by
Damien F. Mackey
Biblical
scholars, such as Edwin Thiele, can be so committed to the supposedly unassailable accuracy of neo-Assyrian chronology
that they are prepared to sacrifice multiple biblical synchronisms in order to
‘rectify’ the biblical chronology.
Here, instead, far from my passive
acceptance of the received neo-Assyrian chronology, I shall be questioning the
very number and succession of the neo-Assyrian kings.
Introduction
The extent of the neo-Assyrian succession
that will occupy my attention in this article will be limited to that embraced
by the Book of Tobit, i.e., from “Shalmaneser” (1:13: GNT) to “Esarhaddon” (1:21:
GNT).
Whilst the standard textbook arrangement of
neo-Assyrian monarchs runs something like this (my reason for including
Tiglath-pileser III will become clear from Table 2):
Table 1
745–727 BC
|
"son of Ashur-nirari (V)"
|
|
727–722 BC
|
"son of Tiglath-Pileser (III)"
|
|
722–705 BC
|
||
705–681 BC
|
||
681–669 BC
|
my revision would truncate this by reducing
these conventionally five kings to a mere three, as according to the succession
given in the Book of Tobit, whose accuracy I accept.
Hence:
Table 2
727–722 BC
|
"son of Tiglath-Pileser (III)"
|
|
705–681 BC
|
||
681–669 BC
|
The relevant parts of Tobit, all occurring
in chapter 1, are verses 10, 12-13, 15, 21 (GNT):
‘Later,
I was taken captive and deported to Assyria, and that is how I came to live in
Nineveh.
….
Since I took seriously the commands of the Most High God, he made Emperor Shalmaneser
respect me, and I was placed in charge of purchasing all the emperor's supplies.
….
When Shalmaneser died, his son Sennacherib
succeeded him as emperor.
….
two of Sennacherib’s sons assassinated him and then escaped to the mountains of
Ararat. Another son, Esarhaddon, became
emperor and put Ahikar, my brother Anael’s son, in charge of all the financial
affairs of the empire. …’.
The royal succession is here clearly given.
“Shalmaneser”, who deported Tobit’s tribe of Naphtali (see Tobit 1:1), was
succeeded at death by “his son Sennacherib”, who was, in turn, upon his
assassination, succeeded by his “son, Esarhaddon”.
No room here for a Sargon II.
And Tobit’s “Shalmaneser” appears to have
replaced Tiglath-pileser III as the Assyrian king who is said in 2 Kings 15:29
to have deported to Assyria the tribe of Naphtali: “… Tiglath-Pileser
king of Assyria came and took Ijon, Abel Beth Maakah, Janoah, Kedesh and Hazor.
He took Gilead and Galilee, including all the land of Naphtali, and deported
the people to Assyria”.
Is the Book of Tobit therefore
contradicting the Second Book of Kings?
Objections to Tobit
It is common for scholars to point to what
they consider to be the historical inaccuracies of those books generally
described as “Apocryphal”.
To give some examples (https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/111-apocrypha-inspired-of-god-the): “Professor William Green of
Princeton wrote: “The books of Tobit and Judith abound in geographical,
chronological, and historical mistakes” (1899, 195). A critical study of the
Apocrypha’s contents clearly reveals that it could not be the product of the
Spirit of God”.
And (https://books.google.com.au/books?id=27KsQg7): “The books of Tobit and Judith contain
some serious historical inaccuracies …”.
And - but more sympathetically (http://douglasbeaumont.com/2014/11/10/journey-through-the-deuteroncanonicals-tobit/):
The book
of Tobit has occasionally been identified as being in the literary form of
religious novel (much like Esther or Judith). Although it has sometimes been
considered to be partially fictional (in the same way that Jesus’
proverbs are), Tobit was taken to be historical by Polycarp, Clement of
Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius, Cyprian, Ephrem, Ambrose, Augustine, and
Aquinas. Despite its solid historical pedigree, however, Tobit is often
attacked for its historical errors (much like other biblical books are
attacked by skeptics today). Further, Tobit’s manuscript history is messy.
