at that!

Dr. Lena Einhorn of Stockholm, though, has attempted to do just that in her, albeit most intriguing, book, A Shift in Time, How Historical Documents Reveal the Surprising Truth about Jesus (2016).

 

 

And she does so likewise in her article, “Jesus and the Egyptian Prophet”: http://lenaeinhorn.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Jesus-and-the-Egyptian-Prophet-12.11.25.pdf

 

What can happen with the way that ancient history (and dare we say also much of AD history) has been, in many cases, erroneously reconstructed, with the duplicating of eras and rulers, is that a certain biblical situation can appear to emerge far more clearly at a time later than it historically should. A classic example of this is with the surprise finding of historians and biblical commentators that king Nabonidus of Babylon, dated some years after the death of king Nebuchednezzar II of Babylon, is found to match the biblical “Nebuchadnezzar”, of, say, the Book of Daniel, far better than does the historical Nebuchednezzar II.

 

And Lena Einhorn thinks, similarly, that she has found better parallels with Jesus Christ in the time of the procurator Felix (a contemporary of St. Paul) than at the time of Pontius Pilate – hence her proposed “Shift in Time” of some two decades.

 

In the case of the Babylonian dynasty, the solution to the seeming displacement is that - at least according to the AMAIC’s scheme of things - some of the Babylonian kings have been duplicated. The reason why king Nabonidus makes such an excellent “Nebuchadnezzar” of the Book of Daniel is because Nabonidus is the historical Nebuchednezzar II, is the “Nebuchadnezzar” of the Book of Daniel. The Book of Daniel informs us, in Chapter 5, famous for the Writing on the Wall, that “Nebuchadnezzar” was succeeded by his son, “Belshazzar”. And that very son is attested in Baruch 1:11: “ … pray for the life of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and of Belshazzar, his son …”.

And it is well known to historians that the son of Nabonidus was also Belshazzar.

But biblical commentators, following an erroneous Babylonian history quite incompatible with the Bible, must feel the need to drop in a corrective note here to Baruch 1:11:

 

* [1:11] Nebuchadnezzar…Belshazzar, his son: Belshazzar was the son of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, not of Nebuchadnezzar, the destroyer of Jerusalem. Belshazzar was co-regent for a few years while his father was away in Arabia. Later Jewish tradition seems to have simplified the end of the Babylonian empire (cf. Dn 5:1–2), for three kings came between Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus.

 

Now, when Dr. Einhorn wrote to me (Damien Mackey), pointing out what she considered to be some seemingly striking parallels between “the Egyptian” (as portrayed by the Jewish historian, Josephus), and Jesus Christ, I suspected that the procurator in either case, Felix (for the Egyptian) and Pontius Pilate (for Jesus Christ) must be duplicates. What I think may bear this out is the fact that St. Paul tells Felix that the latter had judged the nation of Israel for many years (see below) – a situation which would not apply in the conventional ordering of things, but would apply if Pontius Pilate ‘runs into’, is, the same person as Felix.

Anyway, I, having read through a substantial amount of the material that Dr. Einhorn referenced for me on the subject, wrote her this my summary of it all:

 

Dear Lena,

 

Many thanks for your interesting contributions which I have enjoyed reading ….

What I got out of it, though, is not what you would have wanted me to get out of it.
Your showing how well Procurator Felix fits the biblical Pontius Pilate was a revelation to me.

St. Paul says to Felix that the latter had been a judge of the nation "for many years" (Acts 24:10), which could not be true of just Felix at that time (about a handful of years only). But it would be perfectly true were Felix to be merged with Pontius Pilate, making for some two decades of overall governorship.

And, regarding the startling likenesses between some aspects of Jesus and "the Egyptian" - though one would be very hard put indeed to make of Jesus, "love thy enemy", "he who lives by the sword will die by the sword", "my kingdom is not of this world", "render to Caesar", a murderous revolutionary.

What happens is that the influential life of Jesus Christ gets picked up and absorbed into pseudo-historical characters, such as the Buddha (his birth was miraculous, he supposedly walks on water, he has 12 inner apostles and 72 outer ones, etc.), Krishna, Prophet Mohammed, and, most notably, Apollonius of Tyana, whom many regard as being the actual model for the biblical Jesus.

Unfortunately for Apollonius, his association with Nineveh (destroyed in 612 BC and whose location was totally unknown until the C19th AD), renders him an historical absurdity - same with Mohammed and his various associations with Nineveh.

Also Heraclius of Byzantium for the very same reason.

Josephus has obviously merged into the one scenario, two very disparate characters: Jesus Christ and the Egyptian.

Hence some incredibly striking parallels mixed with some impossible differences. ….

---

[1] Ancient Iraq, p. 310. And S. Smith wrote: “Of the short reign of Shalmaneser V no historical record is extant”. ‘The Supremacy of Assyria’, p. 42.

[2] Op. cit. p. 341.

[3] Ibid, pp. 184-185.

[4] Ibid, pp. 75-76.

[5] Ibid, p. 75.

[6] Luckenbill, op. cit, # 195, p. 105. Again, the Assyrian scribes of Tiglath-pileser III and Sennacherib used “stereotypical military imagery” in regard to, respectively, Rezin of Syria and Hezekiah of Judah, each having been “shut in like a bird in a cage”. S. Irvine, Isaiah, Ahaz, and the Syro-Ephraimitic Crisis, p. 30, including n. 21.

[7] Regarding the use of ‘Nebuchednezzar’ for Sargon/Sennacherib, see Chapter 7 of this thesis.

[8] Taken from C. Archer’s The Assyrian Empire, p. 66 for Sargon II (“Sargon II and an attendant eunuch. Young boys were made eunuchs when given to the king as tribute. In Assyrian art they are always shown as being both beardless and chubby. Drawing of a bas-relief from Khorsabad”); p. 79 for Sennacherib (“Sennacherib accepting the defeat of the vanquished. Engraving of a bas-relief from Nimrud”).