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” to “Esarhaddon”. 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 - 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.
[End of quote]
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 (https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:_96AnfQDj1gJ:www.auss):
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 (http://www.academia.edu/2926387/Dating_the_Sennacheribs_Campaign_to_Jud):
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.
Esarhaddon does not need any tampering,
or fusing with any other neo-Assyrian king.
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”.
July 16, 2015
Our Lady of Mount Carmel
