This Ain't Your Mom's Traditional Greek/Roman Classical Education
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we are turning our attention today to the ancient empire of Assyria.
We left off last time with Elijah/Elisha in the history of Israel, and right around the corner is the Assyrian empire, so let’s put this back in context, pick up where we left off last week, and then we’ll do a jump back in history. We’ll step into our Tardis and figure out where the Assyrians came from.
You point out something kind of indirectly that of course is very important to our study of history, and that is sequence. It is not uncommon even for history majors to know these kingdoms and cultures on their own ground and own terms, and really not have a clue how they fit into God’s story and how they advance his plot.
Anybody who’s a history major and at least a junior should at least know that there was this thing called Assyria and that it was important in Mesopotamia and all that, but Assyria lasted a long time. To connect that with the story of God’s unfolding covenant may be very difficult for them. “Yeah, there was some interaction with Israel, I think – something about one of their kings shutting up the king of Judah in a cage, something like that?”
To add to the Assyrians short shrift in a classical school setting, you’re really not going to hear much about it because they’re not Greece, they’re not Rome, they’re not Persia.
Right, they’re not even Babylon. “We’ve never heard of Assyria.” Why is that?
You know, I have no idea but I’m going to be mean and nasty and tell you what I think.
I didn’t underhand pitch that question to you for you to say you have no idea.
Well, I hadn’t thought about it until I thought about it for like a second and it became rather obvious. It’s because it’s not part of the traditional classical Greek/Roman education, and because that classical Greek/Roman education does not begin with scripture. It throws scripture in later.
If you’re working your way through the Bible it’s impossible to avoid Assyria. You plow right into it in 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Isaiah, Jonah, and a couple other places. But if you’re not actually reading the Bible and you just pick up with “where all good history books start – Greece,” then you probably won’t know anything about it, so we’re not going to do that.
I’m going to put in the answer that I expected you to give, which is that a lot of classical education relies on older educational materials, which might actually predate the study of archeology.
Well, yes, there is that. That was in the back of my mind and it just didn’t occur to me that’s what you were actually going for because of what you just said – I was not supplying that some of the older books do go back before archeology really got off the ground.
There was a time in the late 1800s when the higher critics were saying, “Assyria? No, that’s a myth. Nineveh never existed, or all that stuff. The Bible just made that up. Well, there’s a couple references here and there that are true in the classical writers, but there’s not a scrap of archeological evidence so probably it was just kind of a cultural myth that floated around, stories that went from country to country, and the Bible borrowed them as everyone else did, and there you go.”
“And by no archeological evidence we mean it’s not on our road maps,” because archeology didn’t exist yet.
That’s true, it didn’t. It started with Champollion in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, but the first thing that this newfound science of archeology did was to look at Egypt because all the relics were above ground and plastered with these hieroglyphic things. Then along comes Schliemann and uncovers the ruins of Troy, so now we’ve got Greece in.
Assyria was probably the next major thing to be pulled into the picture, but again Egypt was above ground so everyone knew about that. With Schliemann, everybody knew The Iliad so he used that as a road map to try to find a likely spot.
As for Assyria, there was this young guy named Austen Henry Layard. This was the height of the Victorian period where Britain ruled the seas and the world, and the sun never set on the English empire. He and a friend decided – having nothing better to do in England – that they were going to walk to India, to Ceylon actually, and pick up government posts there because they knew people who knew people.
They never made it. We don’t really know what happened to his friend, but they parted company in Mesopotamia because they each had things they wanted to see, old ruins and things. Layard ended up in the city of Mosul, which was not much of anything at that point, but right across the Tigris there was this big mound that looked really suspicious because it was not a naturally-occurring mound so what is it and why is it there?
Layard went out and kind of kicked around in it and began to get really suspicious and eventually arranged for some digging to be done. By the time he could get locals to do the labor they wouldn’t go out there at night because there were demons, but they began to uncover weird big statues, things with the heads of men and bodies of lions and great wings – cherubim, guardian sphinxes. What they had uncovered was Nineveh and suddenly everyone had to say, “Uh oh. We need to rewrite our history books just a little bit.”
“There actually was a Nineveh and it was kind of big and impressive and important.” Then they looked out over the wilderness and saw all these other mounds that were just sitting there. “Oh no. You mean these are all buried cities and we’ve been ignoring them for how long? We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
As a pre-recommendation recommendation I recommend The Luck of Nineveh by Arnold Brackman, who tells Austen Henry Layard’s story. It is a fascinating story and he’s a fascinating character. He was Indiana Jones before there was an Indiana Jones. The adventures he has are crazy. He was a spy. He was a schoolteacher. He was a writer. He was an explorer. He was all kinds of fun things.
So we’re back to this Assyria thing. If you were reading the Bible it’s right there. Unless you decide that you don’t believe the Bible you’ve got to deal with this thing. It’s a huge empire.
As you say, we left off with Elijah. He’s followed by a successor, Elisha, and one of Elisha’s tasks was to anoint the next king of Israel, who would not be in the line of Ahab and Jezebel and all that. He’d be an army captain, a young man named Jehu who would rise up and destroy the house of Ahab, destroy Baal worship, and thus the Phoenician element that we were talking about before.
He made himself king, and God – as a reward for his zeal, not exactly righteous zeal but zeal nonetheless – promised that his sons to the fourth generation would sit successfully on the throne. So Israel continues to prosper and we go through Jehu, Jehoahaz, Jehoash, and we come to Jeroboam II.
At this point, although the prophets are denouncing Israel’s sin left and right, everything looks great. Jeroboam recovers territory. Apparently at this point, although Assyria has been an issue, it kind of backs off for a while. We’ll talk about that in a second. Everything is just great. Nothing could possibly go wrong here.
Meanwhile in the south, when the house of Ahab goes down, the queen mother Athaliah who’s the daughter of Jezebel sees her opportunity, goes into the palace nursery and kills all the royal children except one young boy named Joash, who is rescued by the high priest and his daughter. Eventually he comes to the throne through a conspiracy of light, and we again tick off kings that are fairly familiar if you’ve read the books of Kings and studied it a bit, or Chronicles, and we come very quickly in that line to a very wicked king named Ahaz.
Now we have Israel in the north. It’s peaked its power under the rule of Jeroboam II and then begins to spin down, and while all this is happening here comes on the horizon this great powerful bear of an empire called Assyria.
If we look back further to Genesis, which is where everything begins, we find in the table of nations that Assyria as a people were descended from Shem. They’re Semitic. But we also see that shortly after Babel our tyrant Nimrod goes up into Assyria and founds this city called Nineveh. The original capital of the country was called Ashur. The people were called Ashur. The capital was called Ashur. Their ancestor is Ashur and their chief god is their ancestor deified called Ashur. A lot of Ashurs going around. It was the Greeks who couldn’t pronounce it right and ended up calling it Assyria, as they screwed up everybody else’s names.
So there had been an Assyrian presence there for a long time. It’s connected with Nimrod and Babel and all of that. It’s Mesopotamian. It shares the same sort of dream of one-world order. We’ll talk about their particular spin on it later, but they come and go in the background. During the time of the Judges and David and Solomon, they are minor players to the north and we don’t see much of them, we don’t worry about them, but now they’re making a big comeback.
If you’ve read the Old Testament, names like Tiglath-Pileser and Sennacherib might be familiar names because now Assyria is expanding. First of all though, it’s started, it’s getting scary, and God calls this guy named Jonah to go preach to them and tell them that God is displeased and that it’s all over for them. 40 days and their capital Nineveh will be destroyed.
Most of us know the story. Jonah doesn’t want to go because he’s afraid God is going to be gracious, so he jumps on a ship for Tarshish, the end of the world. God raises up a storm and the mariners are forced to throw him overboard to get rid of him, and this great fish swallows him and eventually upon his repentance spits him up on dry ground, and he goes back to Nineveh and finally grudgingly preaches. The whole city repents and Jonah is not happy and that’s where the book ends. But it did apparently stop the Assyrian war machine for a generation.
They stopped spreading and pushing and conquering for a generation, and Jesus himself bears witness to it. “The men of Nineveh repented at the preaching of Jonah. Behold one greater than Jonah is here,” so it was a real revival, one of the greatest in the history of the world because all they had was 40 days and Nineveh is destroyed. So that’s during the days of Jeroboam II in the northern kingdom of Israel.
But the people of Nineveh apparently were unable or incompetent enough to transmit their faith to the next generation, and in the next generation or so Assyria renews its conquests and begins spreading out, so by the time we get to the middle of 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles, Assyria is now the great danger. Until the coming of Babylon it occupies the hearts of those two historical books and makes a lot of noise in Isaiah’s prophecy as well.
Assyria is interesting to think about because it shows us the pattern that we see in Old Testament history that God raises up these empires, these pagan nations to either save them as often a condemnation of Israel or Judah’s unbelief, and to call them to repentance and say, “The Gentiles are turning. I’m treating them well and blessing them. I’m going to make you jealous,” or it’s to use them as an arm of judgement. It's interesting it shows those two sides of judgement, either punishment or a call to repentance that brings life.
