Bible Synapse
Azekah Inscription
Inscription · c. 712–701 BC · Assyria and Babylon · also called Assyrian letter to the god on the campaign against Judah
See it on the map and timeline
- Date
- c. 712–701 BC (the tablet, written soon after the campaign it describes)
- Found
- Nineveh (Kuyunjik), Iraq. Two fragments from the 19th-century British finds at Nineveh, long thought to belong to inscriptions of different kings. Nadav Na’aman showed in 1974 that they come from one tablet.
- Now
- British Museum, London (K 6205 and a joining fragment)
- Passages
- 2 Kings 18:13, 2 Chronicles 11:9, Jeremiah 34:7
What it is
Two joined fragments of a clay tablet in Akkadian, an Assyrian king’s report of a campaign against Judah. It describes Azekah as Hezekiah’s stronghold, lying between the Assyrian border and Judah on a high ridge, with walls that seemed to rival the mountains; the Assyrians took it with earth ramps, battering rams and foot soldiers, plundered it and burnt it. The text then turns to a royal city of the Philistines that Hezekiah had seized and fortified.
How it connects to the Bible
Azekah was one of the fortified towns of Judah (2 Chronicles 11:9) and, with Lachish, one of the last to hold out against Babylon (Jeremiah 34:7). If the tablet belongs to Sennacherib, as Na’aman argued when he joined the fragments, it records one of the attacks on “all the fenced cities of Judah” in 701 BC (2 Kings 18:13).
What scholars debate
The king’s name is lost and Hezekiah’s name is partly restored. Na’aman assigned it to Sennacherib’s campaign of 701 BC; other scholars, among them Mordechai Cogan, assign it to a campaign of Sargon II in about 712 BC, and the question is still open.