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16 the conquered cities Sennacherib '"killed their officials and_patri- cians . . . and hung their bodies on poles surrounding the city; the common citizens I considered prisoners of war." An artifact known as the Prism of Sennacherib preserved an his- torical inscription in which he made mention of the subjugation of Judea and his attack on Jerusalem. The quarrel Sennacherib had with its king, Hezekiah. was the fact that he held captive Padi, the king of the Philistine city of Ekron, "who was loyal to his solemn oath to his god Ashur." "As to Hezekiah, the Judean." Sennacherib wrote, "who did not submit to my yoke, I laid siege to forty-six of his strong cities, walled forts, and to the countless small villages in their vicin- ity. . . . Hezekiah himself I made captive in Jerusalem, his royal residence; like a bird in a cage I surrounded him with earth- works. . . . His towns which I had plundered I cut off from his land and gave them over to Mitinti, king of Ashdod; Padi. king of Ekron; and Sillibel, king of Gaza. Thus I reduced his country." The siege of Jerusalem offers several interesting aspects. It had no direct cause but only an indirect one: the forced holding there of the loyal king of Ekron. The "awe-inspiring Brilliance, the weapon of Ashur," which was employed to "overwhelm the strong cities" of Phoenicia and Philistia, was not used against Je- rusalem. And the customary inscriptional ending—"I fought with them and inflicted defeat upon them"—is missing in the case of Je- rusalem; Sennacherib merely reduced the size of Judea by giving its outlying areas to neighboring kings. Moreover, the usual claim that a land or a city was attacked upon the "trustworthy orders" of the god Ashur was also absent in the case of Jerusalem; one wonders whether all this meant that the at- tack on the city was an unauthorized attack—a whim of Sennach- erib himself but not the wish of his god? This intriguing possibility becomes a convincing probability as we read the other side of the story—for such an other side docs exist in the Old Testament. While Sennacherib glossed over his failure to capture Jerusalem, the tale in II Kings, chapters 18 and 19, offers the full story. We learn from the biblical report that "in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, came upon all the walled cities of Judea and captured them." He then sent two of his generals with a large army to Jerusalem, the capital. But instead of storming the city, the Assyrian general Rab-Shakeh began a verbal exchange with the city's leaders—an exchange he insisted on con- THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN