Woe to Nineveh, City of Blood

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Deuteronomy 29, in a similar manner to Leviticus 26, contains the Torah’s harshest warnings. Israel is told that persistent rebellion against God lead them to disaster. “When such a person hears the words of this oath and they invoke a blessing on themselves, thinking, I will be safe, even though I persist in going my own way, they will bring disaster on the watered land as well as the dry. The Lord will never be willing to forgive them; his wrath and zeal will burn against them. All the curses written in this book will fall on them, and the Lord will blot out their names from under heaven.”

Most of the forward-looking warnings in the Bible, along with the warnings of the prophets, focus on the people of Israel and Judah. But some prophets deviated from this theme and spoke of calamities for other nations.

Nahum and Zephaniah are two prophets in Terei Assar, ‘The Twelve.’ Both speak of an Assyrian collapse.

The dating of Nahum is anchored by historical events. Nahum 3:8 refers to the fall of No-Amon, which is Thebes, the capital of southern Egypt, as a past event. The Assyrian sack of Thebes occurred in 663 BCE under Ashurbanipal. At the same time, Nahum’s message anticipates the destruction of Nineveh, which fell in 612 BCE to a Babylonian-Median coalition. This places Nahum between those two dates.

Nahum 3 taunts Nineveh, “Woe to the city of blood.” Nahum compares Nineveh to Thebes, reminding Assyria that imperial power did not save Egypt’s great city, and it will not save Assyria’s capital either. The city that terrorized nations is now an object of scorn. “Nothing can heal you, your wound is fatal.”

Zephaniah follows a generation later. His dating stated as being during the reign of King Josiah, before the discovery of the Torah scroll. While Zephaniah addresses Judah’s internal corruption, idolatry, and complacency, his vision extends beyond Israel’s borders.

In Zephaniah 2, Assyria is the focus. God will “stretch out his hand against the north and destroy Assyria, leaving Nineveh utterly desolate.” Where imperial revelry once reigned, only animals will dwell. The city that once declared, “I am, and there is none besides me,” becomes a wasteland.

By the end of the seventh century BCE, these prophecies will have turned out to be correct prognostications. After centuries of terror as an empire dominating the ancient Near East, Assyria’s reign of terror would finally end.

The image above is of a relief of Sennacherib at Nineveh, with the Assyrian ruler’s face deliberately destroyed, literally defaced. 

Common Israelite and Assyrian Curses

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Deuteronomy 28 gives Israel a choice. “If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God… However, if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come on you and overtake you.” The text continues on to describe the terrible things which will befall Israel.

The idea of curses for disobedience, the types of curses, and their generational applicability are known elsewhere in the ancient Near East.

The Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon (VTE) was a succession oath imposed in 672 BCE by the Assyrian king Esarhaddon. The core obligation of the VTE is exclusive allegiance. It was to be signed by Assyrian officials and rulers within the Assyrian Empire to guarantee the uncontested succession of Esarhaddon’s son Ashurbanipal.

The curses in Deuteronomy 28 to be unleashed include drought, crop failure, disease, military defeat, siege, exile, and terror. The curses in the VTE escalate in intensity and cover every domain of life: agriculture, health, family, military, land, and burial. The treaty threatens drought, crop failure, locusts, famine, cannibalism, disease, blindness, madness, military defeat, siege, exile, sexual violence, extinction of offspring, and denial of burial.

A comparison of the two treaties show that both texts describe heaven turned to metal and rain transformed into dust or fire, locust consuming agriculture, famine escalating to cannibalism including parents eating children, pestilence and skin disease afflicting the population, blindness, madness, panic, military defeat, sexual violation of wives, loss of children, exile and denial of burial, with corpses consumed by animals.

These two treaties show a generalized form of loyalty oath that was used in this ancient region.

The image above is of a relief of people being deported to exile following defeat at the hands of the Assyrians.

Ivri or Ashurit, and Which Form?

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Deuteronomy 17 commands Israel’s king to write himself a copy of the Torah. “When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law, taken from that of the Levitical priests.” What is not said is exactly what script is to be used to write this scroll.