So there’s these little snippets, and we think of Romans 11 and how he calls the Gentiles so that Israel would be jealous in a sense and say, “Hey, wait a minute, we were the first.” But he does this with every single one of these empires, where you have rulers and the people in general hear the word of God and actually repent, and God’s people like in the time of Jeroboam II are not listening to him at all and they’re trusting in their own wealth and power. Yet we see somebody far more powerful like Assyria turn to the Lord in complete humility and submission.
The same thing with Babylon, Media-Persia, maybe not so much with Greece, but the ones that we see in the Bible particularly pictured are showing us God’s pattern in history.
And that’s so clearly imaged in Jonah. You mentioned how it ends with Jonah just being grumpy, grumpy even to death. We don’t know how Jonah’s personal story ended, just as we don’t know how the older brother of the prodigal son ended up. It’s God’s scheme of giving grace to show that he will give grace.
I appreciate you tying this in with judgement because often when we speak of judgement, all people see is negativity and an angry God and “Where’s the love and grace of God?” and “It’s not the last day yet so God doesn’t really judge.” That’s to completely misunderstand God’s judgement in history. “There is a God that judges in the earth” we’re told more than once.
It serves a number of purposes. First, it’s to stop really bad people from being really bad people because they’re hurting other people who aren’t quite as bad. Sometimes they’re persecuting the church. They need to be stopped. That’s love to God’s church and to just poor people who are oppressed. God actually doesn’t want wicked governments and kings and emperors oppressing even their own people. That’s not what God wants. It would not be loving for God to let that just go on and on and on.
And that’s what he tells us when he institutes the death penalty at the very beginning of the new world after the flood. It’s not good that wickedness should be unbridled.
Exactly, but then on top of that there’s the fear of the Lord factor. God brought judgement and he spared you. At least you’re not dead. If you’re here hearing the message you’re not dead yet. This judgement has bought you time and the ability to face yourself and think. Know ye not that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?
If God just lets you go on, not only do you go on hurting people but you go on thinking, “God doesn’t hear. God doesn’t see. I can get away with this forever,” and that also would not be loving of God. He needs to draw lines in the sand so that people realize, “Uh oh. There is a God and I’m in a lot of trouble.” That doesn’t mean they always listen, but at least God shakes his spear to get their attention. And of course if they don’t then that’s more wrath on them in the end.
Judgement is not a bad thing. Judgement is God saying, “Hey, come over here. Let me look at you. Let’s talk.” Some bad things may happen to you, but if you survive, repentance is always a possibility. God is gracious. God will always receive those who turn to him in fear and in faith.
And of course you can’t leave out the final option of judgement, that you come before God and he judges you righteous, which is the goal of all this.
Yes, so all of that is weaving through all of this. Rachel, I know you did some research so let’s pull that in right now while I’m thinking of it. Assyria becomes part of this age-old dream of this new world order. We’re going to have a one-world government. We’re going to be the unity. You were telling us about the seal or flag or something of Assyria.
Yes. I was looking up just out of curiosity what is the symbol of Assyria. It was interesting to find it in a modern organization called the Assyrian Cultural Foundation that tells people to display this flag as part of their cultural heritage, particularly those that still look back and call themselves Assyrian by being old churches from that area.
It was a weird combination. You have the Chaldean church and the Assyrian church that are still variations on Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic in the Middle East, so that was kind of a weird combination, but it gave me an explanation of their flag.
It begins in the center with a sun, of course the sun being in their imagery the source of light and life and all things – the energy of the universe. Then it has four compass points going out to symbolize in a sense the spread of their land, and they considered themselves to basically rule all the land that there was in the four directions of the world.
Those basically make a cross, and then between those four points going out in four directions are these three rivers, the three rivers in their area – the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Great Zab. You can see it looks like all the rivers are flowing toward the center, towards them, so they control the land pointing in all directions and everything flows into them in that sense of, “We are the center. We are the source. We are the sun that everything orbits around.”
They will not be the first or the last to pick up this imagery. We can think of a more modern example with someone like Louis XIV who was called the Sun King, where he literally believed that everything should orbit around him. He made his palace filled with all sorts of celestial references of the gods of the different planets and things like that.
It’s that idea that the source of life, all aspects of the world should be – or they claim to be – under their dominion and rule, with one single center, of course, that everything is supposed to point to, look to, and find their source in. It's the same world order religion that we have coming all the way from Babel forward, but you see it symbolized literally in that flag.
