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by
Damien F. Mackey
“One
day, while [Sennacherib] was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisroch,
his
sons Adrammelek and Sharezer killed him with the sword, and they escaped
to
the land of Ararat. And Esarhaddon his son succeeded him as king”.
Isaiah 37:38
The
god name rendered in the Hebrew as Nisroch
(נִסְרֹךְ) is the
Assyro-Babylonian fire-god, Nusku.
This connection has been well explained by professor J. Dyneley Prince in his
article, “Nisroch and Nusku” (JBL, Vol.
23, No. 1 (1904), pp. 68-75).
On.
p. 68, the professor had noted: “There is no Assyrian or Babylonian deity Nisroch, but the consonantal elements of the
word have led a number of its expositors to look for its equivalent in the
name of the Assyrian fire-god Nusku ….
He
then asked this question:
Was
the Assyro-Babylonian god Nusku, whose name seems
to resemble the Hebrew word “Nisroch,” a deity of sufficient importance in the
Assyrian pantheon to justify this allusion to him in the Old Testament as being
the god par excellence of the great
Assyrian king Sennacherib …?
Things
do not appear to be immediately favourable in this regard.
However,
the professor does find that (on p. 69):
…
the silence of the ancient Babylonian
historical texts regarding Nusku, mentioned by Jastrow, is, I think, more than counterbalanced
by the existence of the name of this god in certain votive texts from the
ancient Cassite [Kassite] dynasty of Babylonia.
The
professor’s examination of this god in relation to Sennacherib, though, will
lead him to conclude that (pp. 72-73): “All this evidence seems to indicate that,
although. Nusku undoubtedly occupied a well-defined position in both the. Babylonian and Assyrian pantheons, he was distinctly a subordinate deity in the later Assyrian
divine hierarchy ….
On p. 73, he will make
this suggestion: “It is much more likely that [“Nisroch”| is a very corrupt hybrid form from both the names Nusku and Ašur….
The
professor’s conclusion on all of this being (p. 74):
I
am strongly inclined
to the view that the form נִסְרֹךְ
crept into the original text of 2 K. 1937 = Is. 3738 by
the hand of some copyist, who, possibly wishing to show his Assyriological
knowledge and also to make the text complete, inserted the vague form נִסְרֹךְ which had descended to him
from a confused mixture of tradition, embodying the well-known Ašur with the less known, but not
unimportant, fire-god Nusku.
The
fire-god Nusku, which Hildegard and
Julius Lewy have brilliantly identified as the planet Mercury (“The God Nusku”):
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/43078841.pdf
Another
dimension for Sargon II-Sennacherib: as Tukulti Ninurta I
of whom (Tukulti-Ninurta I) we have a depiction of him on his
knees worshipping the very god Nusku
(our “Nisroch”).
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