by
Damien F. Mackey
Archaeologists such as Israel
Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and Bill Dever of the University of Arizona
were interviewed on actual sites where they could point directly to
stratigraphical levels where they thought the evidences for Joshua, the
Conquest,
or king Solomon, ought to be; but where there was in fact a complete lack of such relevant archaeological data. Whilst doing this they were often, as I believe,
or king Solomon, ought to be; but where there was in fact a complete lack of such relevant archaeological data. Whilst doing this they were often, as I believe,
‘standing upon’, so to speak, the very
levels in which the data can be found.
Chapter Five (Volume One, beginning on p. 119) of my university thesis:
A Revised History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its Background
commences with this section on the chronology of
King Hezekiah (here modified and with some comments added):
Restoring the Hezekian Chronology
With regard to ancient Israel, the
problem that confronts historians has truly become an enormous one. It is not
simply a case here of alignment and chronological precision. Judah and Israel
need in fact to be rescued completely from oblivion in some quarters. Far from
Israel’s being, as Isaiah had envisaged it (19:24), “the third with Egypt and Assyria,
a blessing in the midst of the earth …”, Israel’s life-giving river … has, in
the minds of some archaeologists, almost entirely dried up. Professor Heinsohn
is not really exaggerating when he writes in his historical revision: …. “Mainstream
scholars are in the process of deleting Ancient Israel from the history books.
The entire period from Abraham … in the -21st century … to the flowering of the
Divided Kingdom in the -9th century … is found missing in the
archaeological record. ...”. Such a bold conclusion about “9th century” archaeology, especially (we
already discussed this era in a revised context in Part I), must surely impact also upon the
archaeology of the Era of Hezekiah [EOH] in the C8th BC (conventional dating).
My comment: This conventional dating will need to undergo a
massive overhaul now if I am correct in my - {later than my thesis} -
identifying of King Hezekiah with King Josiah.
See my article
on this:
High profile archaeologists excavating
in Palestine have, in recent publications and media interviews, been casting
doubt upon much early Israelite history as recorded in the Bible. Sturgis, in a
book that became a TV documentary … - featuring Beirut hostage victim, John
McCarthy, interviewing leading archaeologists currently digging in Israel - set
out to determine whether the Exodus and Conquest, or David and Solomon, were
historical realities. Archaeologists such as Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University
and Bill Dever of the University of Arizona were interviewed on actual sites where
they could point directly to stratigraphical levels where they thought the
evidences for Joshua, the Conquest, or king Solomon, ought to be; but where
there was in fact a complete lack of such relevant archaeological data. Whilst
doing this they were often, as I believe, ‘standing upon’, so to speak, the
very levels in which the data can be found.
That huge slice of pre-Hezekian
history, from the C21st – C9th century BC, “found missing” [sic] - by the
archaeologists. Rohl, quoting from Sturgis’s book, tells of some of the
conclusions reached by these archaeologists and historians: ….
- Ze-ev Herzog on the Exodus – ‘a history that never happened’.
- Bill Dever on Jericho – ‘Joshua destroyed a city that wasn’t even there’.
- Sturgis on Davidic Jerusalem – ‘After a century and a half of surveying, digging and sifting, almost no clear archaeological evidence for King David’s capital has come to light’.
- Israel Finkelstein on United Monarchy Jerusalem – ‘There is almost no evidence for the tenth century. There is almost no evidence for Solomon. Jerusalem at this time was probably a very small village, or a very poor town’.
And so on and on it went. These
archaeologists actually have their historical sights set at the entirely
inappropriate Late Bronze Age - the era to which David and Solomon did actually
belong - for the Exodus, and the Conquest by Joshua, and at a most impoverished
archaeological phase during the Iron Age for evidence of the glorious era of
David and Solomon. Whilst they tend to write off Solomon, they are forced to
concede at least the existence of king David - though greatly diminished - due to
the Tell Dan evidence of the ‘House of David’. …. (I discussed this document on pp. 115-116 of the previous chapter).
Without Solomon, however, one wonders how, based on 1 Chronicles 3:10-13, there
could have been a Hezekiah, who is named there amongst “the descendants of
Solomon”. The attack on Israel’s rôle in antiquity has been launched in various
ways in the past century and a half; for example by:
- dismissing the patriarchs and early kings as virtually a complete myth.