These alleged historical errors seem to have been caused by (and can be explained by) Tobit’s multiple manuscript
versions and scribal inconsistency.
[End of
quotes]
The common historical objections to the
accuracy of Tobit are those already referred to, pertaining to both
Tiglath-pileser III and Sargon II.
Thus, for example, we read at (http://taylormarshall.com/2012/03/defending-the-book-of-tobit-as-history.html):
- Objection: It was
Theglathphalasar [Tiglath-pileser] III who led Nephthali (IV Kings, xv,
29) into captivity (734 B.C.). But Tobit wrongly says that it was (i, 2),
Salmanasar [Shalmaneser].
…. - Objection: Tobit wrongly states that Sennacherib was the son of Salmanasar (i, 19) whereas he was in verified history the son of Sargon.
These cease to be problems, however, if -
as I have argued in a thesis and in various articles - Tiglath-pileser III was
the same as Tobit’s “Shalmaneser” [= history’s Shalmaneser V], and Sargon II
was the same as Tobit’s “Sennacherib” [= history’s Sennacherib].
Might not the Book of Tobit have the last
laugh on its critics?
Revised Neo-Assyrian
Succession
Whether or not my truncation of five
neo-Assyrian kings to become three is valid, there are certainly some strong
points in favour of such a reduction.
Tiglath-pileser
III/Shalmaneser
That Shalmaneser (so-called V) may be in
need of a more powerful historical alter ego seems
to me to be apparent from the fact that certain considerable deeds have been
attributed to so virtually unknown and insignificant a king.
According, for instance, to 2 Kings 17:3-5:
Shalmaneser the king of Assyria
came up against him, and Hoshea [king of Israel] became his vassal and paid
tribute to him. But the king of Assyria found treachery in
Hoshea, for he had sent messengers to So king of Egypt, and he did not offer
tribute to the king of Assyria as he had year after year; so the king of
Assyria arrested him, and confined him in a house of imprisonment. So
the king of Assyria went up in all the land, then he went up to Samaria
and besieged it for three years.
Despite this, Shalmaneser qua Shalmaneser
has left hardly a trace. According to one source, “there is no known relief
depiction of Shalmaneser V” (http://emp.byui.edu/satterfieldb/rel3).
Be that as it may, there is so little
evidence for him, anyway, that I was led to the conclusion, in my university
thesis:
A Revised
History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its
Background
that Shalmaneser must have been the same ruler as
Tiglath-pileser III (Volume One, p. 147):
Unfortunately,
very little is known of the reign of this ‘Shalmaneser’ [V] to supplement
[the
Book of Tobit]. According to Roux, for instance: … “The short reign of …
Shalmaneser V (726-722 B.C.) is obscure”. And Boutflower has written similarly:
…. “The reign of Shalmaneser V (727-722) is a blank in the Assyrian records”.
It seems rather strange, though, that a king who was powerful enough to have
enforced a three year siege of Israel’s capital of Samaria (probably the Sha-ma-ra-in
of the Babylonian Chronicle), resulting in the successful sack of that
city, and to have invaded all Phoenicia and even to have besieged the mighty
Tyre for five years … and to have earned a hateful reputation amongst the
Sargonids, should end up “a blank” and “obscure” in the Assyrian records.
The
name Tiglath-pileser was a throne name, as Sargon appears to have
been – that is, a
name
given to (or taken by) the king on his accession to the throne. In Assyrian
cuneiform, his name is Tukulti-apil-ešarra, meaning: “My confidence is
the son of Esharra”. This being a throne name would make it likely that the
king also had a personal name - just as I have argued … that Sargon II had the
personal name of Sennacherib.
The
personal name of Tiglath-pileser III I believe to have been Shalmaneser.
