just at the time to when Hezekiah received his letter and made the prayer to which Isaiah was instructed to respond.  The two hosts lay down at night in their respective stations, the Egyptians and their king full of anxious alarm, Sennacherib and his Assyrians proudly confident, intending on the morrow to advance to the combat and repeat the lesson taught at Raphia and Altaku.  But no morrow was to break on the great mass of those who took their rest in the tents of the Assyrians.  The divine fiat had gone forth.  In the night, as they slept, destruction fell upon them.  “The angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand; and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.”  A miracle, like the destruction of the first-born, had been wrought, but this time on the enemies of the Egyptians, who naturally ascribed their deliverance to the interposition of their own gods; and seeing the enemy in confusion and retreat, pressed hastily after him, distressed his flying columns, and cut off his stragglers.  The Assyrian king returned home to Nineveh, shorn of his glory, with the shattered remains of his great host, and cast that proud capital into a state of despair and grief, which the genius of an AEschylus might have rejoiced to depict, but which no less powerful pen could adequately portray.

It is difficult to say how soon Assyria recovered from this terrible blow.  The annals of Sennacherib, as might have been expected, omit it altogether, and represent the Assyrian monarch as engaged in a continuous series of successful campaigns, which seem to extend uninterruptedly from his third to his tenth year.  It is possible that while the Assyrian expedition was in progress, under the eye of Sennacherib himself, a successful war was being conducted by one of his generals in the mountains of Armenia, and that Sennacherib was thus enabled, without absolutely falsifying history, to parade as his own certain victories gained by this leader in the very year of his own reverse.  It is even conceivable that the power of Assyria was not so injured by the loss of a single great army, as to make it necessary for her to stop even for one year in the course of her aggressive warfare; and thus the expeditions of Sennacherib may form an uninterrupted series, the eight campaigns which are assigned to him occupying eight consecutive years.  But on the other hand it is quite as probable that there are gaps in the history, some years having been omitted altogether.  The Taylor Cylinder records but eight campaigns, yet it was certainly written as late as Sennacherib’s fifteenth year.  It contains no notice of any events in Sennacherib’s first or second year; and it may consequently make other omissions covering equal or larger intervals.  Thus the destruction of the Assyrian army at Pelusium may have been followed by a pause of some years’ duration in the usual aggressive expeditions; and it may very probably have encouraged the Babylonians in the attempt to shake off the Assyrian yoke, which they certainly made towards the middle of Sennacherib’s reign.