Monday, September 3, 2018

Sennacherib’s army of 185,000 ‘foiled by the hand of a woman’


Related image


 

 by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

“And the Assyrian will fall by a sword not of man,

and a sword not of man will devour him”.

 

Isaiah 31:8

 

‘But the Lord Almighty has foiled them

by the hand of a woman’.

 

Judith 16:5

 

 

It is one of the most famous incidents of ancient history, the destruction of king Sennacherib of Assyria’s massive army of 185,000, seemingly all in the one single night.

Yet no one, either ancient or modern, seems to be able to agree upon when, how, or where it happened.  

 

Biblical testimonies

 

Biblically, the incident is recorded in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles, and in the Book of Isaiah (chapters 36-37).

And, for those using a Catholic Bible, it is summarily recounted in Sirach (48:18-21):

 

In [Hezekiah’s] days Sennacherib invaded the country;
    he sent his commander and departed;
he shook his fist against Zion,
    and made great boasts in his arrogance.
Then their hearts were shaken and their hands trembled,
    and they were in anguish, like women in labor.
But they called upon the Lord who is merciful,
    spreading out their hands toward him.
The Holy One quickly heard them from heaven,
    and delivered them through Isaiah.
The Lord struck down the camp of the Assyrians,
    and his angel wiped them out.

 

and also in 1 Maccabees, where Judas Maccabeus prays (7:41-42): ‘O Lord, when they that were sent by king Sennacherib blasphemed thee, an angel went out, and slew of them a hundred and eighty-five thousand: Even so destroy this army in our sight to day, and let the rest know that he hath spoken ill against thy sanctuary: and judge thou him according to his wickedness’. (Cf. 2 Maccabees 15:22-23).

And again, according to this present article, the whole incident is described in minute detail in the Book of Judith that also features in the Catholic Bible.

 

Non-Biblical testimonies

 

Josephus tells of the steep decline and fall of king Sennacherib (Antiquities, Bk. 10, #’s 4-5), with reference also to Herodotus and Berosus:

 

Now concerning this Sennacherib Herodotus also says, in the second book of his Histories, “How this King came against the Egyptian King, who was the Priest of Vulcan: and that as he was besieging Pelusium, he broke up the siege on the following occasion. This Egyptian Priest prayed to God, and God heard his prayer; and sent a judgment upon the Arabian King:” but in this Herodotus was mistaken, when he called this King not King of the Assyrians, but of the Arabians. (3) For he saith, that “A multitude of mice gnawed to pieces in one night both the bows, and the rest of the armour of the Assyrians: and that it was on that account that the King, when he had no bows left, drew off his army from Pelusium.” And Herodotus does indeed give us this history. Nay and Berosus, who wrote of the affairs of Chaldea, makes mention of this King Sennacherib; and that he ruled over the Assyrians, and that he made an expedition against all Asia and Egypt; and says thus. (4)

5. “Now when Sennacherib was returning from his Egyptian war to Jerusalem, he found his army under Rabshakeh his general in danger [by a plague, for] God had sent a pestilential distemper upon his army: and on the very first night of the siege an hundred fourscore and five thousand, with their captains and generals, were destroyed.

So the King was in a great dread, and in a terrible agony at this calamity; and being in great fear for his whole army, he fled with the rest of his forces to his own Kingdom, and to his city Nineveh. And when he had abode there a little while, he was treacherously assaulted, and died by the hands of his elder sons (5) Adrammelech and Sarasar: and was slain in his own temple, which was called Araske. ….

[End of quotes]

 

Comparisons can arise between Sennacherib and Xerxes: “Like Xerxes in Greece, Sennacherib never recovered from the shock of the disaster in Judah. He made no more expeditions against either the Southern Levant or Egypt”:


“Like the Persian Xerxes, [Sennacherib] was weak and vainglorious, cowardly under reverse, and cruel and boastful in success”:


And such comparison is most interesting, given Emmet John Sweeney’s series of likenesses between Xerxes and Sennacherib in his book, The Ramessides, Medes, and Persians (pp. 129-131).

 

Glimpses of Judith in BC Antiquity

 

If Judith really had done, historically, all that is attributed to her - whether or not it actually pertained to Sennacherib’s army, or to some other foreign army and era - then we should expect her marvellous intervention to be celebrated in the literature, too, of the various other (non-Israelite) nations, albeit most likely in a garbled form.

If, as according to Judith 16:21, 23: “She was honored for the rest of her life all throughout the land. …. She became increasingly famous and grew old in her husband’s house, reaching the advanced age of 105”, then we should expect the heroine Judith to have made a big impact in the ancient world. And I think that that is what we find.

Here I give only a few of many possible examples, having written previously:

 

Some ancient stories that can be only vaguely historical seem to recall the Judith incident. Two of these that I picked up in my thesis appear in the ‘Lindian Chronicle’ (dated 99 BC), relating to the Greco-Persian period, and in Homer’s classic, The Iliad.

 

The Lindian Chronicle

 

Thus I wrote in my thesis (op. cit., Volume Two, pp. 67-68):

 

Uzziah, confirming Judith’s high reputation, immediately recognized the truth of what she had just said (vv. 28-29), whilst adding the blatantly Aaronic excuse that ‘the people made us do it’ (v. 30, cf. Exodus 32:21-24): ‘But the people were so thirsty that they compelled us to do for them what we have promised, and made us take an oath that we cannot break’. Judith, now forced to work within the time-frame of those ‘five days’ that had been established against her will, then makes this bold pronouncement – again completely in the prophetic, or even ‘apocalyptic’, style of Joan of Arc (vv. 32-33):

Then Judith said to them, ‘Listen to me. I am about to do something that will go down through all generations to our descendants. Stand at the town gate tonight so that I may go out with my maid; and within the days after which you have promised to surrender the town to our enemies, the Lord will deliver Israel by my hand’.

A Note. This 5-day time frame, in connection with a siege – the very apex of the [Book of Judith] drama – may also have been appropriated into Greco-Persian folklore.

In the ‘Lindian Chronicle’ it is narrated that when Darius, King of Persia, tried to conquer the Island of Hellas, the people gathered in the stronghold of Lindus to withstand the attack. The citizens of the besieged city asked their leaders to surrender because of the hardships and sufferings brought by the water shortage (cf. Judith 7:20-28).

The Goddess Athena [read Judith] advised one of the leaders [read Uzziah] to continue to resist the attack; meanwhile she interceded with her father Jupiter [read God of Israel] on their behalf (cf. Judith 8:9-9:14). Thereupon, the citizens asked for a truce of 5 days (exactly as in Judith), after which, if no help arrived, they would surrender (cf. Judith 7:30-31). On the second day a heavy shower fell on the city so the people could have sufficient water (cf. 8:31, where Uzziah asks Judith to pray for rain). Datis [read Holofernes], the admiral of the Persian fleet [read commander-in-chief of the Assyrian army], having witnessed the particular intervention of the Goddess to protect the city, lifted the siege [rather, the siege was forcibly raised]. ….

[End of quote]

 

Apparently I am not the only one who has noticed the similarity between these two stories, for I now find this (http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/judith.html): “The Israeli scholar Y. M. Grintz has pointed out the parallels between the theme of the book [Judith] and an episode which took place during the siege of Lindus, on the island of Rhodes, but here again the comparison is extremely weak”.

Yes, the latter is probably just a “weak” appropriation of the original Hebrew account.

 

I have written a lot along these lines of Greek appropriating, e.g.:

 

Similarities to The Odyssey of the Books of Job and Tobit


 

Whereas the goddess Athena may have been substituted for Judith in the Lindian Chronicle, she substitutes for the angel Raphael in the Book of Tobit.

I made this comparison in “Similarities to The Odyssey”:

 

The ‘Divine’ Messenger

 

From whom the son, especially, receives help during his travels. In the Book of Tobit, this messenger is the angel Raphael (in the guise of ‘Azarias’).

In The Odyssey, it is the goddess Athene (in the guise of ‘Mentes’).

Likewise Poseidon (The Odyssey) substitutes for the demon, Asmodeus (in Tobit).

It may also be due to an ‘historical’ mix up that two of Judith’s Assyrian opponents came to acquire the apparently Persians name of, respectively, “Holofernes” and “Bagoas” (http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/judith.html): “Holofernes and Bagoas are to be identified with the two generals sent against Phoenicia, Palestine and Egypt by Artaxerxes III towards 350 [BC]. The names are certainly Persian, and are attested frequently …”.

 

Greco-Persian history is still awaiting a proper revision.

 

“The Iliad”

 

Earlier in my thesis (pp. 59-60) I had written in similar vein, of Greek appropriation, regarding the confrontation between the characters in the Book of Judith, “Holofernes” and “Achior”:

Achior had made an unexpected apologia on behalf of the Israelites. It had even come with this concluding warning to Holofernes (5:20, 21):

‘So now, my master and lord … if they are not a guilty nation, then let my lord pass them by; for their Lord and God will defend them, and we shall become the laughing-stock of the whole world’.

These words had absolutely stunned the soldiery who were by now all for tearing Achior ‘limb from limb’ (5:22). Holofernes, for his part, was enraged with his subordinate. Having succeeded in conquering almost the entire west, he was hardly about to countenance hearing that some obscure mountain folk might be able to offer him any meaningful resistance.

Holofernes then uttered the ironic words to Achior: ‘… you shall not see my face again from this day until I take revenge on this race that came out of Egypt’ (6:5); ironic because, the next time that Achior would see Holofernes’ face, it would be after Judith had beheaded him.

Holofernes thereupon commanded his orderlies to take the insolent Achior and bind him beneath the walls of Bethulia, so that he could suffer, with the people whom he had just verbally defended, their inevitable fate when the city fell to the Assyrians (v. 6).

After the Assyrian brigade had managed to secure Achior at Bethulia, and had then retreated from the walls under sling-fire from the townsfolk, the Bethulians went out to fetch him (6:10-13). Once safely inside the city Achior told them his story, and perhaps Judith was present to hear it. Later she would use bits and pieces of information supplied by Achior for her own confrontation with Holofernes, to deceive him.

[End of quote]

 

In a footnote (n. 1286) to this, I had proposed, in connection with The Iliad:

 

This fiery confrontation between the commander-in-chief, his subordinates and Achior would be, I suggest – following on from my earlier comments about Greco-Persian appropriations – where Homer got his idea for the main theme of The Iliad: namely the argument at the siege of Troy between Agamemnon, supreme commander of the Greeks, and the renowned Achilles (Achior?).

And further on, on p. 69, I drew a comparison between Judith and Helen of Troy of The Iliad:

The elders of Bethulia, “Uzziah, Chabris, and Charmis – who are here mentioned for the last time in the story as a threesome (10:6)” … – are stunned by Judith’s new appearance when they meet her at the town’s gate (vv. 7-8): “When they saw her transformed in appearance and dressed differently, they were very greatly astounded at her beauty and said to her, ‘May the God of our ancestors grant you favour and fulfil your plan …’.”…. Upon Judith’s request (command?), the elders “ordered the young men to open the gate for her” (v. 9). Then she and her maid went out of the town and headed for the camp of the Assyrians. “The men of the town watched her until she had gone down the mountain and passed through the valley, where they lost sight of her” (v. 10).

“Compare this scene”, I added in (n. 1316), “with that of Helen at the Skaian gates of Troy, greatly praised by Priam and the elders of the town for her beauty. The Iliad, Book 3, p. 45”.

We recall that Craven had grouped together “Judith, the slayer of Holofernes; Jael, the slayer of Sisera; and Tomyris, the slayer of Cyrus …”. Whilst Judith and Jael were two distinct heroines of Israel, living centuries apart, I think that Tomyris, the slayer of Cyrus must be - given the ancient variations about the death of Cyrus – a fictitious character. And her story has certain suspicious likenesses, again, to that of Judith.

 

Tomyris and Cyrus

 

I have added here a few comparisons


 

Death …


 

The details of Cyrus’s death vary by account. The account of Herodotus from his Histories provides the second-longest detail, in which Cyrus met his fate in a fierce battle with the Massagetae, a tribe from the southern deserts of Khwarezm and Kyzyl Kum in the southernmost portion of the steppe regions of modern-day Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, following the advice of Croesus to attack them in their own territory.[68] The Massagetae were related to the Scythians in their dress and mode of living; they fought on horseback and on foot. In order to acquire her realm, Cyrus first sent an offer of marriage to their ruler, Tomyris, a proposal she rejected.

Compare e.g.

(http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context): “Holofernes declares his intention of having sexual intercourse with Judith (12:12). Judith responds to his invitation to the banquet by saying “Who am I, to refuse my lord?”, clearly a double entendre! Holofernes, at the sight of Judith, is described as “ravished.” But he does not get any further with Judith than Cyrus would with Tomyris, for Judith, upon her return to the camp, will proclaim (13:15-16):

‘Here’, she said, ‘is the head of Holofernes, the general of the Assyrian army, and here is the mosquito net from his bed, where he lay in a drunken stupor. The Lord used a woman to kill him.As the Lord lives, I swear that Holofernes never touched me, although my beauty deceived him and brought him to his ruin. I was not defiled or disgraced; the Lord took care of me through it all’.

Wine will also play a vital part in the Cyrus legend, though in this case the defenders [i.e., the Massagetae – replacing the Israelites of the original story], rather than the invader, will be the ones affected by the strong drink:

[Cyrus] then commenced his attempt to take Massagetae territory by force, beginning by building bridges and towered war boats along his side of the river Jaxartes, or Syr Darya, which separated them. Sending him a warning to cease his encroachment in which she stated she expected he would disregard anyway, Tomyris challenged him to meet her forces in honorable warfare, inviting him to a location in her country a day’s march from the river, where their two armies would formally engage each other. He accepted her offer, but, learning that the Massagetae were unfamiliar with wine and its intoxicating effects, he set up and then left camp with plenty of it behind, taking his best soldiers with him and leaving the least capable ones. The general of Tomyris’s army, who was also her son Spargapises, and a third of the Massagetian troops killed the group Cyrus had left there and, finding the camp well stocked with food and the wine, unwittingly drank themselves into inebriation, diminishing their capability to defend themselves, when they were then overtaken by a surprise attack. They were successfully defeated, and, although he was taken prisoner, Spargapises committed suicide once he regained sobriety.

It is at this point that Tomyris will be stirred into action, more as a warrior queen than as a heroine using her womanly charm to deceive, but she will ultimately – just like Judith – swear vengeance and decapitate her chief opponent:

Upon learning of what had transpired, Tomyris denounced Cyrus’s tactics as underhanded and swore vengeance, leading a second wave of troops into battle herself. Cyrus the Great was ultimately killed, and his forces suffered massive casualties in what Herodotus referred to as the fiercest battle of his career and the ancient world. When it was over, Tomyris ordered the body of Cyrus brought to her, then decapitated him and dipped his head in a vessel of blood in a symbolic gesture of revenge for his bloodlust and the death of her son.[68][69] However, some scholars question this version, mostly because Herodotus admits this event was one of many versions of Cyrus’s death that he heard from a supposedly reliable source who told him no one was there to see the aftermath.[70]

Herodotus’s claim that this was “the fiercest battle of … the ancient world”, whilst probably not befitting the obscure Massagetae, is indeed a worthy description of the defeat and rout of Sennacherib’s massive army of almost 200,000 men.

But this was, as Herodotus had also noted, just “one of many versions of Cyrus’s death”. And Wikipedia adds some variations on this account:

Dandamayev says maybe Persians took back Cyrus’ body from the Massagetae, unlike what Herodotus claimed.[72]

Ctesias, in his Persica, has the longest account, which says Cyrus met his death while putting down resistance from the Derbices infantry, aided by other Scythian archers and cavalry, plus Indians and their elephants. According to him, this event took place northeast of the headwaters of the Syr Darya.[73] An alternative account from Xenophon‘s Cyropaedia contradicts the others, claiming that Cyrus died peaceably at his capital.[74] The final version of Cyrus’s death comes from Berossus, who only reports that Cyrus met his death while warring against the Dahae archers northwest of the headwaters of the Syr Darya.[75]

[End of quote]

 

Image result for tomyris

 

Scholars may be able to discern many more Judith-type stories in semi-legendary BC ‘history’. Donald Spoto, in Joan. The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint (Harper, 2007), has referred to the following supposed warrior-women, a re-evaluation of whom I think may be worth considering (p. 73):

The Greek poet Telesilla was famous for saving the city of Argos from attack by Spartan troops in the fifth century B.C. In first-century Britain, Queen Boudicca [Boadicea] led an uprising against the occupying Roman forces. In the third century Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra (latter-day Syria), declared her independence of the Roman Empire and seized Egypt and much of Asia Minor.

 

[End of quote]

 

But there are a plethora of such female types also in what is considered to be AD history.

 

Glimpses of Judith in (supposedly) AD Time

 

Before I go on to discuss some of these, I must point out – what I have mentioned before, here and there – a problem with AD time, especially its so-called ‘Dark Ages’ (c. 600-900 AD), akin to what revisionists have found to have occurred with the construction of BC time, especially its so-called ‘Dark Ages’ (c. 700-1200 BC). Whilst I intend to write much more about this in the future, I did broach the subject again in my article:

 

Biography of the Prophet Mohammed (Muhammad) Seriously Mangles History. Part Two: From Birth to Marriage

 


 

and some of this will have a direct bearing upon Judith (see Axum and Gudit below).

