12/19/2023 0 Comments Suzerain treaty![]() ![]() After Sennacherib put Jerusalem under siege, which yielded his famous “like a bird in a cage” reference concerning Hezekiah on his prism, the remainder of 2 Kings 18 and 2 Kings 19 recounts Hezekiah’s rebellion and successful preservation of Jerusalem. Of course, Hezekiah rebelled because no one wants to live under the kind of oppression that Assyria imposed on Judah. Second Kings 18:13-16 says Hezekiah stripped the Jerusalem Temple of all of its gold and silver to pay off Sennacherib. This was a largely one-sided treaty where the suzerain, the Assyrian king Sennacherib, agreed not to destroy Jerusalem in exchange for Judah’s king Hezekiah submitting to Assyria, pledging loyalty, and paying Sennacherib an obscene amount of ransom. First, I showed them the account from Sennacherib’s Prism, which is roughly paralleled in 2 Kings 18. ![]() Then we looked at treaties for which there is archaeological evidence. While the first treaty is described positively, the second is cast in a negative light-even though it benefitted the Israelites. We talked about two treaties discussed in the Bible for which we have no archaeological evidence: the treaty between King Hiram of Tyre and King Solomon in which both parties received benefits (1 Kings 5:1-12) and the deceptive treaty proffered by the Gibeonites to the Israelites (Joshua 9:3-27), which led to the mistreatment-but not the death-of the Gibeonites. ![]() ![]() Print Subscribers: Your issue has either already arrived or will soon.ĭigital and All-Access Subscribers: Read Biblical Archaeology Review Summer 2020, here. By giving my students ancient examples of peace treaties, I hoped they could glean key elements present in the effective treaties and absent from the ineffective ones. The lecture was part of a course I teach on global religious conflict into which I incorporate as much biblical archaeology as I can. We have evidence for both types from the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. These fall into two main categories: parity treaties between two relatively equal parties and suzerain-vassal treaties between a dominant, usually foreign polity (suzerain) and a subject tributary state (vassal). ![]()
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