The contenders for the original script would be Ketav Ivri, the ancient Paleo-Hebrew script, or Ketav Ashurit, the alphabetic lettering system of the Assyrian Empire.

In the Jerusalem Talmud Megillah 1:9, some sages maintain that the Torah was originally given in Ketav Ivri and only later changed to Assyrian script in the days of Ezra. It notes that in the older script the letter ayin, drawn like an eye, left a center piece to float miraculously in the Ten Commandments. The Babylonian Talmud assumes that the Torah in its authoritative form is written in Ketav Ashurit, the square Hebrew script used today. In Shabbat 104a, the sages describe the letters engraved on the tablets, noting that closed letters such as samekh and final mem stood miraculously, since their inner spaces should have fallen out. This passage presumes the familiar square forms of Ketav Ashurit, where samekh is fully enclosed.

Ulitimately, today, it is Ketav Ashurit that is the lettering system that is used for Torah scrolls. This alphabetic system evolved over time.

Ksav Ashurit is an adaptation of Imperial Aramaic writing. When Assyria conquered Aram and much of the Near East, it ruled administratively in Akkadian, an East Semitic language written in wedge formed cuneiform. But Akkadian was not practical for daily communication and so Aramaic filled that role, becoming the lingua franca of the empire. With the language came its script. This Aramaic alphabet was a development of the same Northwest Semitic writing family as paleo-Hebrew, Ketav Ivri, but its letter forms evolved differently.

By the time of Ezra, Hebrew texts were being copied in this Aramaic-derived script. The Dead Sea Scrolls provide direct evidence for this process. Most biblical scrolls from Qumran are written in square Hebrew script recognizably ancestral to the modern form. The scrolls show that letter shapes were still fluid. The letter shapes continued to evolve until eventually they crystallized into today’s recognizable form.

The image above is of an earlier form of Ketav Ashurit, a precursor to today’s Hebrew lettering system.

The Many Aramaics, Past to Present

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Deuteronomy 13 establishes boundaries for evaluating a prophet. “If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder spoken of takes place, and the prophet says, Let us follow other gods, gods you have not known, and let us worship them, you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. It is the Lord your God you must follow, and him you must revere. Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him.”

Passages such as this one in Deuteronomy likely dissuaded Jews from joining the early Jesus movement and possibly explains why Christianity was rejected by the majority of Jews.

Aramaic was an important language for Jews. It became the spoken language in the Second Temple Period. It features heavily in biblical books such as Ezra/Nehemiah and Daniel. And it is the language of the Talmud. While Christianity veered away from Judaism to adopt its gentile form, it preserved the Aramaic language as a spoken language.

Languages evolve over time. Old English of just 1,000 years ago is incomprehensible to modern English speakers. Similarly, Aramaic has evolved over time. Scholars divide Aramaic into several major phases. Imperial (or Official) Aramaic emerged during the Assyrian and Persian empires as a standardized administrative language. This is the variety preserved in parts of the Hebrew Bible, especially in Daniel and Ezra. Middle Aramaic refers to a range of regional dialects used between roughly 300 BCE and 600 CE, including the languages of the Talmuds and early Christian liturgies. Neo-Aramaic describes the modern spoken descendants that survive today in scattered communities.

Within each period, Aramaic displays significant diversity. This is especially clear in the Talmudic corpus. The Jerusalem Talmud is written in Western, Jewish-Palestinian Aramaic. Its language reflects the speech of Roman-period Galilee and Judea and shows influence from Greek and Latin. The Babylonian Talmud, by contrast, is written in Eastern, Jewish-Babylonian Aramaic. Its grammar, vocabulary, and syntax differ markedly, incorporating Iranian loanwords and distinct verbal systems. These differences reflect geography, political context, and tradition.

Christian Aramaic developed along similar regional lines. In the western regions of Syria and Palestine, Christians used dialects related to Jewish-Palestinian Aramaic. In the east, particularly in Mesopotamia, Christian communities developed Syriac, a literary form of Eastern Aramaic. Syriac became the language of theology, liturgy, and biblical translation for Eastern Christianity and remains central to several churches today.