 

But here is a different summary of attempts to expose the perceived problems pertaining to AD time, known as the “Phantom Time Hypothesis”, by a writer who is not sympathetic to it (http://www.damninteresting.com/the-phantom-time-hypothesis/):

 

by Alan Bellows

 

When Dr. Hans-Ulrich Niemitz introduces his paper on the “phantom time hypothesis,” he kindly asks his readers to be patient, benevolent, and open to radically new ideas, because his claims are highly unconventional. This is because his paper is suggesting three difficult-to-believe propositions: 1) Hundreds of years ago, our calendar was polluted with 297 years which never occurred; 2) this is not the year 2005, but rather 1708; and 3) The purveyors of this hypothesis are not crackpots.

The Phantom Time Hypothesis suggests that the early Middle Ages (614-911 A.D.) never happened, but were added to the calendar long ago either by accident, by misinterpretation of documents, or by deliberate falsification by calendar conspirators. This would mean that all artifacts ascribed to those three centuries belong to other periods, and that all events thought to have occurred during that same period occurred at other times, or are outright fabrications. For instance, a man named Heribert Illig (pictured), one of the leading proponents of the theory, believes that Charlemagne was a fictional character. But what evidence is this outlandish theory based upon?

It seems that historians are plagued by a plethora of falsified documents from the Middle Ages, and such was the subject of an archaeological conference in München, Germany in 1986. In his lecture there, Horst Fuhrmann, president of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, described how some documents forged by the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages were created hundreds of years before their “great moments” arrived, after which they were embraced by medieval society. This implied that whomever produced the forgeries must have very skillfully anticipated the future… or there was some discrepancy in calculating dates.

This was reportedly the first bit of evidence that roused Illig’s curiosity… he wondered why the church would have forged documents hundreds of years before they would become useful. So he and his group examined other fakes from preceding centuries, and they “divined chronological distortions.” This led them to investigate the origin of the Gregorian calendar, which raised even more inconsistency.

In 1582, the Gregorian calendar we still use today was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII to replace the outdated Julian calendar which had been implemented in 45 BC. The Gregorian calendar was designed to correct for a ten-day discrepancy caused by the fact that the Julian year was 10.8 minutes too long. But by Heribert Illig’s math, the 1,627 years which had passed since the Julian calendar started should have accrued a thirteen-day discrepancy… a ten-day error would have only taken 1,257 years.

So Illig and his group went hunting for other gaps in history, and found a few… for example, a gap of building in Constantinople (558 AD – 908 AD) and a gap in the doctrine of faith, especially the gap in the evolution of theory and meaning of purgatory (600 AD until ca. 1100). From all of this data, they have become convinced that at some time, the calendar year was increased by 297 years without the corresponding passage of time. ….

 

[End of quote]

 

As with the pioneering efforts of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky (Ages in Chaos) to reform BC time, some of this early work in AD revisionism may turn out to be extreme and far-fetched. But I would nevertheless agree with the claim by its proponents that the received AD history likewise stands in need of a massive renovation.

In my series on Mohammed – {who, I am now convinced, was not an historical personage, but a composite of various biblical (pseudepigraphal) characters, and most notably (for at least the period from Birth to Marriage), was Tobias (= my Job), son of Tobit} – I drew attention to a very BC-like “Nehemiah”, thought to have been a contemporary of Mohammed.

Moreover, the major incident that is said to have occurred in the year of Mohammed’s birth, the invasion of Mecca by Abrahas the Axumite, I argued in the “Biography of the Prophet Mohammed”, was simply a reminiscence of Sennacherib’s invasion and defeat:

 

… an event that is said to have taken place in the very year that Mohammed was born, c. 570 AD, the invasion of Mecca by Abraha[s] of the kingdom of Axum [Aksum], has all the earmarks, I thought, of the disastrous campaign of Sennacherib of Assyria against Israel.

Not 570 AD, but closer to 700 BC!

Lacking to this Quranic account is the [Book of] Judith element that (I have argued in various places) was the catalyst for the defeat of the Assyrian army. ….

But, as I went on to say, the Judith element is available, still in the context of the kingdom of Axum – apparently a real AD kingdom, but one that seems to appropriate ancient Assyrian – in the possibly Jewish heroine, Gudit (Gwedit, Yodit, Judith), ostensibly of the mid- C10th AD. Let us read some more about her.

 

Judith the Simeonite and Gudit the Semienite

 

Interesting that Judith the Simeonite has a Gideon (or Gedeon) in her ancestry (Judith 8:1): “[Judith] was the daughter of Merari, the granddaughter of Ox and the great-granddaughter of Joseph. Joseph’s ancestors were Oziel, Elkiah, Ananias, Gideon, Raphaim, Ahitub, Elijah, Hilkiah, Eliab, Nathanael, Salamiel, Sarasadai, and Israel”, and the Queen of Semien, Gudit (or Judith), was the daughter of a King Gideon.

That the latter, Gudit, is probably a fable, however, is suspected by the following writer


 

Bernard Lewis (1): The Jews of the Dark continent, 1980

 

The early history of the Jews of the Habashan highlands remains obscure, with their origins remaining more mythical than historical. In this they areas in other respects, they are the mirror image of their supposed Kin across the Red sea. For while copious external records of Byzantine, Persian, old Axumite and Arab sources exist of the large-scale conversion of Yemen to Judaism, and the survival of a large Jewish community at least until the 11th century, no such external records exist for the Jews of Habash, presently by far the numerically and politically dominant branch of this ancient people.

Their own legends insist that Judaism had reached the shores of Ethiopia at the time of the First temple. They further insist that Ethiopia had always been Jewish. In spite of the claims of Habashan nationalists, Byzantine, Persian and Arab sources all clearly indicate that the politically dominant religion of Axum was, for a period of at least six centuries Christianity and that the Tigray cryptochristian minority, far from turning apostate following contact with Portugese Jesuits in the 15th century is in fact the [remnant] of a period of Christian domination which lasted at least until the 10th century.

