What both sides agree on. Sennacherib (reigned 705–681 BC), Sargon's son, launched the campaign against King Hezekiah of Judah in 701 BC that Scripture narrates at length in 2 Kings 18:13–19:37 and Isaiah 36–37 (ISBE, "Sennacherib"). His own account survives, the clay hexagonal prism inscriptions known as the Taylor Prism (and its duplicates), and tells the same campaign from the Assyrian side. He claims to have stormed 46 of Hezekiah's walled cities and to have shut the king up "like a bird in a cage in Jerusalem, his royal city." He records the heavy tribute Hezekiah paid, and, a convergence the ISBE flags as "striking", his figure for the gold (30 talents) matches 2 Kings 18:14 exactly.
Where the two accounts part, and how each explains it. For all the agreement, the Assyrian record never claims the one thing that would crown the campaign: the capture of Jerusalem. The city did not fall. The two sources account for this differently, and this file picks no winner. Scripture says the LORD's angel struck the Assyrian camp and Sennacherib withdrew (2 Kings 19:35–36); Sennacherib's annal simply describes the tribute and the bird-in-a-cage siege and moves on, never claiming to have taken the city, a king's inscription records victories, not the failure to finish one. Historians have long debated what halted the siege (plague, a payoff, trouble elsewhere in the empire); the ISBE, in its 1915 conservative idiom, flatly calls the campaign against Hezekiah "a failure." What is not in dispute is that the great king who took 46 towns did not take the forty-seventh.
His end. Sennacherib was murdered years later, in 681 BC, by two of his own sons, recorded in 2 Kings 19:37 and confirmed in the Assyrian succession, with a third son, Esarhaddon, taking the throne. Here too the Bible and the empire's records agree. (Source: ISBE 1915, "Sennacherib"; the campaign details are from Sennacherib's own annals, the Taylor Prism, as summarized by the ISBE.)
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