Among modern Christian communities, these linguistic divisions still matter. The Syriac Orthodox Church and Syriac Catholic Church, historically centered in the Tur ʿAbdin region of southeastern Turkey, preserve Syriac as a liturgical language and speak Turoyo (Surayt), a Central Neo-Aramaic dialect, in daily life. Their traditions emphasize continuity with late antique Syriac Christianity.

Further east, the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church preserve related but distinct forms of Eastern Neo-Aramaic, often grouped under North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA). These communities trace their heritage to ancient Mesopotamian Christianity and historically extended as far as Persia, Central Asia, and India. Their spoken dialects differ from Turoyo in grammar and pronunciation, reflecting centuries of separation and contact with Persian, Kurdish, and Arabic.

These modern distinctions highlight an important point: Aramaic did not survive as a single, unified sacred language. Instead, it fragmented along communal, regional, and religious lines.

Jews, Christians, and Mandaeans all preserved Aramaic in different forms, often unintelligible to one another. Despite this fragmentation, there is a degree of continuity. Words familiar from the Bible and Talmud remain in everyday use. Terms like bar (“son”), bayta (“house”), malkā (“king”), and šlamā (“peace”) appear in ancient texts and modern speech alike.

In a few Syrian villages, in churches from Iraq to Sweden, and in the pages of ancient texts, Aramaic continues to be spoken, prayed, and studied. The image above is of Maaloula in Syria, where Aramaic is still spoken today.

How Aramaic Found Its Way to the Talmud

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Deuteronomy 7 presents Israel on the threshold of conquest. “The Lord your God will drive out those nations before you, little by little. You will not be allowed to eliminate them all at once, or the wild animals will multiply around you. But the Lord your God will deliver them over to you, throwing them into great confusion until they are destroyed. He will give their kings into your hand, and you will wipe out their names from under heaven. No one will be able to stand up against you; you will destroy them.”

One of the results of the Israelite conquest is that Hebrew became the dominant language of that land mass. This was not the case for the Assyrian Empire, whose subject gave the Empire its language.

In the first millennium BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire captured territories from the Zagros Mountains in the area of modern Iran to Anatolia in modern Turkey to Egypt. It ruled over dozens of peoples, cities, and linguistic communities.

The Assyrians spoke and wrote Akkadian, an East Semitic language written in cuneiform. Akkadian was the language of royal inscriptions, legal documents, and elite administration within the Assyrian heartland. Yet it was Aramaic, the language of a conquered people, that became the language of the Empire.

Aram was the broad region corresponding roughly to modern Syria and parts of northern Mesopotamia. From the late second millennium BCE onward, this region was inhabited by Aramean tribal groups who spoke Aramaic, a Northwest Semitic language closely related to Hebrew and Phoenician. The Arameans were semi-nomadic, decentralized, and politically fragmented. Many formed small kingdoms, such as Damascus, Hamath, and Bit-Adini, all of which were eventually conquered by Neo-Assyrian Empire.

Assyrian imperial policy relied heavily on mass deportations. Populations were moved from one end of the empire to another end to break local resistance and supply labor where it was needed. These deportees came from many linguistic backgrounds, but Aramaic speakers were disproportionately numerous. At the same time, Arameans were deeply involved in long-distance trade networks. Merchants, caravan leaders, and scribes needed a practical spoken language that could be learned easily and used across regions. Aramaic fit that need.

Unlike Akkadian, which required mastery of hundreds of cuneiform signs, Aramaic used an alphabetic script with fewer than two dozen characters. It could be written quickly on papyrus, parchment, potsherds, or stone. It was flexible, adaptable, and easy to transmit. Over time, Assyrian administrators themselves began to rely on Aramaic scribes, especially outside the Assyrian core.

By the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, Aramaic had become the lingua franca of the Assyrian Empire. This situation continued under the Neo-Babylonian Empire and reached its fullest expression under the Achaemenid Persians, who formalized “Imperial Aramaic” as the administrative language of their vast realm.