(a)
Abraham (Abram)
We saw above, quoting Heinsohn, that a
huge slice of Israel’s history, beginning with
Abraham, is under question today
because of the apparent lack of archaeology to support it. Yet this Abraham was
also the father of Isaac, the father of Jacob who became Israel, and thus the
father of the twelve tribes of Israel with all the attendant history associated
with these tribes. Abraham is also considered to have been the father of the
monotheistic religions. Relevant to king Hezekiah, Abraham was also the
ancestor of the royal tribe of JUDAH from which this Hezekiah would of course later spring. Moreover, as the
ancestor of the tribe of LEVI,
Abraham was the father of the Israelite priesthood. Hence St. Paul can speak of
Levi as being “in the loins” of Abraham (Hebrews 7:10). From this priestly Levi
came the many Levites listed in Kings, Chronicles and Isaiah for the EOH (2
Chronicles 29:12-14), and, presumably, “the high priest, Joakim” of Judith 4:6.
(For more on this Joakim, see VOLUME 2, Part II).
From the tribe of SIMEON, there arose Judith herself (Judith
8:1), and also Isaiah as I shall be proposing in the same Part II.
And from the northern tribe of NAPHTALI, came Tobit and his son, Tobias, and
also Tobit’s nephew, Achior (var Ahikar) (Tobit 1:1, 9, 22); an official who will figure most
prominently again in this same Part II. Hence these four tribes (JUDAH, LEVI, SIMEON
and NAPHTALI) in particular will be of utmost importance in my reconstruction of
EOH.
(b)
Jacob (Israel)
Jacob also must disappear from history
if certain contemporary archaeologists are to have their way. Judith will refer
back to an incident in the life of Jacob concerning the latter’s daughter,
Dinah, who was raped by a Canaanite prince and then avenged by her brothers; most
notably, in Judith’s case, by her ancestor Simeon. This brief story narrated in
Genesis 34:1-31, which separates Jacob’s arrival at Shechem from his return to
Bethel - and which precedes the beginning of the Joseph narrative (37:2b) by
three chapters – will be recalled a full millennium later by Judith as an
heroic deed by her ancestor Simeon against the Hivite prince, Shechem. Actually
it was both Simeon and Levi, not Simeon alone, who subsequently slaughtered,
not only the chief culprit, Shechem, but all the male Canaanites in the city; a
fact that the parochial Simeonite Judith seems to have overlooked. She also
failed to note that Jacob had been less than impressed with Simeon and Levi for
their violent retaliation: ‘You have brought trouble on me by making me odious
to the inhabitants of the land …’; an incident that Jacob will actually recall
on his deathbed, there cursing the anger of Simeon and Levi (cf. 34:30 &
49:5-7).
Judith however will re-cast her
ancestral history in favour of Simeon when, in her prayer before entering the
camp of the Assyrians, she prays that Dinah’s fate will not befall her, too, at
the hands of Holofernes (Judith 9:2-4).
(c)
Moses
Meyer had, in 1906, cast serious doubt
upon the historicity of Moses:
…. “After all, with the exception of
those who accept tradition bag and baggage as historical truth, not one of
those who treat [Moses] as a historical reality has hitherto been able to fill
him with any kind of content whatever, to depict him as a concrete historical
figure, or to produce anything which he could have created or which could be
his historical work”.
In arriving at this conclusion, as in
many other ways, Meyer may have been a victim of his own system; for one of the
unhappy consequences of Sothic displacement is that historical characters are
sought for in kingdoms or eras where they do not belong.
Shoshenq I as ‘Shishak’ is, I believe,
one classical example of this.
Just as the memory of Joseph’s
contribution to Egypt was forgotten - that is, by ‘not recognising’ what Joseph
had done) - by the ‘hostile new king who arose over’ the land (cf. Exodus 1:8
& Judith 5:11), so apparently has the identity of the Moses, who was born
during the reign of this same inimical ruler (cf. Exodus 1:8 & 2:2), been ‘forgotten’
to historians; buried under the immense rubble of the Sothic chronology.
