so that their heads may be held facing forward while the king puts out their eyes with a pointed instrument. Captives are there having their tongues torn out, others being stripped naked and flayed alive, while human heads are piled up into pyramids.
All these tortures the Jews themselves had to fear if Sennacherib should take Jerusalem. It was doubtless a day of terrible suspense in the Holy City, and a night in which few dared go to sleep. But. the early morning brought the tidings that the army of Sennacherib was destroyed, that the angel of the Lord had gone forth and slain in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred four score and five thousand men. We knew the Scripture story of the deliverance, but we can realise it better now when we have the record of the siege of Lachish, and know what fate threatened the Jews of Jerusalem.
Moreover, we have recovered Sennacherib's own account of this very campaign, in which he tells us that he had taken forty-six fenced cities in Judea, and that he shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem "like a bird in a cage." He forbears to tell us why he failed to capture the bird; he glosses over the disaster which befell his army; and he seems even to misrepresent the facts by declaring that, after this, Hezekiah sent him splendid presents to Babylon, for the presents of Hezekiah were sent before this, when Sennacherib was down by Lachish, and sent with the hope of buying him off, which there was no need to do after his retreat.
A great difficulty in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah is also satisfactorily cleared up by these inscriptions. Sennacherib, coming from the Philistine country to Jerusalem, would have to travel from the south-west, whereas, in an earlier chapter, Isaiah had told us that the Assyrian invader came down from the north, that he captured Carchemish in his way, and conquered Damascus, and took Samaria, and