The gradual spread of Aramaic is reflected in the Bible. In the Torah Aramaic appears in limited quantities. Genesis 31 records a boundary marker named twice: Jacob calls it Gal-ʿEd in Hebrew, while Laban calls it Yĕgar Śahadutā in Aramaic.

Later biblical books contain much larger blocks of Aramaic. Daniel 2:4b through 7:28 is written entirely in Aramaic. Similarly, Ezra 4:8–6:18 and 7:12–26 preserve letters, accusations, and royal decrees in Aramaic. Nehemiah assumes the same linguistic background, even where Hebrew dominates the narrative. By this period, Aramaic is the spoken language of much of the population in Judah, while Hebrew functions increasingly as a literary and liturgical language.

The lingua franca of the world the Jews occupied would gradually change over time, to languages such as Greek, Latin and Arabic. But this transition to Aramaic would continue in works such as Onkelos and the Talmud.

The image above is of tablets from the Assyrian capital with cuneiform and Aramaic inscriptions.

The Supreme God

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Deuteronomy 4 describes God’s uniqueness. “Ask now about the former days, long before your time, from the day God created human beings on the earth; ask from one end of the heavens to the other. Has anything so great as this ever happened, or has anything like it ever been heard of? Has any other people heard the voice of God speaking out of fire, as you have, and lived? Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation, by testings, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, or by great and awesome deeds, like all the things the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?…Acknowledge and take to heart this day that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth below. There is no other.”

In the Bible, while God is presented as all powerful, Israel as a nation was still small. For the Assyrian Empire, their claims would be connected to actual power, and Assyria articulated an ideology in which political domination and cosmic order were connected.

Assyria is often described as the first “true” empire. An empire is defined as an extensive group of states or countries under a single supreme authority. Earlier polities, such as Akkad or New Kingdom Egypt, ruled extensive territories, but Neo-Assyria combined scale, longevity, administrative integration, and ideology. From the 9th to the late 7th century BCE, Assyria was the unchallenged power of the Near East. Its kings claimed to rule “all peoples, from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea.” They built roads, provinces, deportation systems, and archives to make that claim real.

The Assyrian pantheon was crowded. Anu, Enlil, Ea, Sin, Shamash, Ishtar, Marduk, Nabu, and many others filled temples and prayers. Above them all stood Ashur. Originally the city-god of the Assyrian heartland, Ashur’s status rose with Assyria’s political fortunes. By the Neo-Assyrian period, he was no longer just a patron deity but was the sovereign who authorized conquest and kingship alike. Royal inscriptions and legal texts called him “king of the gods, lord of all lands.”

This theological elevation is expressed in the Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon (VTE), many of which have been unearthed. These treaties, imposed on subject rulers, bound subject nations by oath to support Esarhaddon’s designated heir, Ashurbanipal. Every copy opens with “Seal of the god Ashur, king of the gods, lord of all lands.” Before any human king is named, Ashur’s universal sovereignty is asserted.

The preamble of the VTE addresses the vassals “from sunrise (east) to sunset (west), all those over whom Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, acts as king and lord.” No corner of the inhabited world lies outside the oath’s scope. The gods invoked as witnesses form a descending hierarchy: first Ashur, “the father of the gods, lord of all lands,” then Anu, Enlil, Ea, and the rest, culminating in “all the gods dwelling in heaven and earth, the gods of every (foreign) country.” Ashur is at the head of this structure.

The treaty’s curse section stresses the point with threats. If the oath is broken, Ashur and the gods will unleash famine, disease, exile, cannibalism, and cosmic disorder. “May the great gods of heaven and earth… uproot you from the living… may food and drink forsake you, and hunger, want, famine, and pestilence never leave you.” Resistance to Assyrian authority is framed not as political dissent but as rebellion against the cosmic order upheld by Ashur. Imperial obedience becomes a theological necessity.

Israel was not the only nation to claim its god as supreme.

The image above is of the god Ashur inside a winged disc.

Loyalty Treaties of the Ancient Near East

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Credit: BiblePlaces.com, Antakya Museum, Turkey

Deuteronomy 1–3 functions as a preamble before Moses spells out God’s treaty with Israel. These chapters revisit the steps that led to Israel’s landing at the edge of the Jordan River, preparing to cross into the land of Canaan.

