by
Damien F. Mackey
‘See,
my son, what Nadin did to Ahikar who had reared him. Was he not, while still
alive, brought down into the earth? For God repaid him to his face for this
shameful treatment. Ahikar came out into the light, but Nadin went into the
eternal darkness, because he tried to kill Ahikar. Because he gave alms, Ahikar
escaped the fatal trap that Nadin had set for him, but Nadin fell into it
himself, and was destroyed’.
Tobit 14:10
To what significant incident in the life of
Ahikar, if real, was the aged Tobit referring here? The last time that Ahikar
and Nadin (var. Nadan/Nadab) had been mentioned together in the Book of Tobit
it was on the very happy occasion of the wedding of young Tobias (11:17-18):
“It was a day of great joy for all the Jews of Nineveh. Tobit’s nephews Ahikar
and Nadin came by to share Tobit’s happiness with him”.
Confusingly, in the Greek Septuagint version of
the Book of Tobit as we now have it, the name Nadin has been replaced with (no
doubt quite anachronistically) ‘Aman, the name given in Greek to Haman, the
arch-enemy of the Jews in the Book of Esther. One can understand how the
confusion may have arisen, given that Haman would also later, just like Nadin,
have the tables dramatically turned on him, so that it could be said just as
truly of Haman, that: [Mordecai]
escaped the fatal trap that Haman had set for him, but Haman fell into it
himself, and was destroyed.
But this incident could have had nothing to do
with the historically-much-earlier Tobit one. The incident to which Tobit was
referring, in relation to Ahikar, could only have been, as will be argued here,
the main incident at the culmination of the Book of Judith drama, the
classic bouleversement (like in the Book of Esther) whereby the
Commander-in-Chief of the Assyrian army, “Holofernes”, falls into the very trap
that he had set for Achior (var. Ahikar) at Bethulia, Judith’s town.
Logically, then, Nadin himself must have been
that very same Commander-in-Chief: hence, Nadin is the historically elusive
“Holofernes”.
The Douay and Greek versions of the Book of
Judith are unanimous in telling that the Great King of Nineveh made war against
the Chaldean foe in his Year 12. They diverge in assigning the destruction of
the latter’s city to, respectively, Year 12 and Year 17. This may be explained
to some degree by the fact that Sargon II/Sennacherib twice conquered Babylon.
The destruction of Babylon in Year 17, though, accords well with a sequence
that takes us as far as Sennacherib’s Seventh Campaign. For, in his Eighth Campaign,
against the Elamite king, Umman-menanu, the Assyrian king ravaged the southern
capital.
Eighth Campaign I advanced swiftly against Babylon …. Like the on-coming of a storm I
broke loose …. I completely invested that city, with mines and engines ….
The plunder ….
|
Year 17 (Judith 1:13,14) In the seventeenth year [the Assyrian king] …
came to Ecbatana [i.e. Babylon], captured its towers, plundered its
markets, and turned its glory into disgrace
|
Then, still in Year 17 according to Judith, “… he returned to Nineveh, he and all his
combined forces … and there he and his forces rested and feasted for one
hundred and twenty days” (v.16).
Sennacherib by now had much about which to be
self-congratulatory.
His Eighth Campaign, though, is about as far
as the Great King’s war records take us. And we could be left feeling very
empty. Where is the account of that most notorious of all wars of his, the one
against the west taking Assyria all the way to Egypt/Ethiopia
– as recorded by Herodotus in The Histories, and in the Scriptures including
Judith, Tobit and 2 Maccabees – when Sennacherib’s army of almost 200,000 was
humiliated?
So catastrophic a defeat for Assyria cannot by
any means be accommodated during Sennacherib’s Third Campaign, against the
west, which was, as we have read in the previous articles, a stunning success
for Assyria. Historians (see e.g. J. Bright’s A History of Israel,
296f., Excursus I: “The Problem of Sennacherib’s Campaigns in Palestine”)
have agonized over this:
Was there a
further western campaign after king Hezekiah of Judah
had
initially been brought into submission?
And, I must add, what about the showdown between
the Simeonite heroine Judith and the Commander-in Chief for Assyria, called
“Holofernes” in the Book of Judith, who completely lost his head over this
Jewish beauty?
By contrast to this seeming silence, the impressive
Greek version of Judith, in particular, records a massive military campaign –
ultimately disastrous – first envisaged by the Assyrian Great King in his Year
18, and to be led by a commander of enormous prestige (Judith 2:1, 4):
In the eighteenth year, on the twenty-second day of the first month,
there was talk in the Palace of [the] king of Assyrians about carrying out his
revenge on the whole region, just as he had said.
….
