event · E0483
Siege of Lachish המצור על לכיש
In Chizkiyahu's fourteenth year, Sancheriv king of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Yehudah and seized them. The campaign's centerpiece was Lachish, the kingdom's second city: siege ramps, battering rams, and, when the wall fell, deportation. It was from his camp at Lachish that Sancheriv received Chizkiyahu's submission and dispatched Ravshakeh against Jerusalem — the opening act of the campaign that would end, without a conquest, beneath Jerusalem's walls.
I. Who
- Hebrew
- המצור על לכיש
- Also known as
- Fall of Lachish, Sancheriv's Campaign in Yehudah
- Era
- bible
II. When
- Traditional
- c. 3213 AM — Chizkiyahu's fourteenth year on the atlas's schematic royal chronology (accession 3199 AM)
- Civil (computed)
- 3213 AM · 548 BCE (trad.)
- Academic
- 701 BCE, fixed by the Assyrian eponym lists; Level III destruction layer at Tel Lachish
- Date range
- 701 BCE (academic); Chizkiyahu's fourteenth year, c. 3213 AM (traditional)
- Precision
- approximate
IV. What
- Events
- Taylor Prism, Lachish Reliefs, Sancheriv's Defeat at Yerushalayim
V. How do we know
| Claim | Evidence | Confidence | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sancheriv came up against all the fortified cities of Yehudah and seized them; Chizkiyahu sent his submission and tribute "to Lachish," and it was from Lachish that the king of Assyria sent Ravshakeh with a great army against Jerusalem — "for he was besieging Lachish, and all his power with him."
Confidence is for what the biblical text states. |
biblical | ★★★★★ | |
| Sancheriv told the story himself, twice over. His annals count forty-six fortified Judean cities taken by ramp and assault, and his palace at Nineveh devoted an entire room to Lachish alone — the relief cycle whose epigraph reads "Sennacherib, king of the world... sat upon a nimedu-throne while the booty of Lachish passed before him." No other event of Tanakh-era Yehudah was ever drawn by its contemporaries in such detail.
The prism and the relief room are both held as atlas artifacts — see the Taylor Prism (Taylor Prism) and the Lachish Reliefs (Lachish Reliefs). Excavations at Tel Lachish (Ussishkin) tie the city's Level III destruction — ramp, arrowheads, burnt gate — to this siege; the Babylonian destruction a century and a quarter later (Level II) is the layer of the Lachish Letters (Lachish Letters).
|
external | ★★★★★ | |
| Seder Olam sets Sancheriv's campaign in Chizkiyahu's fourteenth year, as the pasuk states; hung from the atlas's schematic royal chronology for Chizkiyahu (accession 3199 AM), the siege sits at c. 3213 AM. Academic chronology fixes the same campaign at 701 BCE from the Assyrian eponym canon.
Schematic placement for the atlas timeline; the traditional AM count and the academic BCE count do not map one-to-one across this period (the seam is flagged at Destruction of the First Temple).
|
tradition | ★★★☆☆ |
Referenced by: Sancheriv's Defeat at Yerushalayim