One of the key instruction for Israel is to maintain their fealty to God and to adhere to his laws. In Deuteronomy 1, Israel is reminded of what they lost by angering God. “But you were unwilling to go up; you rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. You grumbled in your tents and said, “The Lord hates us; so he brought us out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us…When the Lord heard what you said, he was angry and solemnly swore: No one from this evil generation shall see the good land I swore to give your ancestors…” This theme is repeated throughout Deuteronomy after the preamble.

This structure of a treaty with a preamble followed by a demand for loyalty is known in the ancient Near East. It was notably used by the Assyrian King Esarhaddon as he prepared for the eventual transition of power to his son Ashurbanipal.

The Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon were designed to secure loyalty to Esarhaddon and, more importantly, to his chosen successor, Ashurbanipal.

The treaties were discovered in 1955 at Nimrud, Iraq, ancient Kalḫu, in the temple of Nabu. More than three hundred fragments were found, allowing scholars to reconstruct several large tablets. One well-preserved example names a Median ruler, Ramataya of Urakazabanu, as the counterparty. Other copies were duplicates of the same treaty text, prepared for different rulers. A further copy was discovered in 2009 at Tell Tayinat, ancient Kunulua, in modern Turkey, pierced for display in a temple. This shows that the treaty was meant to be seen publicly, not hidden in an archive.

The treaty opens with a formal heading invoking the seal of the god Ashur. It names Esarhaddon as “king of the world” and identifies the vassal ruler, along with his descendants and subjects. The core demand is absolute loyalty to Ashurbanipal after Esarhaddon’s death. The vassal must support him, report any conspiracy, reject rival claimants, and fight on his behalf.

The treaty text is repetitive and explicit. It anticipates nearly every conceivable form of disloyalty: silence, concealment, hesitation, neutrality, or sympathy for rebels. The penalty sections are long and graphic. If the oath is broken, the gods are called upon to bring disease, famine, military defeat, exile, loss of offspring, social collapse, and violent death. These describe specific outcomes that Assyria routinely inflicted on rebellious populations.

The following links contain images of the Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon from Tel Tayinat.

https://tayinat.artsci.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/esarh1.jpg

https://tayinat.artsci.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/esarh2.jpg

https://tayinat.artsci.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/esarh3.jpg

The image above is of a relief of Assyrian soldiers from Tel Tayinat, from the Antakya Museum in Turkey.

King Manasseh’s Contribution to Assyrian War

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Numbers 31 describes a coordinated military action in which all the tribes of Israel contribute forces. “Arm some of your men to go to war against the Midianites so that they may carry out the Lord’s vengeance on them. Send into battle a thousand men from each of the tribes of Israel. So twelve thousand men armed for battle, a thousand from each tribe, were supplied from the clans of Israel. Moses sent them into battle, a thousand from each tribe, along with Phinehas son of Eleazar, the priest, who took with him articles from the sanctuary and the trumpets for signaling.”

Warfare in the ancient world often required this kind of collective participation, with allied groups acting together under a larger command structure.

2 Kings 21 introduces us to Manasseh King of Judah. “Manasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem fifty-five years.” While Manasseh was king, he was also under the under the rule of the Assyrians. As such, he would be subject to the actions of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and be expected to assist or at least not hinder Assyrian military objectives.

The reign of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria from 669 to 631 BCE, is documented by multiple annalistic inscriptions written on clay prisms and cylinders. These texts describe his campaigns, victories, and relationships with subject kings. Because no single inscription is complete, historians reconstruct Ashurbanipal’s reign by piecing together different versions: complete prisms, fragmentary prisms, and broken cylinders found in Nineveh and elsewhere.

The most important of these cylinders is Prism A, commonly known as the Rassam Cylinder, now in the British Museum. It is a complete ten-sided decagonal clay prism that preserves the fullest narrative of Ashurbanipal’s early campaigns. Prism A describes in detail Ashurbanipal’s first and second invasions of Egypt, his battles against Pharaoh Taharqa of Kush, and the sack of Thebes. It records how Assyrian forces marched south, defeated Egyptian and Nubian armies, reinstated local rulers, and carried enormous quantities of plunder back to Nineveh.