When he had completed his plan, Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Assyrians,
called Holofernes, the chief general of his army, second only to himself ….
The Commander-in-Chief duly raised an army of
120,000 picked troops by divisions, together with 12,000 archers on horseback,
plus immense numbers of animals for baggage and food, ample rations and a huge
amount of gold and silver from the royal palace (vv.14-18).
This number is not incredible.
An earlier Assyrian king, Shalmaneser III,
deployed the same sized army against the Syrians at Qarqar (see e.g. G. Roux’s Ancient
Iraq, p. 348).
Sheer revenge is given as being the Great King’s
motivation for this campaign, because the nations from Cilicia as far as the
borders of Ethiopia had refused to support him upon his request during his Year
12 war against the Chaldeo-Aramaean coalition (Judith 1:7-12).
We read (v. 11):“… they were not afraid of him, but regarded him as only one man. So
they sent back his messengers empty-handed and in disgrace”.
A desire to conquer wealthy Egypt was probably
also a major motivational factor for Sennacherib.
The Commander-in-Chief went forth with his huge
army, and by the time that he had brought the west into quaking submission, and
had come “toward Esdraelon, near Dothan, facing the great ridge of Judaea”
(Judith 3:9), his fighting forces had swollen to “one hundred seventy
thousand infantry and twelve thousand cavalry, not counting the baggage and the
foot soldiers handling it, a very great multitude” (7:2). This overall
total (182,000 plus) equates nicely to the 185,000 men of Sennacherib’s
famously defeated army. It was down upon such an immense host, encamped before
Dothan, that there gazed in awe the northern Israelites, including Judith, a
16th generation Simeonitess, and her townspeople of Bethulia.
The Israelites gasped: “They will now strip
clean the whole land; neither the high mountains nor the valleys nor the hills
will bear their weight” (7:4).
Nonetheless, urged on by their high priest in
Jerusalem, Joakim (var. Eliakim), they had resolved to resist (Judith 4) and
live with the consequences.
I have recently accepted the identification of
Judith’s town of Bethulia with the strategically important city of Shechem:
Judith's City of 'Bethulia'. Part Two (ii): Shechem
and:
Who was Assyria’s Ill-Fated
‘Commander-in-Chief’?
In early articles, such as “The Assyrian
Turtan”, I had put forward the view that “Holofernes” was Sennacherib’s general,
or turtanu. Then I had, in my thesis, elevated him above Turtan, to
Crown Prince, as the very son of Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, multi-identifying (as
is my wont) the latter with, for example, Sennacherib’s eldest son,
Ashur-nadin-shumi and with the Nadin (Nadin/Nadab) of the Book of Tobit. Though
I have clung to this view for a long time, I had more recently dropped the
notion that Esarhaddon could possibly have been “Holofernes”, whilst retaining
my identification of the latter, still, with:
- the Crown Prince, Ashur-nadin-shumi, and with
- Nadin, the nephew of Ahikar.
Actually, there had always been a problem with
any identifying of “Holofernes” with the biblical “Turtan” of Isaiah 20:1: “In
the year that the Turtan, sent by Sargon king of Assyria, came to Ashdod and
attacked and captured it”, since that particular Turtan would presumably have
been – by the time of the Judith incident, about a decade after the Ashdod
campaign – well familiar with the various nations of the west. Hence he would
unlikely have needed to ask the locals, as did “Holofernes” (Judith 5:3): ‘Tell
me, you Canaanites, what people is this that lives in the hill country?’
Sennacherib, according to Roux (op. cit., p.
345. See also L. Oppenheim, “Letters from Mesopotamia”, ABL 870, p.
159), was known to have employed both “a
turtânu ‘of the right’ and a turtânu ‘of the left'”.
Which one, if either, was the mighty
“Holofernes”, I had then asked?
The answer is, neither. “Holofernes” was
apparently higher ranking than Assyrian Turtan. The Book of Judith is quite
specific: “Holofernes” was “second
only to [the king] himself
…”. He commanded an army of epic proportions, cleaning up the
west, and preparing the way for the king himself (just as was the pattern in
regard to Sennacherib’s Third Campaign, when he, as Sargon II, had been
preceded by his Turtan).
But the Commander-in-Chief for Assyria was
eventually stopped dead in his tracks by some mountain folk in Samaria, before
he could penetrate as far as Jerusalem.
History apparently knows of no such
Commander-in-Chief for Assyria. At a later time, presumably in 352 BC
(conventional dating) during the reign of Artaxerxes III ‘Ochus’, it is said, a
Cappadocian prince named “Holofernes” fought against the Egyptians. (Thus
Diodorus Siculus xvii, 6, 1, as referred to in Encyclopedia Judaïca).