Thus Meyer was being perfectly logical,
according to his own artificial context - with its subsequent misalignment of
the early history of Israel - when issuing his bold challenge to gainsay the
traditional view that Moses was a real historical person. And Meyer was entirely
correct too back then, in 1906 (a full century ago), when stating that “not one
of those who treat [Moses] as a historical reality has hitherto been able to
fill him with any kind of content whatever …”. For Meyer’s chronology, as
promoted by the Berlin School of Egyptology, and later by Sir Henry Breasted,
which had become the standard, had made it quite impossible for scholars even
to locate Moses in that complex scheme, let alone “to fill him with any kind of
content”. Whilst an independent-minded historian like Sir Flinders Petrie might
try valiantly to make a major adjustment to Sothic chronology - though still
unfortunately based on that system’s faulty premises, by adding an extra Sothic
period - he did not like what he eventually saw and so had to reject his novel idea.
…. Meyer’s Sothic
chronology therefore survived the challenge and prevailed.
Today, for those who do give some
credence to the story of Moses and the Exodus
account, the favoured era is, as it was
in Meyer’s day, the 19th Ramesside
dynasty, Sothically dated to the C13th-C12th’s BC – but still two or more
centuries after properly calculated biblical estimates for Moses. Ramses II (c.
1279-1212 BC, conventional dates) is now generally considered to have been the
Pharaoh of the Exodus; though no evidence whatsoever for a mass exodus of
foreigners can be found during his reign.
Fortunately, the work of revision is
serving to resurrect some long-lost biblical characters of great import. I have
already shown in fair detail in Part I how C9th BC biblical characters, for instance, emerge in some profusion
when a Velikovskian-based revision is carefully applied to the well-documented
EA [El Amarna] period. And Ramses II came into being more than half a
millennium after Moses. He was certainly not the pharaoh of the Exodus.
Just as Abraham cannot be so easily
brushed aside, with so much history attached to him, neither can one simply
erase Moses as Meyer had thought. For, intricately connected with Moses, and
with his older brother, Aaron, are detailed genealogies of Israel that, running
from the sons of Jacob (Israel), and passing through EOH, course all the way down
to the Babylonian Captivity, and even beyond (e.g. Matthew 1:2-17). Thus we
read in Numbers 1, in the case of the first census of Israel, of Moses and
Aaron being commanded to enroll the people “company by company” (v. 3). In this
task, the brothers were assisted by men selected from each of the twelve
tribes; the leader selected from the Simeonites being “Shelumiel son of
Zurishaddai” (v. 6).
And these two Simeonite names are the
very same ones that head the list in the Simeonite Judith’s own genealogy:
“Salamiel son of Sarasadai [son of Israel]” (Judith 8:1). In other words, the
author of the Book of Judith details Judith’s genealogy of about sixteen generations
extending all the way back to the time of Moses.
The selection from the tribe of Judah,
given in the very next verse (v. 7), was “Nahshon, son of Amminadab”; Nahshon
and his father being regal ancestors of David, who was in turn a regal ancestor
of Hezekiah (cf.1 Chronicles 2:10-15 & 3:1-13).
And the Levites, too, have genealogies
extending from Levi, through Aaron, brother of Moses, all the way down to the
time of Solomon, and on down to the Babylonian
Captivity (e.g. 1 Chronicles 6:1-15), including
specific reference to EOH (4:41).
Moreover, all of these individuals
belong to eras that have their own attendant history;
some of it very detailed. So there is some
real traditional “bag and baggage”, to quote
Meyer, in support of the historical
authenticity of Moses, and so, for one to be properly
convincing in challenging such a
tradition, one would need to overthrow, not only Moses, but the attendant
genealogical “baggage”.
It was not until about half a century
later than Meyer, with the publication of Volume 1 of Velikovsky’s Ages in Chaos series
(1952), that, as far as I see it, there first became available a basic model
for the proper alignment of ancient Egypt with ancient Israel. This prepared
the way for an historical identification of Moses himself; though Velikovsky,
for his part, hardly mentioned the great man, let alone tried to identify him.
Velikovsky did, however, point to some stunning parallels between various
Middle Kingdom payrii (e.g. Ipuwer, Ermitage) and the biblical description of
the Ten Plagues. …. In
more recent times Dr. Rudolph Cohen, Deputy Director of the Israeli Antiquities
Authority, seems to have accepted this basic sort of scenario, in a 12th dynasty
context, and he has also supported Courville’s view that the Israelites were
the Middle Bronze I people. ….Professor Emmanuel Anati, an archaeologist of the
University of Lecce, has added his weight to the argument for the historical
reality of Moses and Joshua by pointing to the appropriate archaeology,
including his now famous identification of the true Mount Sinai: Har Karkom. ….