They do also add to their flag the symbol of Ashur, their god. If you look at that it changes over time. It reminds me a little bit of those cherubim guardians mixed with a bow and arrow because he is sometimes called the God of war. Sometimes it has a sun flaming around him. Normally he has some form of wings, and sometimes there’s a snake because they do also positively call themselves the Great Dragon, the Great Serpent. It’s another way of showing that over them in some form helping them is this god, though they never really consider him a singular god. He’s still one of many, but it’s their preferred ancestor.
So we’re seeing the ancestor worship, the worship of the dead again. Assyria lies on the northern side of the Tigris River, but this is still more or less Mesopotamia. It’s not exactly in the middle, still slightly to one side, but it’s that same region. Ashur was the original capital. Eventually Nineveh becomes the capital. When Jonah’s preaching is done, the Assyrians in a generation or two are out again conducting war. The Old Testament in the books of Kings and Chronicles at this point draws our attention to it.
First of all we talked about Jonah and we know his story pretty well, I would think, but then in the southern kingdom a man named Ahaz comes to the throne. His father and grandfather had been pretty godly kings and had done most things well. He’s a complete rat. He does not love God. In fact, he hates God and shows contempt for God.
Isaiah is prophesying at this point, and it’s at this point that the northern kingdom of Israel and the kingdom north of them that we call Syria – they called themselves Aram, as in Aramaic – these two kingdoms Syria and Israel had been fighting for a long time. In the first part of the book of 2 Kings that’s largely what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with wars back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Then suddenly they stop and they drop their battleaxes, shake hands, and say, “There’s something bigger and badder coming over the horizon. If we work together maybe we can stand up to it. Let’s send messengers down to Egypt. Yeah, they’ll be with us. Then there’s Judah. Hey, Ahaz, want to be part of a coalition that opposes the coming of this great nation of Assyria?” and Ahaz says, “No, I don’t like you guys. I don’t want to play with you.”
“No, really. We need you. We’re not going to fight Assyria to the north and have you at our backs being a sissy, so get with it.”
It’s at this point that some of the history in the book of Isaiah begins, and it’s echoed in Chronicles and in Kings. God sends Isaiah to Ahaz, and Ahaz and his people are getting a little worried because the word on the street is that Syria and Israel, not having been able to come to terms with Ahaz, are going to turn on him, join forces, take Jerusalem, put a puppet king on the throne, and turn around and be ready for when Assyria comes.
Isaiah comes and says, “Don’t worry about this. Got you covered. Israel is my people, although you have to trust me. So ask a sign of the Lord your God. Ask it either in the heavens above or in the deep beneath,” and Ahaz looks at Isaiah and says, “I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord my God,” and Isaiah says –
And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David; Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
And so begins Isaiah’s famous Christmas sermon. There are little pieces here and there that we know all about, a light shining in Galilee, unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, the root of the house of David, the lamb laying down with the lion, the world being full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea – in chapters 7-12 – one of the more famous sections of Isaiah that we read verses from every year.
But what most people don’t know, I suspect, is the context is, “Okay Ahaz, you think you’re all that because you’re the house of David and God has made commitments and promises, and you can use God and ignore him and treat him any way you want, and he’s bound by his promise always to be there and pick up your dirty work afterwards. No, it does not work that way. God and his prophets don’t need you. We don’t need the house of David as you’re fancying it, because you know what? God can bring forth Messiah from a virgin.”
People wonder about that. “What’s that got to do with anything?” Well, it’s got this to do with it. God is not going to need the kings of the house of David. He will use them, but it turns out in the long run that Messiah is not born from their genes, from their blood. He comes through another son of David, a man named Nathan. Mary is the blood descendant of Nathan, not a blood descendant of the kings of Israel. So the kings of Israel are free to go to the chopping block at this point. He will eventually use the title that passes through the kingly line, but he will not use a drop of their blood.
That’s largely what this Christmas sermon is about. God is not thwarted by Syrian might or his people’s unbelief. He’s going to bring forth Messiah in his time, and though he come as a child he will be God with us, Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
Ahaz does not buy into this at all. He kind of grunts and groans and sends messengers to the king of Assyria and says, “Hey, I want to be your friend. I am your son. I am your tributee. Here’s money. Go attack those other nations, please.” And the king of Assyria says, “Oh, okay.” This is sort of background material, sort of not.
We run into Tiglath-Pileser III. The Bible calls him Tiglath-Pileser, Pul, a bunch of names. He listens to Hezekiah, and probably already had this on his agenda anyway, and he comes against Syria, destroys it, carries its people captive, and moves on to Israel. He does not finish the job but he begins the deportation of northern Israel into Assyria, and that’s a job that the later kings will finish.