In the Rassam Cylinder, Ashurbanipal recounts how twenty-two kings from the seashore, islands, and mainland brought tribute and accompanied his army. These kings are mentioned collectively, but not individually, in Prism A. The text emphasizes Ashurbanipal’s authority, the scale of his coalition, and the obedience of vassal rulers who followed him into Egypt.

Another inscription, known as Prism C, preserves a different kind of information. Prism C is not complete. It survives in six fragmentary pieces that scholars have carefully assembled. While Prism C contains fewer narrative details than Prism A, it includes a crucial list absent from the Rassam Cylinder: the names of the subject kings who supported Ashurbanipal’s Egyptian campaign.

In Prism C, line ii 27’, Ashurbanipal lists “Manasseh (Mi-in-si-e), king of Judah (Ia-ä-di),” alongside rulers of Tyre, Edom, Moab, Gaza, Ashkelon, Ekron, Byblos, and Ammon. Manasseh is presented as one among many Levantine kings who owed allegiance to Assyria and contributed to imperial campaigns.

In combination, these records show how warfare involved collective participation, and in this case, the participation of Manasseh king of Judah.

The image above is of a fragment of a prism referencing Ashurbanipal.

Ashurbanipal’s Troubles in the Assyrian Empire

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BiblePlaces.com, British Museum

Numbers 25–30 records a sequence of internal tensions within Israel at the end of the wilderness period.

Numbers 25 describes a crisis sparked by Israelite behavior that ends when Pinchas “took a spear in his hand and followed the Israelite into the tent. He drove the spear into both of them, right through the Israelite man and into the woman’s stomach. Then the plague against the Israelites was stopped; but those who died in the plague numbered 24,000.” Numbers 27 describes a legal quandary when the daughters of Zelophehad seek to inherit their father who has died without sons.

The Israelites were to wander for forty years in the wilderness, and conflict is seemingly inherent over extended periods of time. Similarly for the Assyrian Empire, over King Ashurbanipal’s long reign, internal cracks were bound to emerge.

Ashurbanipal is often described as the last great Assyrian king, but his rule was marked by major internal conflicts. He fought a war against his brother Shamash-shum-ukin, whom their father Esarhaddon had installed as king of Babylon. That conflict lasted several years and ended with Ashurbanipal capturing Babylon in 648 BCE.

Ashurbanipal’s reign also saw the gradual loss of Egypt. He campaigned there twice, in 667 and 664 BCE, defeating the Kushite rulers Taharqa and Tantamani and capturing Thebes. Yet Egypt did not remain securely under Assyrian control. After Ashurbanipal withdrew, Psamtik I consolidated power and eventually ruled independently.

The book of Ezra also appears to preserve a memory of frictions within the Assyrian Empire’s territories.

Ashurbanipal seems to make an appearance under the name “Osnappar,” identifying him as a ruler who centuries earlier deported foreign populations into Samaria (Ezra 4:10). Locals petitioned against the returning Jews, opening their letter with the following: “…in the days of Artaxerxes king of Persia, Bishlam, Mithredath, Tabeel and the rest of his associates wrote a letter to Artaxerxes. The letter was written in Aramaic script and in the Aramaic language. Rehum the commanding officer and Shimshai the secretary wrote a letter against Jerusalem to Artaxerxes the king as follows: Rehum the commanding officer and Shimshai the secretary, together with the rest of their associates, the judges, officials and administrators over the people from Persia, Uruk and Babylon, the Elamites of Susa, and the other people whom the great and honorable Ashurbanipal deported and settled in the city of Samaria and elsewhere in Trans-Euphrates.”

This brief reference reflects Assyria’s role as an agent of forced population movement within the empire, and of internal turmoil that would have precipitated the move.

Like Israel in Numbers, Assyria under Ashurbanipal faced internal fracture alongside external conflict. The empire survived these pressures during his lifetime, but the unresolved tensions he left behind would prove fatal to those who followed.