- metamorphosis of Hebrew (Israelite) patriarchs into non Hebrews (Israelites).
Psychoanalyst Freud’s view in Moses and Monotheism that Moses was an Egyptian … has recently been revisited by Islamic writer Osman in a provocative
book, in which he claims to have identified as 18th dynasty Egyptian characters,
not only the early
patriarchs of Israel, but even the New
Testament’s ‘Holy Family’. These biblical characters, some traditionally
separated from others by as much as one and a half millennia, are all herded
together by Osman into Egypt’s 18th dynasty. There, king David becomes pharaoh
Thutmose III (and father of Isaac, no less); Moses becomes Akhnaton, the
supposed founder of monotheism. But when the revision, with its solid
foundations in archaeology, is applied to Osman’s major premises, almost the
entire book can be shown to be nonsense.
At the request of Dr. Simms, I wrote a
critique of Osman’s book; a highly unfavourable one. Now I doubt if Osman would
be over-impressed by professor Thiede’s quotation, in The Wanderer, of
noted biblicist Herschel Shanks, who puts a recent commentator “in the same
category as those cranks who claim that Jesus was not Jewish but Egyptian”.
- late dating the Hebrew writings and making them dependent upon Babylonian
myths.
The view that Genesis and Exodus were
late compilations, having been handed down by oral tradition before being
committed to writing during the Babylonian Exile, was formed by biblical
commentators of the C19th, when it was still thought that writing had not developed
until about 1000 BC, the approximate time of king David; and before ancient scribal
methods had become properly known. This approach culminated in what is known as
Graf-Wellhausen’s ‘Documentary Hypothesis’. While we well know now how completely
naïve in archaeological terms some of these premises were, this outdated system
has - like Meyer’s Sothic scheme - tended to stick. Suffice it to say that the
language and structure of the Pentateuch completely refute the Graf-Wellhausen
system of Pan Babylonianism, because:
A. the language of the Pentateuch is
found to be saturated with Egyptianisms - a
fact of which the Pan Babylonianists seem to be generally unaware; and
B. the Pentateuchal texts contain the
most ancient of scribal structural elements,
whose colophon ‘signatures’ attest to
them being very early compilations.
The Egyptologists’ lack of knowledge of
- even, in some cases, contempt for - Hebrew and the Bible was the reason,
according to Professor Yahuda, for their failure to appreciate the prevailing
Egyptian element in the Pentateuch. Yahuda himself, who lacked expertise in
neither Hebrew nor Egyptian (not to mention Akkadian), summed up the situation:
…. “The
Assyro-Babylonian school has undoubtedly been very successful in shedding new
light on many parts of the Bible and also on some chapters of Genesis. But far
from solving the problems of composition and antiquity of the Pentateuch, it
rather complicated them”. And:
Egyptology, too, failed, to furnish a
solution only because after the rise of the Graf-Wellhausen
School some of the leading Egyptologists accepted
its theories without having sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and the Bible to enable
them to take any initiative in these questions. As they could not find more
than any occasional connexions between Hebrew and Egyptian, they simply took it
for granted that Egyptology had very little to yield for the study of the Bible
… Professor Adolf Erman went so far as to affirm that all ‘that the Old
Testament had to say about Egypt could not be regarded with enough suspicion’.
One cannot but pick up amongst various
of these commentators (e.g. Erman, Meyer, Wellhausen) that same tendency that Martin
Bernal has been at pains to identify; namely, a Western European reluctance to
give credit where it is due to the east; in this case, notably, to Israel. Ironically, Israeli scholars are at
the forefront of this. Thus
Heinsohn: ….
The worst enemy of Israel’s history,
indeed, is biblical chronology. Whoever puts his faith in it, cannot help but
be tempted to extinguish Ancient Israel from the map. This is not only true for
anti-Semites and anti-Zionists and neutral researchers, but even for the best and brightest of Israeli
scholars.
- ignoring clearly stated biblical syncretisms.
I gave the example in Chapter 1 of
Thiele’s widely accepted, neo-Assyrian-based ‘biblical’ chronology, according
to which Thiele has completely rejected - and hence lost - that triple biblical
link of the 9th year of Hoshea, the 6th year of Hezekiah and
the fall of Samaria. I intend now to discuss this further.