And on p. 148 I continued:
Boutflower
had surmised, on the basis of a flimsy record, that Tiglath-pileser III had
died in battle and had been succeeded by Shalmaneser: …. “That Tiglathpileser
died in battle is rendered probable by the entry in the Assyrian Chronicle for
the year 727 B.C. ….: “Against the city of …. Shalmaneser seated himself on the
throne”.” Tiglath-pileser is not even mentioned.
[End of quotes]
But the following may constitute the real
crunch.
On pp. 371-372 of my university thesis I
discussed the following fascinating piece of research by S. Irvine, who, however,
may not have - due to his being bound to a conventional outlook - fully
appreciated just what he had uncovered (Isaiah, Ahaz, and the
Syro-Ephraimitic Crisis, Society of Biblical Literature, Dissertation Series
No. 123, Scholars Press, Atlanta, 1990):
According
to my revised neo-Assyrian chronology (as argued in detail in Chapter 6),
Tiglath-pileser III himself was heavily involved in the last days of the
kingdom of Israel. And indeed Irvine has discussed the surrender of Hoshea to
Assyria, interestingly, and quite significantly, to Tiglath-pileser III of
Assyria, in connection with what he refers to as “ND4301 and ND4305 …
adjoining fragments of a summary inscription found during the 1955 excavations
at Nimrud and subsequently published by D. J. Wiseman”….. Here is Irvine’s
relevant section of this: ….
Line
11 reports that Hoshea … submitted personally to Tiglathpileser. Where and when
this occurred is not altogether clear, for the Akkadian text is critically
uncertain at this point. Wiseman reads, ka-ra-ba-ni a-di mah_-ri-ia, and
translates, “pleading to my presence”. This rendering leaves open the date and
place of Hoshea’s submission. More recently, R. Borger and H. Tadmor restored
the name of the southern Babylonian town, Sarrabanu, at the beginning of the
line …. On linguistic grounds this reading is preferable to “pleading” (karabani).
It appears then that Hoshea paid formal homage to Tiglathpileser in Sarrabanu,
where the Assyrian king was campaigning during his fourteenth year, Nisan 731 –
Nisan 730. The event thus occurred well after the conclusion of the Assyrian
campaigns “against Damascus” (Nisan 733 – Nisan 731).
This
may have vital, new chronological ramifications. If this were indeed the
“fourteenth year” of the reign of Tiglath-pileser III, who reigned for
seventeen years …. and if he were Shalmaneser V as I am maintaining, then this
incident would have been the prelude to the following Assyrian action as
recorded in 2 Kings 17:5: “Then the king of Assyria invaded all the land and
came to Samaria; for three years he besieged it”. These “three years” would
then approximate to Tiglath-pileser III’s 14th-17th years. “In
the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria captured Samaria; he carried the
Israelites away to Assyria” (v. 6). That event, as we know, occurred in c.
722 BC. And it may just be that this apocalyptical moment for Israel is
recorded in the fragments of Tiglath-pileser III now under discussion.
I
continue with Irvine’s account: ….
The
Assyrian treatment of Israel at large, presumably once described in 1. 10, is
also uncertain. According to Wiseman’s translation, the text refers cryptically
to “a district” and “their surrounding areas” …. Alternatively, Borger and
Tadmor restore the Akkadian along the lines of III R 10,2:15-18: “[House of
Omri] in [its] en[tirety …together with their pos]sessions [I led away] to
[Assyria]” …. This reading is conjectural but possible. If it is correct, the
text reports the wholesale deportation of Israel. The truth of this
sweeping claim is a separate question ….
Further on, Irvine will propose that this “statement
exaggerates the Assyrian action against Israel”, though he does not deny
the fact of an Assyrian action. Thus:
…. “Not all the people could have been
exiled, for some people obviously must have remained for the new king Hoshea to
rule”. But if this were, as I am maintaining, the time of Hoshea’s
imprisonment by Assyria, with the subsequent siege and then capture of Samaria,
his capital city, then there may have been no king Hoshea any more in the land
of Israel to rule the people.
….