Here I think is a good time to say something about Assyria’s version of the new world order. As we continue our study of history we’re going to go to Babylon, Medo Persia, Greece, and Rome. These are all variations on a theme. As I mentioned before the broadcast started, later on one of the histories will look at the kings of Persia and call them the kings of Assyria. It’s easy for skeptics to say, “They can’t even get their own history right.” No, God knows exactly what he’s doing. This is the same empire. It just keeps morphing a little bit and they each have their own flavor.
Assyria’s flavor was remarkably brutal and honest. “You will serve us and you will do what we say or we will wipe you off the face of the earth, and we’ll scare you to death along the way. There you go. Anybody want to stand up to us now?”
It’s kind of an interesting inversion of God’s pattern. The empire that conquers in the worldly sense simply becomes another form of what it supposedly conquered, whereas with God’s kingdom the light overcomes the darkness. We conquer our enemies by making them our friends, and we’re still winning. It’s the opposite.
Yes. Assyria’s idea was first of all – talk about terror – “Let’s act really terrible. When we defeat people let’s behead the corpses. Let’s skin them alive, or skin them dead as the case may be, and take those human skins to the next city we plan to attack and nail the human skins to their gates,” with the implied message being “surrender or this happens to you.” Oddly enough, a lot of people surrendered.
But once they conquered these lands, often in order to prevent revolution and in order to keep people from falling back on local/national loyalties or simply loyalty to the land they were on, they would take these people and would scatter them to the four corners of the earth. Thus it effectively becomes genocide, not in the sense that they tried to kill everybody of any given particular genetic stripe, but that they spread them out and mixed them so thoroughly on such an international scale that eventually say you’re an Israelite and you go into captivity. The guy on one side is a Philistine and the guy on the other is Syrian and the guy across the way is from Egypt and the guy around the block is from Babylon.
You don’t even speak the same language. You don’t have the same gods. What do you have? That you’re all citizens of the Assyrian empire.
Right, there’s nothing going on here. That was their goal, a new homogeneity that will simply be Assyrian and nothing else.
Well, as I say, it was straightforward, it was bold, it was frightening, and it did have this one thing – nobody liked them. Later with Persia, a lot of people didn’t really mind too much belonging to the Persian empire because they pretty much left you alone to do your own thing under your own people without interfering a whole lot, as long as you paid taxes and contributed soldiers to the army. But here, these are nasty people who do nasty things in very nasty ways.
So when Assyria finally falls it’s not to one nation it just accidentally runs into. It’s to a whole bunch of nations that have been warring against them for a long time and there simply comes a point where they all say, “What if we all took them on together?” and they do.
Assyria by that time has been so weakened and demoralized and effeminized, if that’s a word…
Yes. One of the pictures, which comes from the Greeks so it’s not wholly fair, but one of the last Greek pictures of the Assyrian culture is showing the last king living on his couch eating dainties and dressed like a woman in a woman’s make-up. That was their idea of how far the Assyrians had sunk. I assume the Greeks considered dressing like a woman as an insult. With the Greeks you’re never sure.
I think so. Anyhow, this is what’s going on. Ahaz is appealing to Assyria, and Assyria agrees and makes Israel their little pet, except being a pet to a tyrant turns out not to be so hot after all. In Kings we find Ahaz actually goes to visit Tiglath-Pileser when he takes Damascus, and there sees an altar and says, “What a cool altar. My altar is not nearly so cool.” He sends word back to the high priest, “Make me an altar like this.”
When he comes back the altar is made, and he takes God’s altar and makes it his private altar and puts this new altar in its place. He then constructs a sort of pathway from his own palace out into Jehovah’s temple complex, particularly for the king of Assyria should he ever come. I don’t think he ever did, but Ahaz is moving everything in terms of his total allegiance and total commitment to this pagan, his gods, and his worldview. Things are looking really bad and then Ahaz dies and his son comes to the throne.
His son is named Hezekiah. Somehow Ahaz was so busy doing his political shenanigans that he forgot to corrupt his son enough. His son may have hung out with grandfather Jotham or something, but anyway somehow he is a man of faith. If we were continuing with Israel’s history we’d talk about the great revival he led and the transformation of Israeli culture, but for our purposes Hezekiah says in so many words, “We’re done with this Assyria thing. We’re not going to kiss up to them. We’re not going to follow in their path. In fact, we’re not going to pay tribute.”
By now there’s a new king on the throne of Assyria. His name is Sennacherib. If you know British literature you may know the poem “The Destruction of Sennacherib” by Lord Byron.
