The Lachish Reliefs

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“Have you not heard that I determined it long ago?

I planned from days of old

    what now I bring to pass,

that you should turn fortified cities

    into heaps of ruins,

while their inhabitants, shorn of strength,

    are dismayed and confounded” (2 Kings 19:25–26a)

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In 701 BC, the merciless Assyrian army, led by their king, Sennacherib, invaded the kingdom of Judah. Judah had been forming alliances with neighbouring states in an attempt to throw off the yoke of Assyrian imperial rule, so Sennacherib had decided it was time to end their rebellion and obliterate the Judean nation.

Ultimately, as we read in brilliant detail in 2 Kings 18–19, Isaiah 36–37, and 2 Chronicles 32, Sennacherib failed in his mission. Although he destroyed many of Judah’s fortresses, he was not able to take the crown jewel—the city of Jerusalem—just as God had assured the Judean king Hezekiah through the prophet Isaiah. This seems to have been a bit of a sore spot for Sennacherib, because, after returning home to the city of Nineveh, he commissioned a memento of the invasion. Sennacherib had carved into stone on the walls of a central room in his palace a gruesome depiction of the siege of one of the Judean cities he had managed to defeat—the great fortress city of Lachish.

This carved relief is now in the British Museum, displayed in a room roughly the same size as the one in which it originally stood. It provides us with one of the few ancient depictions of the people of Judah, and if you follow it from left to right as you walk round the room, it transports you back 2,700 years as it tells its horrific story.

The start of the invasion

On the far left of the relief, Assyrian  slingmen, archers, and spearmen take aim at the city, bombarding the defenders on the walls (Figure 1). Amazingly, some of the very arrows and slingstones shot during the battle have been excavated at Lachish. The slingstones were made of flint and were roughly the size of tennis balls—a stark reminder that when David killed Goliath with a sling a few centuries earlier, he wasn’t using a child’s toy but a lethal weapon of war.

The city is depicted atop an imposing hill, high above the invading troops. This fits very well with the actual geography and architecture of Lachish, leading archaeologists to suggest that the artist was likely present at the battle, and produced the first draft from the safety of the Assyrian camp.

The heart of the battle

We then get to the central scene of the relief, which takes us right into the heart of the battle. The Assyrians are making their way up wooden ramps that they’ve placed against the hill to ease their ascent, and at the top of each of them they’ve stationed sophisticated battering rams to breach the stone walls of the city (Figure 2). The defenders on the walls do everything they can to stop the encroaching hoard—not just shooting arrows and slingstones, but throwing down rocks, flaming torches, and even their own shields. The Assyrians, however, are prepared, and even have a device to pour water onto their battering rams to stop them catching fire. 

The city plundered

The defences of the Judean soldiers, and the strength of their fortifications, eventually succumbed to the Assyrian army. Sennacherib plundered the city of Lachish, and forced many of the surviving inhabitants to live in Assyria. We see a number of these deportees leaving the city gate in the central scene, carrying their belongings over their shoulders (Figure 2). This is depicted taking place while the battle is still raging, but it probably happened after the defeat. The Assyrian army then carry off the plunder, while the men, women, and children of Lachish start out on their long journey, their possessions loaded onto camels and wagons (Figure 3).

Some of the Judeans suffered a much worse fate. The relief shows that as punishment for their rebellion against Assyria, three people, likely government officials or military commanders, are impaled on stakes outside the city, while two more are flayed alive. Sennacherib had failed to take Jerusalem, but by carving these horrific scenes onto the walls of his palace, he likely intended to ridicule the king of Judah, and remind anyone who saw it of what awaited them should they attempt rebellion. 

The final scene

In the final scene, the plunder is brought before Sennacherib himself, who sits in the Assyrian camp on an ornately decorated throne. The inscription next to him reads ‘Sennacherib, king of the world, king of Assyria, sat on the throne as the plunder of Lachish passed before him’ (Figure 4). 

It is from this inscription that we know for certain that the relief depicts the siege of Lachish, rather than any other of Sennacherib’s conquests. That identification supports the historicity of the Biblical accounts of Assyria’s invasion of Judah. While the Biblical accounts, and most explicitly 2 Chronicles 32:9, mention that Sennacherib laid siege to Lachish, Sennacherib’s own written accounts don’t mention Lachish by name. This small caption of text however, which opens up the whole relief, shows that Sennacherib really was “besieging Lachish with all his forces” (2 Chronicles 32:9). A number of Bible verses also tell us that Sennacherib was present in Lachish during his invasion, with messengers being sent back and forth between Hezekiah in Jerusalem and Sennacherib at Lachish (e.g. 2 Kings 18:14), and this scene agrees that Sennacherib himself was indeed there.

If you look closely, you can see that Sennacherib’s face has been hacked out. This was done deliberately to desecrate the image of this arrogant king, either following his murder, or when Nineveh was eventually destroyed in 612 BC. Despite Sennacherib’s boast that he was ‘king of the world’, and despite the horrors that he inflicted on the people of Judah and the city of Lachish, this serves as a vivid reminder that, just as promised in Isaiah 10:12, God punished “the speech of the arrogant heart of the king of Assyria and the boastful look in his eyes.”