Isaiah 37:37

These verses close the long account of Isaiah 36–37, which is told again in 2 Kings 18–19 and 2 Chronicles 32. Assyria was the great power of the late eighth century before Christ, feared for its brutal conquests and its mass deportations. It had already subjugated the northern kingdom of Israel, and in 701 BC Sennacherib (who reigned 705–681 BC) came against Judah in the days of Hezekiah (about 715–686 BC). He took many of its fortified cities and then turned to Jerusalem. Assyria’s own annals, among them the Taylor Prism, record this campaign.

Sennacherib’s messengers mocked the gods of the nations they had beaten and set the LORD beside them, and God answered that charge directly: “Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed?” (Isaiah 37:23). Hezekiah’s response was humble. He tore his clothes, covered himself with sackcloth, went into the house of the LORD and sent to the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 37:1–4), and then he spread the matter before God in prayer (Isaiah 37:14–20).

God’s reply came through Isaiah (Isaiah 37:21–35). The king of Assyria would stay outside the city, and God would defend it for his own sake and for the sake of his servant David. Earlier still he had said of Sennacherib, “Behold, I will send a blast upon him, and he shall hear a rumour, and return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land” (Isaiah 37:6–7). Our three verses are the fulfilment of those words, one promise after another.

The deliverance is entirely God’s work. Judah raises no weapon and wins no battle. “The angel of the LORD went forth,” and the camp that stood for all of Assyria’s might outside the walls is emptied of life. The word for angel, malʼâk, means a messenger, one sent as a deputy, and it is used of prophets and priests as well as of angels. The verb “smote”, nâkâh, is the ordinary Hebrew word for striking, and it covers anything from a blow to a killing, as it does here.

The number is given exactly: “a hundred and fourscore and five thousand”, which is 185,000 men. An army thought invincible, and one whose king had boasted against the living God, falls in a single night. Those who “arose early in the morning” are either the Assyrians who survived or the people watching from Jerusalem, and what they find is “all dead corpses”. The word peger means a carcass or dead body, of a man or of a beast, and it comes from a root meaning to be limp. Isaiah wants us to see how complete the judgment was. The army was destroyed where it lay.

Isaiah had already said that the LORD of hosts would defend and deliver Jerusalem (Isaiah 31:5), and here he does it. This is the truth the psalm sings: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1–3). It is also what Proverbs warns the proud about: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). Zechariah later says that the LORD will make Jerusalem “a burdensome stone for all people”, so that all who burden themselves with it are cut in pieces (Zechariah 12:2–3).

“So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and returned.” The word “So” ties his leaving to the night before, and the king’s full title reminds us how great a man is being turned around. Three verbs carry him away. “Departed” is nâçaʻ, which means to pull up tent pegs and so to set out on a journey. “Went” is yâlak, the journey itself, and “returned” is shûwb, to turn back. He had come to conquer Jerusalem, and he goes back the way he came, exactly as God had said he would. Then he “dwelt at Nineveh”, his capital. The verb yâshab means to sit down, and so to dwell or remain.

After the terrible night of verse 36, the retreat of the most powerful ruler of his day is told in one short, quiet sentence. Scripture does the same in the parallel accounts (2 Kings 19:36), and Chronicles adds that the LORD sent an angel who cut off the mighty men and leaders in the Assyrian camp, so that the king returned to his own land in shame (2 Chronicles 32:21). The kings of the earth may set themselves against the LORD, and he who sits in the heavens holds them in derision (Psalm 2:4–5).

The second half of the promise waited about twenty years. The siege was in 701 BC and Sennacherib was killed in 681 BC, so God’s word against him stood all that time and then was kept to the letter. He had said, “I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land,” and Sennacherib’s sons “smote him with the sword” in Nineveh. The verb is nâkâh again, the same one used of the angel in verse 36. The parallel record is 2 Kings 19:37.

He dies “as he was worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god”. The verb shâchâh means to bow down or prostrate oneself in homage to a king or to God. The man who mocked the LORD as a god unable to save Jerusalem is cut down on his face before a god who cannot save him. The LORD had just delivered a whole city, and Nisroch could not protect one worshipper in his own temple.

The killers are named, Adrammelech and Sharezer, and they are his own sons. They “escaped into the land of Armenia”, the ancient kingdom of Urartu to the north of Assyria, and their flight left the throne to another son: “Esarhaddon his son reigned in his stead.” The verb mâlak means to reign or to ascend the throne. Records from outside the Bible also tell of the murder by his sons and of Esarhaddon’s succession.

Even the violence inside a pagan court is under God’s hand. “The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will” (Proverbs 21:1). Nebuchadnezzar would later confess the same thing, that the Most High does according to his will among the inhabitants of the earth (Daniel 4:34–35).

The rescue of Jerusalem points forward to a greater rescue. Christ, the true Son of David, has delivered his people from sin, death and the devil, and by his cross he “spoiled principalities and powers” and triumphed over them (Colossians 2:15). For those who hold that the angel of the LORD is the Son before his incarnation, it was Christ himself who defended the city that night. He guards his church now, and “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).

The fall of the Assyrian army also looks ahead to the last judgment. Christ waits until his enemies are made his footstool (Hebrews 10:13), and he will come as King of kings and Lord of lords to judge and make war in righteousness (Revelation 19:11–16). Sennacherib’s reign ended in betrayal in an idol’s temple. Christ’s reign rests on God’s own decree (Psalm 110:1), his dominion is everlasting over all peoples, nations and languages (Daniel 7:14), and his kingdom shall never be destroyed (Daniel 2:44). And where Nisroch could do nothing for the man who bowed to him, Jesus is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).

This passage gives us a God who keeps his word in full. He promised to defend the city, to send the king home and to bring him down in his own land, and he did all three, the first two at once and the third after twenty years. A promise of God that is still waiting is as sure as one already kept.

It also shows where safety lies. Jerusalem was saved by the LORD when its own strength had run out, and the turning point on the human side was a king on his knees in the house of God. Hezekiah’s prayer was heard, and that is an encouragement to bring to God the things that are far too big for us.

And it shows what becomes of pride and of false gods. Sennacherib trusted his army and his idol, and both failed him. Whatever we lean on in place of the LORD, whether wealth, power or our own plans, will be as helpless as Nisroch on the day we need it. Our hope rests in the living God, who can overthrow the greatest enemy by a single angel.