He goes on to tell what the Bible tells us – that the Assyrian army delegated by Sennacherib comes all ready to trounce Jerusalem, and then God intervenes and it’s not a pretty picture. By the time they’re done, the Angel of the Lord, Jesus, intervenes. Byron’s closing lines are –
What happens is that Sennacherib doesn’t appreciate that Hezekiah isn’t paying tribute, and although he’s busy he’s not so busy he can’t deal with that. He sends armed forces to confront Hezekiah, and Hezekiah sends out his spokesman to meet Sennacherib’s spokesman. Kings, Chronicles, and Isaiah all describe what happens there.
There’s a lot of political gameplaying and one-upmanship as Sennacherib’s representative, Rabshakeh (a court title), tries to make fun of Hezekiah and Israel (Judah at this point) and everything else. He says, “And don’t trust your God because your God is the one who sent me to destroy you,” and unfortunately that seemed more than plausible at that point, because it sure could have been.
My husband David did a sermon on Isaiah 7 for Christmastime and he actually connected the two Ahaz and Rabshakeh stories, because they actually happen at the same pool in Jerusalem, the first place where Isaiah promises a sign to show that God can deliver by his own means, and when Ahaz turns to Assyria is then where Assyria comes and threatens. Now Hezekiah is going to have to go back and trust in the promise that Isaiah gave. It’s an interesting interplay between those two periods that I had not noticed before he pointed it out, so I thought I would throw it in there.
Yes, and it’s interesting what place it is. It’s the upward pool by the Fuller’s field. In other words, it’s the place that gives Jerusalem her water and it’s a place where you can make things white as snow, and that’s where the promise of the gospel is given. There are no coincidences here.
Rabshakeh threatens Hezekiah, and Hezekiah turns to God and God says, “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got it covered.” The Rabshakeh receives word from his master that amounts to, “Get back here. We have a problem. The Egyptians are coming.”
But before he goes very far the Rabshakeh sends back word to Hezekiah, “You’re not getting out of this. Don’t think you’re going to be rescued. Where are all the other nations? Where are the gods of the other nations? Do the gods of this city or that city or this city – how about the gods of Samaria? Did they rescue them? Who is your God that he should be able to rescue you from my hand?”
And Hezekiah takes the letter to the temple and spreads it out before God and points and says, “Look at this.” Meanwhile he sends messengers to Isaiah and says, “This is what’s going on,” and Hezekiah by divine inspiration replies, “Don’t even worry. Here’s the message you send back. The virgin daughter of Zion laughs you to scorn and sticks out her tongue at you. Thus says the Lord (in modern English), I know where you live.”
To Hezekiah it’s, “The remnant will escape, will put down roots, bear fruit. I’ve got you covered,” and that night the Angel of the Lord goes out and kills – I forget the number, but 100,000+ of the Assyrian troops, just about the time the Egyptian troops are showing up. So Sennacherib leaves rather quickly and goes home.
Sometime after – it’s not an immediate thing, but before too long his sons decide they don’t like their daddy, and while he’s worshiping in the house of his god they kill him and they run off to the northern kingdom of Urartu.
We don’t hear much about Urartu, but if you listen to the consonants – we call it Ararat and do does the King James version of the Bible. It was a major kingdom and it was one of the things that Assyria had to keep watching, because every time they turned their back it attacked them, more or less successfully. Apparently they had been bought off by the king of Urartu, so they flee up there. Sennacherib dies and his son Esarhaddon comes to the throne.
Assyria doesn’t go away. It might be easy to assume by reading scripture because Jerusalem isn’t immediately threatened that it just evaporates. No, it’s still there. Esarhaddon takes Egypt. There is something else though that’s going on here in the background that I almost forgot and it’s really important to the story.
About the time that Sennacherib was coming, Hezekiah, having led a great revival and done great things for God as he perceives it, falls sick and he calls for Isaiah. Isaiah says, “God says you’re dying. Get your house in order. It’s time. You’re done.”
Hezekiah can’t handle that and turns to God and weeps on his bed, and we have his prayer in Chronicles. “I’ve done all these things for you, and if I go down to the grave I can’t praise you.” Some of it sounds a bit like the psalms, but there’s none of this “…but not my will but yours.”
So before Isaiah has even gotten out of the palace God tells him, “Go back and tell him, ‘Okay, I hear you. I’m going to add 15 more years to your life,’” so Isaiah goes, “Fine, God heard you.” Hezekiah says, “What’s the sign that I’ll recover and go up to the house of the Lord and worship?”
