Researchers have discovered an ancient military base that may corroborate a biblical story about God’s angels fending off an attack on Jerusalem.
The story goes that about 2,700 years ago, the Lord sent an angel messenger to fight an army of Assyrian soldiers coming to conquer the Holy Land.
It is then said that the Angel of the Lord descended on the invading military and killed 185,000 soldiers in a single night.
There has been no archaeological evidence that the supernatural event, or even the battle, actually occurred.
Now, using modern mapping techniques, archaeologist Stephen Compton claims to have found more evidence that the epic battle took place.
King Sennacherib, who ruled the Assyrian Empire from 705 to 681 BC. C., besieged Jerusalem to capture all the roads that led to the Mediterranean Sea. Pictured: (Above) An aerial image of Jerusalem from the 1930s (Below) The drawings found on the wall of Sennacherib’s palace.
The carvings showed how the military base was laid out, allowing Compton to compare it with photographs taken of the area in the 1910s (pictured).
The Assyrian Empire operated from 1365 to 609 BC, hundreds of years before the time of Christ.
The invasion of Jerusalem was prompted by the empire’s king Sennacherib, who wanted to assert his political and economic dominance over all routes through the Syrian desert leading to the Mediterranean Sea.
Researchers had previously discovered a scene carved into the stone walls of King Sennacherib’s palace, celebrating his conquest of Lachish, a city 42 miles south of Jerusalem.
The carvings showed how the military base was laid out, allowing Compton to compare it with photographs taken of the area in the 1910s.
He noticed an area that was the same size and shape as the drawings on the palace wall, leading to ruins containing the remains of a perimeter wall and pottery shards.
After conducting an archaeological study of the site, Compton determined that it was abandoned after Sennacherib’s invasion and that humans had not inhabited the area for at least 2,600 years.
The find has paved the way for researchers to locate other similar military sites in the area and they hope it will lead to the discovery of ancient cities that were destroyed by the Assyrian Empire.
In 2021, Compton wrote in a mail on X, then Twitter, who had discovered the location of Sennacherib’s military camps.
“Each was a circular site just over a mile north of the respective ancient city walls and each bore the same Arabic name on at least one of the ancient maps, ‘Mudawwara,'” he wrote.
The location also meant that it was the place where Sennacherib’s forces planned their attack because it was called Khirbet al Mudawwara in Arabic, meaning “The Ruins of the Invading Ruler’s Camp.”
Before Compton discovered the Assyrian site, researchers had only found one other ancient military camp in the area.
The secondary site was occupied during the Roman siege of Jerusalem and its layout gave researchers a way to compare the layout of their military camp with that of the Assyrians.
“Roman military camps were always rectangular, while these were oval, the characteristic shape of Assyrian camps,” Compton wrote in a Press release.
The methods Compton used to find Sennacherib’s camp have led to the discovery of other Assyrian military camps.
“In some cases, it has also been possible to use the newly discovered fields to locate the sites of ancient cities that were known to have been besieged by the Assyrians but whose locations were unknown or uncertain,” Compton wrote.
The angel of the Lord, written in Hebrew as malak Yahweh, translates as messenger of the Lord and was sent to protect Jerusalem after its ruler, Hezekiah, prayed to God for safety.
Compton reported that the methods used to find Sennacherib’s camp led to the discovery of other Assyrian military camps. In the photo: aerial view of Jerusalem in the 1930s.
Three biblical stories in the book of ‘Isaiah, 37:36-38’, ‘2 Kings, 19:35’ and ‘2 Chronicles, 32:21’ detail how Assyrian soldiers were killed the night before attacking Jerusalem. Pictured: The military site at Ammunition Hill.
Three biblical stories in the book of ‘Isaiah, 37:36-38’, ‘2 Kings, 19:35’ and ‘2 Chronicles, 32:21’ detail how Assyrian soldiers were killed the night before attacking Jerusalem.
In all the stories, the Israelite deity Yahweh sent an angel who passed through the camp while the soldiers slept, killing them all for threatening his followers.
The Bible passage 19:35 from the book ‘2 Kings’ says: ‘And it came to pass that night that the angel of the Lord went out and struck down in the camp of the Assyrians one hundred and eighty-five thousand; and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead bodies.
The angel of the Lord, written in Hebrew as malak Yahweh, translates as messenger of the Lord and was sent to protect Jerusalem after its ruler, Hezekiah, prayed to God for safety.
In another version of the attack, a plague claimed the life of the Assyrian soldier, while a Greek version claimed that the soldiers were left helpless in battle after mice invaded their camp during the night and chewed through all the strings of their bows and shield straps.
After the Assyrian army was defeated, the hill remained quiet until the 1930s, when the British converted part of it into an ammunition storage depot for their defense and renamed it Ammunition Hill.
In 1948, the Jordanian army captured the hill from the British and built defensive trenches around the perimeter.
The site changed hands again two decades later, when Israeli paratroopers fought to take possession of the hill during what later became known as the Six-Day War.
Today, the site is a monument and museum dedicated to that bloody battle that killed 15,000 Arabs and approximately 1,000 Israelis.