A Solid Foundation Needed for EOH
Despite this current mood in academic
thinking, let us not forget that the testimony of Israel has sometimes been our
only source of knowledge about a particular king, nation or event, prior to the
flowering of archaeology in modern times. Thus, for twenty centuries or more,
the only mention of the great Assyrian king, SARGON II, was to be found in the opening verse of Isaiah 20: “In the year that
the commander-in-chief, who was sent by King Sargon of Assyria, came to Ashdod
and fought against it and took it”.
Historians doubted Isaiah’s testimony
that there even was such an Assyrian king, ‘Sargon’. Again, relevant to EOH,
there is, as discussed in Chapter I, some interlocking chronology between the Assyrian records and 2 Kings
for the incident of the fall of Samaria. These syncretisms, I suggest, should
not be lightly dismissed. Potentially, they are fully preserved in my five
chronological ‘anchors’ for EOH as listed in Chapter
1 (p. 28); but they are annihilated in Thiele’s
chronology, despite the latter’s assertion that: ….
… never will the events of the Old
Testament record be properly fitted into the
events of the Near Eastern world, and
never will the vital messages of the Old
Testament be thoroughly or correctly
understood until there has been established a sound chronology for Old
Testament times.
Montgomery tells of the devastating
effect that Thiele’s chronology has had upon the
traditional dating of Hezekiah in its
relation to Hoshea of Israel and the fall of Samaria:….
Thiele’s chronology has the fall of
Samaria in 722 BC, Hezekiah’s accession year in 715 BC and his 14th year in 701 BC – 21 years apart. He
insists that Hezekiah and Hosea [Hoshea] had no contact at all. He says “… it
is of paramount importance that synchronisms (II Kings 18:1, 8, 10) between him
(Hezekiah) and Hosea be recognized as late and artificial.” [12, p174], i.e.
they are false.
This is an extremely bold conclusion
for Thiele to have reached in regard to an ancient document that provides us
with multi-chronological links; especially given his insistence upon “a sound
chronology for Old Testament times”. Admittedly though, as already noted in Chapter 1, there
are problems to be sorted out in connection with the biblical link between
Hoshea and Hezekiah, the beginning of whose reign is said to have occurred during
Hoshea’s third year (2 Kings 18:1): “In the third year of King Hoshea son of
Elah of Israel, Hezekiah son of King Ahaz of Judah began to reign”. Thiele has
discussed this in several places, and has rejected the veracity of the biblical
evidence. His argument firstly centres upon the fact that Hezekiah had, in the
great Passover he proclaimed in his first year, sent invitations to Israel – to
Ephraim and Manasseh and even Zebulun (2 Chronicles 30:1, 6, 10), leading
Thiele to conclude:….
“While the northern kingdom was still
in existence, it would not, of course, have been possible for the envoys of
Judah to pass through the territory of Israel; so we have here a clear
indication that it was no longer in existence”.
On a more general note, Thiele has
offered this related objection: ….
Nowhere in the record of Hezekiah’s
reign is mention made of any contact by him with Hoshea. In less serious times
there was always a mention in the account of a king of Judah of some contact
with the corresponding king of Israel, but none is found here. If it had been
during the days of the God-fearing Hezekiah that Assyria was bringing Israel to
its end, it is almost certain that Hezekiah would have had some contact with
Hoshea and mentioned that contact. The deafening silence in this regard is a
clear indication that Hoshea and his kingdom were no more when Hezekiah began.
This is a legitimate point. The most
likely solution to the problem, in my opinion, is that Hoshea was no longer in
charge of Israel.
I suggested in Chapter 1 (p.
26) that Hoshea’s revolt against Assyria, involving his turning to ‘So King of
Egypt’, would have occurred close to 727 BC, the beginning of
Hezekiah’s reign. Some years earlier,
with the Assyrian forces of Tiglath-pileser III “approaching the very border of
Israel and … threatening to push onward to Samaria”, according to Irvine’s
construction of events, Hoshea had led “a pro-Assyrian, anti-Pekah movement
within Israel …”. …. But
now, in the face of Hoshea’s revolt, the swift-acting Shalmaneser V (who I am
identifying with Tiglath-pileser), had promptly “confined [Hoshea] and
imprisoned him” (2 Kings 17:4). Hoshea was thus rendered inactive from about
the beginning of Hezekiah’s reign and on into the siege and subsequent capture
of Samaria. And so the Egyptian-backed Hezekiah, who had like Hoshea rebelled
against Assyria, became for a time the sole ruler of the entire land, prior to
the Assyrian incursions into Judah. In this way, one presumes, Hezekiah would
have been able to have sent his messengers into northern Israel.