For the historian, when records fail, speculation must perforce fill the gap. Given our knowledge of the existence of both Jewish and Christian sects in the deserts of Western Arabia and Yemen it is not difficult to speculate that both may have reached the shores of Axum concurrently prior to the council of Nicaea and the de-judaization of heterodox sects. Possibly, they coexisted side by side for centuries without the baleful conflict which was the lot of both faiths in the Mediterannean. Indeed, it is possible that they were not even distinct faiths. We must recall that early Christians saw themselves as Jews and practiced all aspects of Jewish law and ritual for the first century of their existence. Neither did Judaism utterly disavow the Christians, rather viewing them much as later communities would view the Sabateans and other messianic movement. The advent While Paul of Tarsus changed the course of Christian evolution but failed to formally de-Judaize all streams of Christianity, with many surviving even after the council of Nicaea.

Might not Habash have offered a different model of coexistence, even after it’s purported conversion to Christianity in the 4th century? If it had, then what occurred? Did Christianity, cut off from contact with Constantinople following the rise of Islam, wither on the vine enabling a more grassroots based religion to assume dominance? While such a view is tempting, archaeological evidence pointing to the continued centrality of a Christian Axum as an administrative and economic center for several centuries following the purported relocation of the capital of the kingdom to Gonder indicates a darker possibility.

The most likely scenario, in my opinion, turns on our knowledge of the Yemenite- Axum-Byzantine conflict of the 6th century. This conflict was clearly seen as a religious, and indeed divinely sanctioned one by Emperor Kaleb, with certain of his in scriptures clearly indicating the a version of “replacement theology” had taken root in his court, forcing individuals and sects straddling both sides of the Christian-Jewish continuum to pick sides. Is it overly speculative to assume that those cleaving to Judaism within Axum would be subject to suspicion and persecution? It seems to me likely that the formation of an alternative capital by the shores of lake Tana, far from being an organized relocation of the imperial seat, was, in fact, an act of secession and flight by a numerically inferior and marginalized minority (2).

Read in this light, the fabled Saga of King Gideon and Queen Judith recapturing Axum from Muslim invaders and restoring the Zadokan dynasty in the 10th century must be viewed skeptically as an attempt to superimpose on the distant past a more contemporary enemy as part of the process of national myth making. What truly occurred during this time of isolation can only be the guessed at but I would hazard an opinion that the Axum these legendary rulers “liberated” was held by Christians rather than Muslims. ….

 

[End of quote]

Judith and Joan of Arc

 

Perhaps the heroine with whom Judith of Bethulia is most often compared is the fascinating Joan [Jeanne] of Arc. Spoto again, in his life of Joan, has a chapter five on Joan of Arc that he entitles “The New Deborah”. And Joan has also been described as a “second Judith”. Both Deborah and Judith were celebrated Old Testament women who had provided military assistance to Israel. Spoto, having referred to those ancient pagan women (Telesilla, etc.), as already discussed, goes on to write (p. 74):

 

Joan was not the only woman in history to inspire and to give direction to soldiers. …. Africa had its rebel queen Gwedit, or Yodit, in the tenth century. In the seventh appeared Sikelgaita, a Lombard princess who frequently accompanied her husband, Robert, on his Byzantine military campaigns, in which she fought in full armor, rallying Robert’s troops when they were initially repulsed by the Byzantine army. In the twelfth century Eleanor of Aquitaine took part in the Second Crusade, and in the fourteenth century Joanna, Countess of Montfort, took up arms after her husband died in order to protect the rights of her son, the Duke of Brittany. She organized resistance and dressed in full armor, led a raid of knights that successfully destroyed one of the enemy’s rear camps.

Joan [of Arc] was not a queen, a princess, a noblewoman or a respected poet with public support. She went to her task at enormous physical risk of both her virginity and her life, and at considerable risk of a loss of both reputation and influence. The English, for example, constantly referred to her as the prostitute: to them, she must have been; otherwise, why would she travel with an army of men?

Yet Joan was undeterred by peril or slander, precisely because of her confidence that God was their captain and leader. She often said that if she had been unsure of that, she would not have risked such obvious danger but would have kept to her simple, rural life in Domrémy.

 

[End of quote]

 

I think that, based on the Gudit and Axum scenario[s], there is the real possibility that some of these above-mentioned heroines, or ancient amazons, can be identified with the famous Judith herself – gradually being transformed from an heroic Old Testament woman into an armour-bearing warrior on horseback, sometimes even suffering capture, torture and death – whose celebrated beauty and/or siege victory I have argued on many occasions was picked up in non-Hebrew ‘history’, or mythologies: e.g. the legendary Helen of Troy is probably based on Judith, at least in relation to her beauty and a famous siege, rather than to any military noüs on Helen’s part.

In the name Iodit (Gwedit) above, the name Judith can be, I think, clearly recognised.

The wisdom-filled Judith might even have been the model, too, for the interesting and highly intelligent and philosophically-minded Hypatia of Alexandria. Now I find in the Wikipedia article, “Catherine of Alexandria” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_of_Alexandria), that the latter is also likened to Hypatia. Catherine is said to have lived 105 years (Judith’s very age: see Book of Judith 16:23) before Hypatia’s death. Historians such as Harold Thayler Davis believe that Catherine (‘the pure one’) may not have existed and that she was more an ideal exemplary figure than a historical one. She did certainly form an exemplary counterpart to the pagan philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria in the medieval mindset; and it has been suggested that she was invented specifically for that purpose. Like Hypatia, she is said to have been highly learned (in philosophy and theology), very beautiful, sexually pure, and to have been brutally murdered for publicly stating her beliefs.

Interestingly, St. Joan of Arc identified Catherine of Alexandria as one of the Saints who appeared to her and counselled her.

 

Who really existed, and who did not?

 

 

The When, How and Where

of the amazing Book of Judith

 

When?

 

A key figure towards an identification of the era of Judith has to be this king (Judith 1:1): “… King Nebuchadnezzar was ruling over the Assyrians from his capital city of Nineveh”, because, apart from a location (“Assyrians”, “Nineveh”), he is also given a regnal date (v. 5): “In the twelfth year of his reign King Nebuchadnezzar went to war …”.