Sure, God does signs all the time. “Look out there. There’s a sundial your dad created. You want the shadow to go forward 10 degrees or backwards 10 degrees?”
“Oh, it goes forward all the time. That’s just time passing. Let’s see it go backward!”
“Okay, fine.” So the shadow on the sundial, and therefore presumably the sun, move backward. Cool, Hezekiah’s going to live for 15 more years. During that time he begets a son named Manasseh who’s the worst king Judah ever has, who brings Judah to destruction. By the time he’s done God says, “We’re done. There’s nothing that’s going to fix this. It’s just a matter of time now.” So be careful what you pray for.
In Chronicles we’re told about the king of Babylon. At this point Babylon was not a huge empire. It was one city within the Assyrian empire that kept rebelling against Assyria – go figure that one – under the leadership of a man named Merodach-Baladan.
There are countries that are constantly throwing revolutions, and leaders that go into exile and come back and lead revolutions again. He’s one of those guys. I think three times he leads Babylon into rebellion, and finally they just say, “Enough is enough” and they destroy Babylon completely. Then Esarhaddon rebuilds it, the idiot.
But moving back, Merodach-Baladan, hanging out with the Babylonians, gets word, “Hey sire, we just saw something kind of weird.”
“It did what? Find out why that happened, please. You’re astrologers, right?”
Eventually they said, “You remember that thing about the sun? There’s this king over in this little place called Judah, and apparently his God moved the sun for him to show he was going to get well.”
“Or at least an alliance with the guy who works for him. Get some ambassadors. I want to send a present and a message.” So these messengers show up and inquire after Hezekiah’s health, and Hezekiah is so flattered that he shows the ambassadors everything. Of course he does.
When Premier Kruschev of the Soviet Union came to visit the United States, my first pastor who was doing a radio program in Oregon at the time used that as his material. “Yeah, these ambassadors come from a far place and you show them everything. You know what’s going to happen next?” At least this is what happened with Babylon.
Isaiah shows up a little late and says, “Wait, who are these guys? Where do they come from?”
“Oh, they’re from some little city, someplace called Babylon.” By the way, Babylon and Babel are the same word in Hebrew. They come from Babel. Hezekiah should have known what Babel was.
“Oh, there was nothing I hesitated to show them. Everything I have I showed them.”
“Aha. That was great. Hear the word of the Lord. Everything that you have, and all of your children and everything that you’re going to lay up is all going to go to this Babylon.”
The text says that God left him to see what was in his heart, something we can all pray that God does not do to us. So there’s that. Hezekiah in time goes to be with his Lord, and his son Manasseh comes to the throne, and Manasseh is the wickedest king that Judah has ever had. He institutes more idolatry, Baal worship, child sacrifice, astrology, persecutes God’s prophets, until finally the Assyrians come and they are tired of his shenanigans.
He’s probably bothered them too, and they throw him into a prison in Babylon, of all places. And in prison he faces God and repents, and God is merciful and restores him to the throne. He tries to fix things, but he’s an old man. His time is short and he can’t do a whole lot. He has a son named Amon who was as bad as he was at his bad point, but his reign is short. The next man on the throne of Judah is Josiah. Meanwhile, Israel has gone into captivity. The ten tribes to the north have been scattered. There’s nothing left there.
Josiah comes to the throne when Assyria is beginning to feel some heat from other directions, so he kind of has a free hand to roam up and down what had once been both Judah and Israel and get rid of idols and destroy all the superstitious and pagan elements that had permeated the land, and he does it. He leads a great revival and God uses him mightily.
Meanwhile, Assyria. Assyria has undergone extreme moral decline. They’ve lost focus. They’ve lost their vision for conquering and they’re just living it up on luxury. All of the major conquered nations around them, or the not-so-conquered nations – the nations they should have conquered or the ones that slipped through their fingers – all kind of get together. Again, one of them is Babylon, and they say in so many words, “Let’s get ‘em!” and all of these nations attack Nineveh. They take Nineveh, and the royal family and the army flees to a city called Carchemish on the Euphrates River – a flashback to scripture.
The Egyptians are a puppet state of Assyria at this point, and the king of Egypt is a man named Pharoah Necho and he says, “Hmm, it would be great to get up there and help my master and maybe rescue him. That would make me really cool and I’d get lots of favors, or you know, I could always maybe pick up the pieces if I can’t rescue him, and I could be the next big cheese on the block.” So he sets out and his path takes him right through Judah.
God is fine with this. Josiah is not. Josiah does not want to get wholly enmeshed in the geopolitical situation. He’s not committing the armies of Judah. He’s not sending troops. He’s staying out of it, but he does realize sort of, “You know, if I stick out my finger right now and Necho trips, if I can slow him down, I don’t have to go fight at Carchemish. I can just deprive the Assyrians of some key help and that would be a good thing.”
