Researchers have discovered an ancient military base that would confirm a biblical story about angels stopping an attack on Jerusalem.
The remains of a story from the Bible were discovered in Jerusalem PHOTO: Freepik
Researchers have discovered an ancient military base that could confirm a biblical story of angels stopping an attack on Jerusalem.
The story goes that about 2,700 years ago, God sent a messenger angel to fight an army of Assyrian soldiers who had come to conquer the Holy Land.
It is said that the angel of the Lord then descended on the invading army and killed 185,000 soldiers in one night.
There was no archaeological evidence that the supernatural event – or even the battle – actually took place.
Now, using modern mapping techniques, archaeologist Stephen Compton claims to have found more evidence that the epic battle took place, according to the DailyMail.
The Assyrian Empire operated from 1365 to 609 BC, hundreds of years before Christ.
The invasion of Jerusalem was led by the king of the empire, Sennacherib, who wanted to assert his political and economic dominance over all the routes that crossed the Syrian desert and led to the Mediterranean Sea.
The story also appeared in a sculpture near Jerusalem
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 to 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 and that led to some ruins that contained the remains of a perimeter wall and pottery shards.
After conducting an archaeological survey of the site, Compton determined that it was abandoned after Sennacherib's invasion and that people had not inhabited the area for at least 2,600 years.
The discovery has paved the way for researchers to locate other similar military sites in the area and hopes it will lead to the discovery of ancient cities that were destroyed by the Assyrian Empire.
In 2021, Compton wrote in a post on X, then Twitter, that he had discovered the location of Sennacherib's military camps.
“Each was a round site just over a mile north of the old walls of the respective city, and each bore the same Arabic name on at least one early map, Mudawwara“, he wrote.
The location also meant that it was where Sennacherib's forces planned their attack, as it was called Khirbet al Mudawwara in Arabic, meaning “The ruins of the invading leader's camp“.
Before Compton discovered the Assyrian site, researchers had only encountered one other ancient military camp in the area.
The secondary site was occupied during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, and its layout provided researchers with a way to compare the layout of the military camp with that of the Assyrians.
“Roman military camps were always rectangular, while this was oval, the characteristic shape of Assyrian camps,” Compton wrote in a press release.
The methods Compton used to find Sennacherib's camp led to the discovery of other Assyrian military camps.
“In some cases it has also been possible to use the newly discovered camps to locate the sites of ancient cities known to have been besieged by the Assyrians, but whose locations were unknown or uncertain,” Compton wrote.
Three Bible stories in the book “Isaiah, 37:36-38”, “2 Kings, 19:35” and “2 Chronicles, 32:21” detail how the Assyrian soldiers were killed the night before the attack on 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.
Bible passage 19:35 from the book “2 Emperori” says: “That night the angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and eighty-five thousand men; and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead bodies.”
The angel of the Lord – written in Hebrew malak Yahweh – translates as messenger of the Lord and was sent to protect Jerusalem after its leader, Ezekiel, prayed to God for safety.
In another version of the attack, a plague claimed the lives of the Assyrian soldiers, while a Greek version claimed that the soldiers were left defenseless in battle after mice invaded their camp during the night and gnawed away at all their bowstrings and shield belts.
After the Assyrian army was defeated, the hill remained undisturbed until the 1930s, when the British turned a portion into an ammunition depot because it was easier to defend and renamed it Ammunition Hill.
In 1948, the Jordanian army captured the hill from the British and built defensive trenches around the perimeter.
The place 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 memorial and museum dedicated to that bloody battle that killed 15,000 Arabs and about 1,000 Israelis.