Despite some key details, however, this king has been identified with, among others, Ashurbanipal; Artaxerxes III Ochus; Antiochus IV ‘Epiphanes; Antiochus VII ‘Sidetes’; Tigranes the Great.

And a colleague is currently trying to convince me that Judith’s “Nebuchadnezzar” was Nebuchednezzar II ‘the Great’. The latter, I would deem to be about the worst candidate that one could opt for, for “Nebuchadnezzar” (except for the name fit), given Nebuchednezzar II’s complete mastery over Israel and Judah, even to the point of having completely destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple.

The writer of Judith would have found it difficult to have written, with Nebuchednezzar II in mind (Judith 16:25): “As long as Judith lived, and for many years after her death, no one dared to threaten the people of Israel”.

 

Sargon II “ruling over the Assyrians from his capital city of Nineveh” (he would later move to his brand new capital of Dur-Sharrukin) is the only ruler who can possibly fit Judith 1, he (i) having waged a successful eastern war in his regnal Year 12, and (ii) being in approximate chronological range for a 100,000+ (the figures vary in versions of Judith) Assyrian army debacle, Sennacherib’s.

Moreover, in my revision, Sargon II was Sennacherib.

This accords with the testimony of the Book of Tobit, which has “Shalmaneser” succeeded by his son “Sennacherib”, with no Sargon in between (Tobit 1:15): “When Shalmaneser died, his son Sennacherib succeeded him as emperor”.

 

And this fusion solves a host of chronological problems.

 

It also accounts for why Sennacherib never bothers about the new Dur-Sharrukin (he does, as Sargon), and why Sargon seems to neglect Nineveh (he does not, as Sennacherib). And why Sargon’s records are numbered by regnal year, whilst Sennacherib numbers by campaign.

Yet the pairs of records perfectly intermesh over more than a decade.

Each is just the one side of the same coin.

Sargon has a lot to say about “Ashdod”, which is Lachish, whereas Sennacherib leaves only a pictorial record of Lachish.

{The coastal Ashdod is distinguished by the Assyrians as Ashdudimmu, ‘Ashdod-by the Sea’:

“Ashdod, Gimtu [Gath?], Ashdudimmu [Ashdod-by-the-Sea], I besieged”: Sargon II}   

 

Names confused in Book of Judith

 

The Book of Judith has, in its present form, a confusion of names – this being one of the reasons, perhaps, for the rejection of it from having canonical status by Jews and Protestants.

Actually, though, according to my revised scheme of things, Sargon II/Sennacherib the Assyrian was a “Nebuchadnezzar”, as ruler of Babylon. He was Nebuchednezzar I (c. 1100 BC, conventional dating). Nebuchednezzar I was a contemporary of Merodach-baladan I, whom I would identify with Merodach-baladan II, the “Arphaxad” of the Book of Judith.

 

Despite that I have a Nebuchednezzar name for Sargon II/Sennacherib, I would attribute the “Nebuchadnezzar” given for an Assyrian king in the Book of Judith to a confusion of names, for, according to Dr. Stephanie Dalley (The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon, 2013), it was common in antiquity for Sennacherib and Nebuchednezzar II to be confused, and also for Nineveh and Babylon to be confused.

According to Dr. Dalley, the famous Hanging Gardens of antiquity were Sennacherib’s, in Nineveh, and not Nebuchednezzar II’s, in Babylon.

 

But there are other important characters also in the Book of Judith - apart from the king of Nineveh and his Chaldean alliance opponent - who need to be taken into consideration.

I refer to, for instance, the high priest Joakim (var. Eliakim); Achior (var. Ahikar); and Uzziah son of Micah, chief magistrate of Bethulia, and described to in the Douay version of the Book of Judith as both “the prince of Judah” and “the prince of the people of Israel”.

Then there is Judith herself with a Simeonite genealogy stretching back some 16 generations (Judith 8:1-2): “She was the daughter of Merari, the granddaughter of Ox and the great-granddaughter of Joseph. Joseph's ancestors were Oziel, Elkiah, Ananias, Gideon, Raphaim, Ahitub, Elijah, Hilkiah, Eliab, Nathanael, Salamiel, Sarasadai, and Israel”.

The pair, Salamiel and Sarasadai are found as Simeonite contemporaries of Moses, as Shelumiel and Zurishaddai in Numbers 1:6.

And we must not forget “Holofernes” himself.

When? did these characters (Joakim/Eliakim; Achior/Ahikar; Uzziah; Judith; and “Holofernes”) live?

All, it seems, during the reigns of kings Hezekiah and Sennacherib.

           

Eliakim

 

Eliakim, foretold to replace Shebna in Isaiah’s Oracle (22:15-25), was king Hezekiah’s go-to man by the time that Sennacherib had sent up his Rabshakeh to lambast the Jews (Isaiah 36:3): “Eliakim son of Hilkiah … Shebna … and Joah … went out to him [the Rabshakeh]”.

I deliberately omitted here Eliakim’s office, which is generally translated as major-domo, or “palace administrator”, whereas the Vulgate properly gives the office to which he is to be raised, Shebna’s office, as that of high priest (Isaiah 22:15) … qui habitat in tabernaculo, ad Sobnam, praepositum temple …. (Tabernacle, Temple)

The out of favour Shebna was, I believe, the same as king Ahaz’s sycophantic high priest, Uriah (2 Kings 16:10-11), and was, afterwards, Hezekiah’s high priest, Azariah, a Zadokite (2 Chronicles 31:10).

He, obviously a powerful man, who boasted of his “chariots” (Isaiah 22:18), had probably ruled the strong fort of “Ashdod”, which is Lachish, but was deposed, as Isaiah predicted.

