The Rescue of Jerusalem: Who Wrote It, and What It Claims Actually Happened in 701 BC
The Bible says an angel destroyed Sennacherib's army outside Jerusalem's walls. Henry Aubin, a Montreal newspaper reporter with no biblical-studies credential, spent years building a different case — that a Kushite army from what is now Sudan, led by a young prince named Taharqa, was the real reason the city survived.
The Rescue of Jerusalem: The Alliance Between Hebrews and Africans in 701 BC was written by Henry T. Aubin, a Canadian journalist, and published in 2002 by Soho Press in the United States and Doubleday Canada. The book argues that a Kushite army from the Nile kingdom of Kush — commanded by a young prince who would later become the pharaoh Taharqa — was decisive in forcing the Assyrian king Sennacherib to abandon his siege of Jerusalem, and that this African contribution was written out of Western scholarship by racial bias over the following two centuries.
The MysteryThe Siege the Book Is Trying to Explain
In 701 BC, the Assyrian king Sennacherib marched into the Levant to crush a coalition of small kingdoms, including Judah, that had stopped paying him tribute after the death of his predecessor Sargon II. Assyrian forces besieged and captured dozens of Judahite towns, including the fortress city of Lachish, before advancing on Jerusalem itself, where King Hezekiah and the prophet Isaiah were preparing the city's defenses.
By every account — biblical and Assyrian alike — Jerusalem should have fallen. It did not. The Hebrew Bible's explanation, in 2 Kings 19 and Isaiah 37, is that an "angel of the Lord" struck down the Assyrian camp overnight, forcing Sennacherib to withdraw. Sennacherib's own inscriptions, unsurprisingly, describe the campaign as a triumph and say nothing about a military defeat, instead claiming a final tribute payment from Hezekiah.
Modern historians have offered several competing, non-supernatural explanations for why Sennacherib turned back — and it is precisely this gap between the biblical account and the historical record that Aubin's book is written to fill.
Competing ExplanationsThe Rival Theories, Ledgered
| Theory | Core claim | Aubin's treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Divine intervention | An "angel of the Lord" killed the Assyrian troops overnight, per 2 Kings 19 and Isaiah 37. | Reframed Treated as the text's theological memory of a real, non-supernatural event rather than literal history. |
| Plague | A smallpox-like epidemic swept the Assyrian camp, forcing a retreat. | Challenged Long the leading secular guess among scholars; Aubin argues the evidence for it is thin and largely inferential. |
| Hezekiah surrendered | Hezekiah simply paid enough tribute that Sennacherib chose to leave rather than risk a costly siege. | Challenged Aubin argues this understates the military pressure the Assyrians were actually under. |
| Kushite intervention | A Kushite army under Prince Taharqa threatened Sennacherib's forces, forcing him to abandon the siege. | Central thesis The book's core claim, built from the brief biblical mention of "Tirhakah, king of Cush" in Isaiah 37:9. |
Aubin's method is essentially prosecutorial: he works through each rival theory, weighs the evidence for it, and argues that the Kushite explanation better fits both the biblical text and the archaeological and Assyrian record than the alternatives — while conceding, in his own words, that parts of his reconstruction of exactly how the Kushites achieved this are speculative "musings" rather than proven fact.
The Central FigureTaharqa — Prince, General, Later Pharaoh
The chronology is one of the trickiest parts of Aubin's case, and he addresses it directly rather than glossing over it: Taharqa was not yet pharaoh in 701 BC — Shebitku was. The Bible's reference to "Tirhakah, king of Cush" marching against Sennacherib (Isaiah 37:9) uses the title Taharqa would only hold more than a decade later, which some scholars have read as an anachronism that undermines the whole episode's historicity. Aubin's response, echoed by later scholarship on the question, is that the biblical author was likely using Taharqa's later, more famous royal title to identify a man already well known as a military commander at the time of the siege — not inventing his presence.
The CaseAubin's Central Argument
Aubin's thesis rests on two connected claims. The first is historical: that the Kushite army's approach, whatever its precise military outcome, was the actual reason Sennacherib broke off a siege he was otherwise positioned to win. The second is historiographical, and considerably more provocative: that this explanation was taken seriously by many Western scholars through the nineteenth century, then dropped sharply after the 1880s — a period, Aubin notes, that coincides closely with the rise of European colonialism in Africa and with hardening racial attitudes about the capabilities of African civilizations.
Aubin's argument is not simply that a Kushite army helped save Jerusalem — it's that scholars once widely entertained that possibility, and that the idea's near-disappearance from twentieth-century biblical scholarship tracks with the era's broader racial assumptions about ancient African military and political capability, rather than with any new contrary evidence.
This is the claim that generated the most sustained scholarly pushback, and it remains the most disputed part of the book.
The book's title captures both halves of the argument at once: a "rescue" carried out by an alliance between two ancient peoples, and a historical episode Aubin believes was quietly erased rather than simply forgotten.
The VerdictCritical and Scholarly Reception
The Rescue of Jerusalem received unusually substantial attention for a trade history book written by a non-academic — both from book reviewers and, years later, from specialists in the fields it touched.
- Kirkus Reviews Called the book's central case compelling and well-documented, while judging that Aubin's racism argument was sometimes overstated — a mixed verdict that set the tone for much of the book's press coverage.
- Publishers Weekly Found parts of the book demanding to read, but concluded it may offer the strongest existing solution to a genuine, long-standing problem in biblical scholarship.
- Globe and Mail Critic Donald Akenson praised Aubin's command of the Near Eastern, biblical, and Egyptological source material and argued the book showed an entire century of prior scholarship had gotten the question wrong.
- Peer response volume A later academic collection gathered eight specialists in biblical studies, Assyriology, Egyptology, and Nubian studies to assess the thesis directly. Most leaned toward finding it plausible in whole or in part — but individual essays pushed back hard on specific pieces, including the strength of the Kushite army and the reliability of Taharqa's route to Judah.
- Journal critique & reply Biblical scholar P.S. Evans published a detailed critique of Aubin's argument in the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures; Aubin wrote a full point-by-point rebuttal, and the exchange became one of the more substantive academic debates the book generated.
Aubin does a good job of showing the flimsy reasoning behind some of the biblical criticism that dismissed the Kushites' effectiveness.
— Paraphrased summary of the Jerusalem Post's review
What emerges across the reviews is not a consensus that Aubin proved his case, but a consistent judgment that he raised a genuinely serious question that professional scholarship had not adequately answered — and that his outsider status, while a source of skepticism, did not disqualify the argument from being taken seriously.
What Comes Of ItWhat the Book Changed
More than two decades after publication, The Rescue of Jerusalem has not settled the question it asks — but it has demonstrably reopened it. The 2015 peer-reviewed response volume dedicated entirely to assessing Aubin's thesis is itself evidence that a self-taught journalist's argument earned a level of specialist engagement rarely extended to a trade-press history book.
The chronological problem around Taharqa's title remains the thesis's most persistent vulnerability, and scholars remain split on how much weight the Kushite army's intervention can bear relative to plague, logistics, or simple Assyrian overextension. Aubin's own framing — that his reconstruction of the battle mechanics is "playful" speculation built on top of more solid historical arguments — has helped keep the debate constructive rather than dismissive on either side.
The more durable contribution may be the one Aubin cared about most: forcing a reckoning with how nineteenth- and twentieth-century biases shaped which explanations for Jerusalem's survival scholars were willing to entertain in the first place, regardless of where the historical argument ultimately lands.
0 Comments