Sargon
II/Sennacherib
Without going over old ground here I shall
simply refer readers to a recent article:
Assyrian
King Sargon II, Otherwise Known As Sennacherib
according to which Sargon II, Sennacherib,
the same person, represent ‘two sides of the one coin’. This conclusion arose,
not from any direct intention to defend the Assyrian succession in Tobit 1
(from Shalmaneser straight on to Sennacherib), but from the significant overlap
beyond mere co-regency that I found there.
And I notice that this
connection has been taken up by A. Lyle (Ancient History: A
Revised Chronology: An Updated Revision ..., Volume 1) (https://books.google.com.au/books?id=w), when he writes: “Sennacherib
is conventionally listed as a separate king. There are some who believe that he
is the same king as Sargon, including this revised chronology”.
I believe that this serves to solve a host
of problems, many of which I discussed in my thesis. For example, there is the
constant problem for conventionalists of whether to attribute something to
Sargon II or to Sennacherib, an irrelevancy in my scheme of things. Wm. Shea
seems to struggle with this (SARGON'S AZEKAH INSCRIPTION: THE EARLIEST
EXTRABIBLICAL REFERENCE TO THE SABBATH? Biblical Research Institute Silver
Spring, MD
The Azekah Text
The "Azekah Text,"
so called because of the Judahite site attacked in its record, is an Assyrian
text of considerable historical significance because of its mention of a
military campaign to Philistia and Judah. …. In this tablet the king reports
his campaign to his god. An unusual feature of this text is the name of the god
upon whom the Assyrian king calls: Anshar, the old Babylonian god who was
syncretized with the Assyrian god Assur. This name was rarely used by Assyrian
kings, and then only at special times and in specific types of texts, by Sargon
and Sennacherib. The text is badly broken. In fact, until 1974 its two
fragments were attributed to two different kings, Tiglath-pileser III and
Sargon. In that year, Navad Na'aman joined the two pieces, showing that they
once belonged to the same tablet. When Na'aman made the join between the two
fragments, he attributed the combined text to Sennacherib, largely on the basis
of linguistic comparison. Because the vocabulary of the text was similar to the
language used in Sennacherib's inscriptions, Na'aman argued that Sennacherib
was the author. However, since Sennacherib immediately followed Sargon on the
throne, it would be natural to expect that the mode of expression would be
similar. In all likelihood some of Sargon's scribes continued to work under
Sennacherib, using the same language.
[End of quote]
Likewise,
G. Gertoux has appreciated the need to recognise a substantial overlap - though
not a complete one, as in the cased of my reconstructions - between Sargon II
and Sennacherib. This is apparent from what he has written in his Abstract to Dating Sennacherib’s Campaign to Judah:
The traditional date of 701 BCE for
Sennacherib's campaign to Judah, with the siege of Lachish and Jerusalem
and the Battle of Eltekeh, is accepted by historians for many years without
notable controversy. However, the inscription of Sargon II, found at
Tang-i Var in 1968, requires to date this famous campaign during his
10th campaign, in 712 BCE, implying a coregency with Sennacherib from
714BCE. A thorough analysis of the annals and the reliefs of Sargon and
Sennacherib shows that there was only one campaign in Judah and not two.
The Assyrian assault involved the presence of at least six kings (or similar):
1) taking of Ashdod by the Assyrian king Sargon II in his 10th campaign,
2) taking of Lachish by Sennacherib during his 3rd campaign, 3)
siege of Jerusalem dated 14th year of Judean King Hezekiah; 4) battle of
Eltekeh led by Nubian co-regent Taharqa; 5) under the leadership of
King Shabataka during his 1st year of reign; 6) probable disappearance of
the Egyptian king Osorkon IV in his 33rd year of reign. This conclusion
agrees exactly with the biblical account that states all these events
occurred during the 14th year of Judean King Hezekiah dated 712 BCE
(2Kings 18:13-17, 19:9; 2Chronicles 32:9; Isaiah 20:1, 36:1, 37:9).