Though he had been pro-Assyrian at the time of king Ahaz, he must have swung over in Hezekiah’s time to embrace the prevailing pro-Egyptian mood (much to the chagrin of Isaiah). And so the Assyrian king Sargon II replaced Azariah (= Shebna) with his brother, Eliakim (the Joakim of the Book of Judith):

“Azuri [Azariah] king of Ashdod, not to bring tribute his heart was set, and to the kings in his neighbourhood proposals of rebellion against Assyria he sent. Because of the evil he did, over the men of his land I changed his lordship. Akhimiti [Eliakim] his own brother, to sovereignty over them I appointed”.

Compare Isaiah 20:1: “In the year that the Turtan [supreme commander], sent by Sargon king of Assyria, came to Ashdod and attacked and captured it …”.

Incidentally, this was the only known mention of the name “Sargon” down through the centuries, until modern archaeology uncovered him, though remaining unsure of who he was.

A further indication to me that the man, Sargon, stands badly in need of an alter ego.

 

In Sennacherib’s records, Akhimiti is called Mitinti.

 

The capture of Ashdod was the lead-up to the great western campaign soon to be waged by Sennacherib. It was conducted by the king’s Turtan, because the king himself was now preoccupied with his darling project of building Dur Sharrukin. But the king would lead the next campaign, in which the Assyrians would successfully capture Judah and Jerusalem.

This campaign gets telescoped with the ill-fated campaign later in the reign, the rout of the 185,000, but the two clearly need to be separated. For, all the things that the prophet Isaiah promised king Hezekiah would not happen to Jerusalem following Sennacherib’s blasphemy did happen during that early western campaign (Isaiah 37:33): “Therefore thus says the LORD concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city or shoot an arrow there or come before it with a shield or cast up a siege mound against it”.

 

Sennacherib appropriately boasted:

 

As for him, Hezekiah, fear of my lordly brilliance overwhelmed him and, after my (departure), he had the auxiliary forces (and) his elite troops whom he had brought inside to strengthen the city Jerusalem, his royal city, and who had provided support, (along with) 30 talents of gold, 800 talents of silver, choice antimony, large blocks of . . . ivory beds, armchairs of ivory, elephant hide(s), elephant ivory, ebony, boxwood, garments with multi-colored trim, linen garments, blue-purple wool, red-purple wool, utensils of bronze, iron, copper, tin (and) iron, chariots, shields, lances, armor, iron belt-daggers, bows and ussu-arrows, equipment, (and) implements of war, (all of which were without number, together with his daughters, his palace women, male singers, (and) female singers brought into Nineveh, my capital city, and he sent a mounted messenger of his to me to deliver (this) payment and to do obeisance.

 

Supporters of a one-campaign theory have difficulty reconciling such historical testimony with a massive Assyrian defeat as recorded in the Bible. But that last is yet well in the future.

Flushed with success, the king of Assyria would now engage in that campaign back east with which the Book of Judith opens, his Year 12. And it will be because he receives no help for it from those whom he has already conquered that king Sennacherib, as the “Nebuchadnezzar” in the Book of Judith (2:1): “… he and his advisers decided to carry out his threat to take revenge on all those countries that had refused to help him”.

This Year 12 campaign was against the Chaldean king, Merodach-baladan (so-called II), who must be the “Arphaxad” of the Book of Judith. Rightly, the alliance against the Assyrian king is called “Chaldean” (Judith 1:6):

 

Many nations joined forces with King Arphaxad—all the people who lived in the mountains, those who lived along the Tigris, Euphrates, and Hydaspes rivers, as well as those who lived in the plain ruled by King Arioch of Elam. Many nations joined this Chelodite alliance [var. “… many nations joined the forces of the Chaldeans”].

 

Here, in this gloss to the Book of Judith (1:6), we meet another quite mysterious character, “King Arioch [ruler] of Elam”.

 

Ahikar

 

For consistency, “Arioch” here should have been rendered as “Achior”.

He is most important in the Book of Judith, and he helps to date the drama. For Achior was the famous Ahikar (named “Achior” in the Douay version), the nephew of Tobit, a most well-known figure in ancient literature as a high official for Assyria and a brilliant sage. That he held the highest possible rank during the reigns of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon is attested in Tobit 1:21-22:

 

Esarhaddon, became emperor and put Ahikar, my brother Anael's son, in charge of all the financial affairs of the empire. This was actually the second time Ahikar was appointed to this position, for when Sennacherib was emperor of Assyria, Ahikar had been wine steward, treasurer, and accountant, and had been in charge of the official seal. Since Ahikar was my nephew, he put in a good word for me with the emperor, and I was allowed to return to Nineveh.

 

Ahikar, who had assisted his uncle Tobit during part of the latter’s four years of blindness, was sent to govern Elam (the Elamites) (Tobit 2:10): “For four years I could see nothing. My relatives were deeply concerned about my condition, and Ahikar supported me for two years before he went to the land of Elam”. This is the mysterious “King Arioch [ruler] of Elam”. He was not an Elamite but an Israelite who governed the land of Elam for Assyria. Nor was he an “Ammonite” (a confusion with “Elamite”) as we find him in current versions of Judith. Though in Judith 6:2, “Holofernes” contemptuously, but correctly, connects Achior with “hirelings of Ephraïm [northern Israelites]”.

Achior as a supposed “Ammonite”, later converting into Yahwism, is another reason why the Book of Judith has not been accorded canonicity. For Mosaïc Law forbade Moabites and Ammonites to be “received into the Assembly of the Lord” (Deuteronomy 23:3).

However, when it is understood that Achior was Ahikar, the nephew of Tobit, an Israelite of the northern tribe of Naphtali, then this argument no longer has any force.  

 

Uzziah

 

He, a great prince of the land, can only be Isaiah himself.

A southerner, Uzziah (Isaiah) must have moved to the northern Bethel, Judith’s “Bethulia” - which Dr. Charles C. Torrey well identified, both geographically and strategically, with the important city of Shechem (“The Site of ‘Bethulia’,” JAOS, Vol. 20, 1899, pp. 167-172) - Vol. 20 (1899), pp. 160-172to partner there his father, Amos.