So as he gets ready to fight, Necho sends him a message that says, “I had a word from your God last night. He told me not to mess with you, so I’m going straight through. I’m not attacking you. I’m not invading. I’m going up to the Euphrates and I’ve got a battle there. Stay out of my face or you’ll have to answer to your God.”
Josiah – again, a low point – thinks, “Well, he says that but I mean I’m me. Wouldn’t Jeremiah or someone like that come and tell me? Why would I get a word of God from a complete Gentile pagan, because God never uses them. But if I go into battle he’ll try to avoid it because he doesn’t want to answer to what he says is God. I know, I’ll disguise myself and my army and we’ll go attack as a bunch of marauders and then he’ll fight us and we can engage.”
The battlefield is a place called Megiddo. The book of Revelation calls it Armageddon. He goes, he fights, he’s wounded, he dies, and this battle begins Judah’s spin down into destruction.
Necho reaches Carchemish, is unable to help, then runs back as fast as he can with his army, being pursued by the clear winner at Carchemish, a Babylonian general named Nebuchadnezzar, and that’s the end of the Assyrian empire as the Assyrian empire. Babylon is going to pick up the pieces, as we said earlier, and continue the dream. They’re just going to play the game a little nicer. We’ll be talking shortly about how Babylon plays the game, particularly as we see it through the eyes of Daniel and his companions.
That’s great. We went a little bit overtime, but for 1,000 years of history and an entire course of an empire I think we did pretty well. Let’s wrap up with some recommendations. I can go first. I have one that’s a musical group called They Might Be Giants. What brought them to mind is a song they have called The Mesopotamians, which deceptively is not about anything historical. It’s a song about this band called The Mesopotamians, and they drive around town in their van and no one’s ever heard of them, but they’re named for Mesopotamian kings, one of whom is Ashurbanipal who was an Assyrian king, so that’s why I thought of them.
They do have some great educational materials specifically marketed at children. They’re very well-written, they’re catchy, they’re interesting, very fun music. You might know “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” That’s them. They also did “Why Does the Sun Shine?” – “The sun is mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace…” another well-known catchy song.
At least they mean something. Do you know where the phrase “They might be giants” comes from?
It comes from a movie starring George C. Scott and I forget who the female lead is. Scott is delusional. He thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes. The female lead is a doctor named Watson who’s a psychiatrist. They have a conversation about reality and they talk about Don Quixote. Scott’s character, the would-be Sherlock Holmes, says “If he said ‘They are giants’ (the windmills) that would be insanity. When he says, ‘They might be giants’ that’s a wholly different perspective.” Anyway, just trivia. Rachel?
I’m going to recommend something different, trying new ethnic kinds of food. In marrying my husband David, I have found lots of different cuisines that he likes that I’ve never tried and vice versa. One of my favorites has been Ethiopian food. If you live in the Sacramento area there’s a wonderful authentic Ethiopian restaurant called Queen of Sheba. I want to say it’s on Broadway, somewhere near there.
It's fun to try out all the different spices or even make it at home and see how you use the same spices, but put them in different combinations. I’ve had a lot of fun trying to make things for David in the cuisines that he most enjoys, and often being able to use the same ingredients I normally have. So there’s my little plug – try something new. You might be surprised.
I already mentioned The Luck of Nineveh, but I’m going to recommend something else that’s more serious. It’s this whole business of teaching history. A lot of Christians have been pulled into something called classical Christian education. Depending on how you define that, it can be kind of okay or it can be really a trap.
Here’s my recommendation. If you are in Christian education and you’re teaching history, you start with the Bible. You do not start with the Greeks and Romans. You do not start with Herodotus. You do not start with Egyptian archeology. You start with the Bible and let it define the categories for you and let it trace your history.
Once you get to the point where we actually do have written records, fine, introduce those written records. Let the Bible judge their accuracy and proceed.
At the beginning of our conversation we said, “People don’t know about Assyria.” Well, they should if they’re Christians because it’s in the Bible all over the place. So if you have listened today and found that you really don’t know much about Assyria, read your Bibles and you will. Just begin at the beginning and proceed to the ending, then do it again. There’s my recommendation.
That’s a wonderful recommendation. Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure, as always. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks also to our transcriptionist, who donates the transcripts for Halting Toward Zion. If you’d like to receive those transcripts in your email inbox you can subscribe to our Substack. Send them to a friend who might be interested.
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