[End of quote]
Less perspicacious in this
matter, however, was Edwin Thiele, who, in his much lauded text book, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (Academie Books, Grand Rapids, 1983), had
been prepared to sacrifice biblical chronology on the altar of a presumed
highly accurate conventional neo-Assyrian chronology.
I wrote about this, for instance, on p. 22 of
my thesis:
Firstly,
regarding the Hezekian chronology in its relationship to the fall of Samaria,
one
of
the reasons for Thiele’s having arrived at, and settled upon, 716/715 BC as the
date for the commencement of reign of the Judaean king was due to the following
undeniable
problem
that arises from a biblical chronology that takes as its point of reference the
conventional neo-Assyrian chronology. I set out the ‘problem’ here in standard
terms. If Samaria fell in the 6th year of Hezekiah, as the Old Testament tells
it, then Hezekiah’s reign must have begun about 728/727 B.C. If so, his 14th
year, the year in which Sennacherib threatened Jerusalem, must have been about
714 B.C. But this last is, according to the conventional scheme, about ten
years before Sennacherib became king and about thirteen years before his
campaign against Jerusalem which is currently dated to 701 B.C. On the other
hand, if Hezekiah’s reign began fourteen years before Sennacherib’s campaign,
that is in 715 B.C, it began about twelve to thirteen years too late for
Hezekiah to have been king for six years before the fall of Samaria. In
short, the problem as seen by chronologists is whether the starting point of
Hezekiah’s reign should be dated in relationship to the fall of Samaria in 722
B.C, or to the campaign of Sennacherib in 701 B.C.
[End of quote]
Another knotty problem, that dissolves
completely, though, if Sargon II be Sennacherib.
Thiele’s influential work has in fact had a
disastrous effect, serving to destroy a three-way biblical synchronism for the
sake of upholding a hopelessly flawed conventional Assyriology.
Still on p. 22, I wrote:
….
The Fall of Samaria
This
famous event has traditionally been dated to c. 722/21 BC … and, according to
the
statement
in 2 Kings, it occurred “in the sixth year of Hezekiah, which was the ninth
year of King Hoshea of Israel” (18:10). While all this seems straightforward
enough, more recent versions of biblical chronology, basing themselves on the
research of the highly-regarded Professor Thiele … have made impossible the
retention of such a promising syncretism between king Hoshea and king Hezekiah
by dating the beginning of the latter’s reign to 716/715 BC, about six years
after the fall of Samaria.
[End of quote]
That vital three-way synchronism, the Fall of Samaria;
6th year Hezekiah; 9th year Hoshea; coupled with the
known neo-Assyrian connections attached to it, is a solid biblico-historical
rock of foundation that needs to be staunchly preserved and defended, and not
overturned on the basis of a flimsy and unconvincing Mesopotamian ‘history’.
Esarhaddon
In my thesis, I, flushed with my apparent
success in reducing Sargon II, Sennacherib, to just the one king, became ‘too
cute’ afterwards in the case of Esarhaddon by trying to make his entire reign
fit within that of his father Sennacherib.
I would have been far better off having
paid closer heed to the Book of Tobit, as I had done in the cases of
Esarhaddon’s predecessors.
I now fully accept the triple succession of
neo-Assyrian kings as laid out in Tobit 1, namely:
“Shalmaneser”
(= Tiglath-pileser III), the father of
“Sennacherib”
(= Sargon II), the father of
“Esarhaddon”.
However!!!
I have recently
added to Esarhaddon, also, an alter ego, in
the same fashion as I had to his predecessors (according to the Book of Tobit):
“Sennacherib” (= Sargon II) and “Shalmaneser” (= Tiglath-pileser III),
identifying the “son” with the conventionally-supposed “father”.
Esarhaddon I
now consider to have been the same as his supposed son, Ashurbanipal.
See the implied
connection between Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal in my recent article:
"Nebuchednezzar Syndrome" : dreams,
illness-madness, Egyptophobia. Part Four: Archaeological precision about
foundation alignment
with more in the future presumably to be written
about this fascinating new connection.