Aspects of the story regarding the Commander-in-Chief in the Book of Judith do
seem to have certain likenesses, too, to Xerxes’ commander, Mardonius (Emmet
Sweeney has drawn some wonderful comparisons between Sennacherib and Xerxes in
ch. 5 of his book, The Ramessides, Medes and Persians: http://books.google.com.au/books?id=Cs4rgC8Gnq8C&pg=PA130&lpg=PA130&dq=emmet) - even the search for
Mardonius’s dead body on the battlefield, Herodotus, op. cit., Bk 9, pp.
602, 610, is reminiscent of Sennacherib’s enquiries about his dead son, see
below).
There are also, in Greek mythology, some
apparent stunning likenesses between the beautiful Helen and Judith (cf. e.g.,
Judith 10:6-9 and Helen at the gates of Troy, praised by Priam and the elders
for her beauty).
Judith herself, in her definition of the precise
relationship between the Great King of Assyria and his Commander-in-Chief,
makes it perfectly clear that, whilst the latter now had full charge of
military affairs, it was nonetheless the ageing king who still cracked the
whip. Thus she said to “Holofernes” (11:7):
‘By the life of Nebuchadnezzar, king of the whole earth, and by the
power of him who has sent you to direct every living being! Not only do human
beings serve him because of you, but also the animals of the field and the
cattle and the birds of the air will live, because of your power, under
Nebuchadnezzar and all his house’.
Judith will immediately play on the young
Commander’s own military reputation during her first encounter with him (11:8):
‘… it is reported throughout the whole
world that you alone are the best in the whole kingdom, the most informed and
the most astounding in military strategy’.
We could estimate that Ashur-nadin-shumi was,
like his younger brother, Esarhaddon, ever loyal to his father, Sennacherib,
and was thus especially vengeful against insolent kings – presumably those who
had, according to the Judith narrative, originally sent back the Assyrian
messengers “empty-handed and in
disgrace”. Good examples of kings who stubbornly resisted Assyria during
this phase of neo-Assyrian history were Abdi-Milkuti, King of Sidon, whom
Esarhaddon would capture and behead, Baal of Tyre and his colleague, Tirhakah
of Ethiopia. The ‘lucky’ ones who survived would probably have ropes (as “reins”)
passed through their lips as these were being held by their conqueror. But the
Crown Prince Ashur-nadin-shumi’s, and his father’s, enemies – at least those
who would survive their vengeful regime – would have the last laugh. In quite a
short space of time, Assyria would lose to violence its Commander-in-Chief, a massive
part of the once-powerful Assyrian army, and the Great King himself,
assassinated by two other of his sons.
According to Tobit – who identified as a
metaphysical cause for the defeat and flight of the Assyrian army, not the
Commander-in-Chief’s sins but Sennacherib’s own sin, of blasphemy – Sennacherib
in his fury took revenge upon the Israelite people in Assyria, including
eventually Tobit himself (1:18-20). Tobit finally had to flee for his life, but
“not forty days passed before two of
Sennacherib’s sons killed him”.
The Climax of the Book of
Judith
We can now set the record straight once and for
all. The all-conquering Assyrian army of 185,000 was not ‘nibbled to death’, or
‘infected’, by mice (Herodotus), nor was it space-blasted (Dr. Immanuel
Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision). See my article:
Its rout and defeat were set in train by the
pious woman Judith, as she herself testified (16:5-6):
‘But the Lord Almighty has foiled them by the hand of a woman. For their
mighty one [Commander-in-Chief] did not fall by the hands of the young men, nor
did the sons of Titans strike them down, nor did tall giants set upon him; but
Judith daughter of Merari with the beauty of her countenance undid him’.
Epilogue
Encyclopaedia Judaïca’s article, “Judith”,
shows that this drama to end all dramas has consistently, down through the
centuries, been represented in art, literature and music. The Greeks,
especially, absorbed the story of Judith and Holofernes into their own
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 the God of
Israel] on their behalf (cf. Judith 8:9-9:14). Thereupon, the citizens
asked for a truce of five days, after which, if no help arrived, they would
surrender (cf. Judith 7:30-31). On the second day of the truce a heavy shower
fell on the city so the people could have sufficient water. 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.
Conclusion
Having an “Achior” in the Vulgate version of the
Book of Tobit, and in the Book of Judith, assigned to die, by “Nadin” (Tobit),
by “Holofernes” (Judith), but later saved, with the opponent dying instead,
strengthens my historical location of the Book of Judith in the neo-Assyrian
era – it has nothing to do with the Maccabean period – and tells me that the
mysterious “Nadin” (Ashur-nadin-shumi) was the same person as the equally
mysterious “Holofernes”.
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