The other legitimate objection that I
had noted in Chapter 1 (on p. 22) concerned Tadmor’s view, followed by Thiele, that Samaria was
captured twice by Assyria; a second time in 720 BC. …. Moreover, Roux considers whether it
were Shalmaneser V or Sargon II who captured Samaria as “still a debated
question”. …. While
van de Mieroop writes of Shalmaneser V as conquering Israel’s capital “just
before his death”, adding
that: “His successor Sargon II claimed the victory for himself and turned the
region into the province of Samaria”. Whilst I intend to discuss in detail, in
the next chapter, the neo-Assyrian chronology in its relation to Hezekiah, I
should like to make some preliminary comments here, following Boutflower.
Sargon, according to Luckenbill, had claimed that the fall of Samaria occurred
(i.e. he caused it) in his first year: …. “[At the beginning of my rule, in my first year of reign ... Samerinai
(the people of Samaria) ... 27,290 people, who lived therein, I carried away ...]”.
I see no good reason though not to accept Sargon’s plain statement here. There
is apparently a one year discrepancy between Sargon II’s Annals and
the document that Winckler called Cylinder B, according to which the fall of Samaria
could not have occurred in the reign of Sargon, but of his predecessor, Shalmaneser.
Here is Boutflower’s explanation of the apparent puzzling discrepancy: ….
… the Annals make Sargon’s reign to
commence in the year 722 BC., styled the rish
sharruti or “beginning of the reign”, 721 being
regarded as the first year of the reign; whereas our cylinder, which after
Winckler we will call Cylinder B,
regards 721 as the “beginning of the
reign”, and 720 as the first year of the reign.
From this conclusion we obtain the
following remarkable result. The capture of Samaria is assigned by the Annals
to the “beginning of the reign” of Sargon, i.e. to the last three months of the year 722, and it is recorded as the
first event of the reign. But according to this new reckoning of time on
Cylinder B that event would not be included in
the reign of Sargon at all, but would be looked upon as falling in the reign of
his predecessor Shalmaneser V.
When, then, it is objected that in 2
Kings xvii. 3-6 the capture of Samaria - which
took place in 722 - appears to be
assigned to Shalmaneser … we can answer that the sacred writer is no more at
fault than the scribe who wrote Cylinder B ….
It does appear from Sargon II’s Annals that
Samaria revolted again even after it had been captured by the Assyrians. This
action, tied up I believe with Hezekiah’s own revolt - part of an
Egyptian-backed Syro-Palestine rebellion against Sargon II - was, as we shall
find, followed by further such revolts, possibly also involving Samaria. It
does not alter the fact that Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom, had
fallen to Shalmaneser V and Sargon II in the ninth year of Hoshea, which was
the sixth year of Hezekiah. When the plain testimony of Sargon II above, in
relation to the capture of Samaria, is synthesized with that of 2 Kings 18:10,
we gain this four-way cross-reference for c. 722 BC (conventional dating): (a) fall of Samaria; (b) beginning of Sargon’s rule; (c) sixth year of
Hezekiah; (d) ninth year of Hoshea.
We can even add to this list (e) year one of Merodach-baladan as king of
Babylon, according to Sargon’s testimony: … “In my twelfth year of reign,
(Merodach-baladan) .... For 12 years, against the will (heart) of the gods, he
held sway over Babylon ...”.
Unfortunately, as already noted,
historians and biblical chronologists, notably Thiele,
have basically ignored the above
four-way (potentially five-way) synchronism, (a)-(d)-(e), preferring to align
Hezekiah’s regnal years to a miscalculated neo-Assyrian history [more on that in the next chapter],
making Hezekiah a late contemporary of Sargon II’s, and dating the former to c.
716/5-687 BC. This means, as we also saw, that Hezekiah would have begun to
reign about a decade later than where 2 Kings locates him; far too late for his
having been the king of Judah during the fall of Samaria. ….
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