These Simeonites did not belong to any prophetic tradition, as is apparent from Amos 7:14: “Amos answered Amaziah, ‘I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet …’.”  

They were not the first Simeonites to go north as others had done so well before, during the reign of king Asa of Judah. Previously I had written on this:

 

Presumably Amos chose Bethel/Bethulia in which to settle because there, more than likely, he had Simeonite ancestors. Judith’s husband Manasseh would later be buried near Bethulia “with his ancestors” (Judith 8:3). This town would thus have been one of those locations in which the migrant Simeonites of king Asa of Judah’s reign (more than a century earlier) had chosen to settle; perhaps re-naming the place Bethul [Bethel] after a Simeonite town of that name in south western Judah (Joshua 19:4).

 

When the Lord had sent the shepherd Amos north, He apparently did not designate a specific place in which Amos was to dwell (Amos 7:15): “But the Lord took me from tending the flock and said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel’.”

Uzziah’s father is named in Judith 6:15 as “Micah, of the tribe of Simeon”, and not as Amos (or Amoz) (Isaiah 1:1). However, the prophet Micah is so much like Amos that he has actually been designated “Amos redivivus”, and thus I presume (with further assistance from the Book of Judith) that Micah was Amos.

Isaiah will in fact emulate Micah in Judah in going “barefoot and naked” (cf. Micah 1:8; Isaiah 20:2).

 

            “Holofernes”

 

The name is meaningless and probably un-historical.

The only clue to the real person behind the name “Holofernes” can be found, once again, I believe, in the indispensable Book of Tobit. In chapter 14:10, the dying Tobit praises his nephew Ahikar for his almsgiving – had he not, for instance, looked after the blind Tobit?

But Tobit warns his son, Tobias, about the one who had betrayed Ahikar, who - given my identification of Ahikar with Judith’s Achior - could only be “Holofernes”.

Tobit calls him Nadin (or Nadab):

 

Remember what Nadab did to Ahikar his own uncle who had brought him up. He tried to kill Ahikar and forced him to go into hiding in a tomb. Ahikar came back into the light of day, but God sent Nadab down into everlasting darkness for what he had done. Ahikar escaped the deadly trap which Nadab had set for him, because Ahikar had given generously to the poor. But Nadab fell into that fatal trap and it destroyed him. ….

 

Ahikar had tutored this Nadin, who was king Sennacherib’s eldest son - had Sennacherib married Ahikar’s daughter? - Ashur-nadin-shumi, hence second to the king (Judith 2:4): “Nebuchadnezzar gave the following command to Holofernes, who was the general in command of his armies and second in command to the king”.

Only Achior who had known the Crown Prince from childhood could have told Judith, after she had recounted her story about “Holofernes” (Judith 12:20): “… he [Holofernes] drank far more wine than he had drunk on any other day in his life”.

 

Judith

 

She, who has so many ‘manifestations’ of greater or lesser likeness to herself throughout later BC antiquity, and whose radiance still glows into supposed AD time (as we have seen), also has some important other biblical alter egos, I believe.

These I intend to explore in detail in subsequent articles.

 

How?

 

There are so many colourful theories as to what precisely happened to king Sennacherib’s ill-fated army of 185,000.

Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky (Worlds in Collision) had thought it was a rogue Mars that caused the disaster: https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1973/JASA12-73Newman.html

 

…. about 800 B.C., Venus nearly collided with the planet Mars. As a result, the Martian surface was devastated and its orbit was disrupted, while Venus settled into a new orbit where it became a planet and no longer menaced the earth.26
Unfortunately, however, the new orbit of Mars now made it a threat to earth in place of Venus. Although the Martian upheavals were not so violent as the earlier Venerian calamities,27 the red planet still succeeded in turning hack the shadow on the dial of Ahaz,28 wiping out the Assyrian hosts of Sennacherib besieging Jerusalem [sic],29 providing phenomena for the striking catastrophes mentioned by several of the Old Testament prophets,30 changing the length of the month and the year,31 influencing the outcome of the Trojan War,32 and adding a new war god to the pantheon of many pagan religions.33

 

One reader tried to convince me that it was caused by massive electrical discharges.

Very selective ones, I would think, being able to wipe out 185,000 Assyrians on the spot, but avoiding any hits on the Israelites in the vicinity.

The ancients spoke about it in terms of a plague of mice, or a pestilence. This was no doubt due to the Assyrian tendency to ridicule their puny opponents as mice (e.g. Judith 14:12): ‘Go in, and awake [Holofernes], for the mice, coming out of their holes, have presumed to challenge us to fight’.

 

The Book of Judith tells us exactly how it happened, and in detail.

It was actually a rout, not a zapping of an entire 185,000 men on the spot.

That just does not happen in real life!

It was set in train by Judith’s beheading of the all-conquering, all-powerful Assyrian commander-in-chief. No doubt the angel that had, according to the Douay version, accompanied Judith and her maid into the Assyrian camp and protected the two women (Judith 13:20): “But as the same Lord liveth, his angel hath been my keeper both going hence, and abiding there, and returning from thence hither …”, had served to set terror and panic amongst the Assyrians. Cf. Isaiah 37:36: “Then the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning—there were all the dead bodies!”

 

Where?

 

Pelusium (Herodotus)? Jerusalem? Dothan?

The geography can be as confusing as the names, in some instances.

But what is certain is that the incident occurred in northern Israel, outside an important and strategic town facing Dothan (Judith 4:6): “The High Priest Joakim, who was in Jerusalem at that time, wrote to the people in the towns of Bethulia and Betomesthaim, which face Jezreel Valley near Dothan”. This information saves us from having to search over a fair reach of the ancient world (such as Egypt) for the Where? of the disaster for Assyria.

 

Judith’s “Bethulia” was, I believe (as Dr. Torrey had argued), the ancient city of Shechem.

 

 

Image result for shechem

 

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