The image above features Ashurbanipal, king of the Assyrian Empire.

A Clash of Ancient Near Eastern Titans

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Numbers 21 tells of a battle between Israel and an area then considered outside of biblical Israel. “When the Canaanite king of Arad, who lived in the Negev, heard that Israel was coming along the road to Atharim, he attacked the Israelites and captured some of them. Then Israel made this vow to the Lord: If you will deliver these people into our hands, we will totally destroy their cities. The Lord listened to Israel’s plea and gave the Canaanites over to them. They completely destroyed them and their towns, so the place was named Hormah.

This crossroads area later factored into a conflict between two much larger powers, Assyria and Egypt, with consequences for the Kingdom of Judah.

Egypt was the prize of the ancient Near East. The Nile provided consistent water, predictable flooding, and surplus grain. For Assyria, Egypt represented both an economic prize and a geopolitical threat if held by a rival power.

During the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, Egypt was ruled by the 25th Dynasty, a line of kings from Nubia, known in the Bible as Cush. These rulers controlled Egypt from the south and maintained an independent power base along the Nile. Pharaohs such as Shabaka, Shebitku, and Taharqa governed Egypt at the same time Assyria was expanding westward under Sargon II, Sennacherib, and their successors. This set the stage for a confrontation.

Isaiah 37 preserves a moment when this larger struggle directly intersects with Judah. During Sennacherib’s campaign in the Levant, word reaches the Assyrian king that Tirhakah, king of Cush, is marching out to fight him. The text assumes that Egypt and Assyria are competing powers and that Judah’s fate is entangled in that rivalry. Sennacherib’s warns Hezekiah not to trust in Egypt.

The military contest between Assyria and Egypt unfolded over decades. Under Sennacherib, Assyria fought Egyptian-backed coalitions in the Levant. Direct confrontation with Egypt intensified under Sennacherib’s son Esarhaddon. In 673 BCE, Esarhaddon launched an invasion of Egypt that ended in failure. Babylonian sources indicate that Taharqa’s forces defeated the Assyrians, forcing a withdrawal.

Esarhaddon returned better prepared in 671 BCE. This time his campaign succeeded. Assyrian forces captured Memphis, Egypt’s administrative center, and carried off members of the royal family. Esarhaddon reorganized northern Egypt under Assyrian-appointed governors and installed Necho I as a client ruler. Victory stelae depict Egyptian captives and the subjugation of Taharqa’s son. For the first time, Egypt was directly incorporated into the Assyrian imperial system.

The conquest did not end resistance. After Esarhaddon’s death in 669 BCE, Taharqa returned to Egypt and fomented rebellion. Ashurbanipal, Esarhaddon’s son, invaded Egypt again in 667 BCE, defeated Taharqa, and pursued him south to Thebes. When further resistance emerged under Taharqa’s successor Tantamani, Ashurbanipal launched another campaign in 663 BCE. The Assyrian army captured and plundered Thebes, an event referenced in biblical prophecy. In Nahum 3, he refers to “No Amon” a name for Thebes. “Are you better than No-Amon…Cush and Egypt were her strength, and it was limitless, Put and Lubim were among her helpers. Yet she became an exile; she went into captivity.”

Despite these victories, Assyrian control of Egypt was temporary. Assyria was increasingly distracted by internal conflict and wars elsewhere. By the mid-650s BCE, Psamtik I, originally installed by Assyria, declared independence. Egypt regained its autonomy. Egypt remained a regional power, and eventually aligned itself with Assyria against Babylon.

King Josiah of Judah became directly involved in this struggle. In 609 BCE, Pharaoh Necho II marched north to assist the remaining Assyrian forces against Babylon. Josiah attempted to block the Egyptian advance at Megiddo. The biblical account records that Josiah was killed in battle. His death was not the result of rebellion against Assyria or Babylon, but of intervention in a conflict at the crossroads of these two empires.

The image above is a relief of the Assyrians with captive Nubians, the Nubians’ features evident in the depiction of the captives.