In 701 B.C. the Assyrian king Sennacherib launched his campaign against, a.o., Judah. This event has been recorded in the Hebrew Bible (Isaiah, the Biblical war narratives) and, as a consequence, has decisively influenced Jewish and Christian thought. The war, though, has remained obscure for modern historians.

The author of this latest volume in Brill's monograph series Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East brings together both Biblical and Assyrian sources on the campaign. Part of these abundant Assyrian materials are new, and consequently enable the author to give new insights on the event itself. A second major result of this study lies in the new, carefully supported interpretations of some Isaiah oracles, and of both the Assyrian and Biblical narratives of Sennacherib's campaign.

The meticulous attention given to textual criticism, translation problems, historiographical questions and its cautiously applied literary criticism make it a model of the contextual method in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Studies.