Secret_History

Chapter 10: Who Wrote the Bible and Why? 445
There is another story that P presents that has no parallel in the older accounts,
so is thought to be entirely made up: the story of the cave of Machpelah. This story
gives a lengthy description of the negotiations between Abraham and a Hittite over
a piece of land with a cave on it which Abraham buys as a burial place for his
family. Why does the P source, which leaves out so many fun facts and stories,
divert to mention this mundane piece of business? Friedman believes that it is to
establish a legal claim to Hebron, an Aaronid priestly city. But if that were the
case, it could have been done any number of other ways. My thought is that maybe
the story is not made up. Perhaps, since it was an Aaronid city, there was a certain
tradition about it that was only now being added to the “history”. And maybe this
tradition of Abraham being a “Great Prince” of the Hittites wasn’t just blowing
smoke because it does, indeed, indirectly point us in the direction of Huwawa! But
what I think is more important is the fact that it points us away from something
else that the author of the P text does not want us to consider.
At any event, we now have a pretty good idea of what was going on at the time
of the Hezekiah reforms in the southern kingdom of Judah, after the fall of the
northern kingdom. We don’t know if Hezekiah went along with this plan because
he was promised that he would benefit from the gifts to the priesthood, or if he
was just simply convinced that it would assist his consolidation of power and
expansionist aims. Whatever forces were behind the activity, we see that Hezekiah
was casting himself in the role of a new Omri-David with his plans to rebel against
the Assyrian empire. He organized the Phoenician and Philistine cities against
Assyria, and he managed to get Egypt as an ally.
Assyria’s Sennacherib launched a massive military response and captured the
Judaean’s fortress of Lachish in an assault that prefigured the Roman capture of
Masada eight hundred years later. The excavations at Lachish tell part of the story.
The rest of the story is at the palace of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire.
There, depicted on the walls, is one of the few known representations of what Jews
looked like in Biblical times. These panels are now in the British museum, with
casts of them in the Israel Museum.
The story is that the Assyrians failed to bring Judah to her knees. When
Sennacherib appeared on the horizon, the call went out for, “the kings of Egypt
and the archers, chariotry and cavalry of the king of Kush, an army beyond
counting”, to come to fight the mighty Assyrian army. Egypt, under Shabaka, had
a large standing army poised in the Delta, apparently waiting for the signal to
march. In the end, we have contemporary evidence of this campaign in the
Assyrian records, as well as Egyptian reliefs. These latter are rather general,
employing the standard “head smiting” scene with some text.
There is no doubt that this battle was a serious reverse for Sennacherib, and he
ultimately permanently withdrew from the Levant. However, the Bible tells us:
“And it was, that night, that an angel of Yahweh went out and struck one hundred
eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp, and they rose in the morning and here
they were all dead corpses. And Sennacherib traveled and went and returned, and
he lived in Nineveh.” Curious how the Egyptian army was transmogrified into an
“angel of Yahweh”.
Nevertheless, this was the turning point in Judah’s history. Though Sennacherib
had laid waste to the outlying districts, Jerusalem had not fallen. And Jerusalem