Sennacherib's Campaign against Judah : A Source Analysis of Isaiah 36-37

Contributes to text-critical scholarship of the military campaigns of Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, against Babylon and Judah. Kahn uses close analysis of passages in Kings, Chronicles and Isaiah to detect repetitions, breaks in the narrative, and contradictions and inconsistencies in the texts, to argue for a re-examination of their timeline.

The campaign of Sennacherib against Judah is one of the most widely researched in biblical studies and Ancient Near East studies, and one that also poses scholarly challenges. Allusion to the event is found in Isaiah, Kings, and Chronicles, but there is no correlation between the Assyrian and biblical descriptions of the same event. Dan''el Kahn offers a text-critical analysis of these biblical passages that allude to the military events. Detecting repetitions, breaks in the narrative, and contradictions and inconsistencies in the texts, he traces and reconstructs different and discrete sources. Kahn demonstrates that the biblical passages are based on earlier sources that were later edited and revised by a third hand. Based on historical events that are found in non-biblical texts, he also offers new dates for the sources. He claims that the narrative was written for the book of Isaiah, arguing that it predates the version found in Kings.