Tirhakah is mentioned (2 Kings xix, 9) as an oppo- nent of Sennacherib shortly before the miraculous de- struction of his army in the fourteenth year of Heze- kiah, corresponding to B.C. 713. It has lately been proved from the Apis tablets that the first year of Tir- hakah's reign over Egypt was the vague j'ear current in B.C. 089 (Dr. Hincks, in the Joia: Sac. Lit. October, 1858, p. 130). There is, therefore, a prima facie dis- crepancy of several years. Bunsen {Bibelwerk, i, p. ccevi) unhesitatuigly reduces the reign of Manasseh from fifty-five to forty-five years. Lepsius {Koniysbuch, J). 104) more criticallj^ takes the thirty-five years of the Sept. as the true diuration. Were an alteration demand- ed, it would seem best to make Manasseh's computation of his reign commence with his father's illness in pref- erence to taking the conjectural number forty-five, or the very short one thirty-five. The evidence of the chronology of the Assv-rian and Babylonian kings is, however, we think, conclusive in favor of the sum of fifty-five. In the Bible we are told that Shalmaneser laid siege to Samaria in the fourth year of Hezekiah, and that it was taken in the sixth year of that king (2 Kings xviii, 9, 10). The AssjTian inscriptions indicate the taking of the city by Sargon in his first or second year, whence we must suppose either that he completed the enterprise of Shalmaneser, to whom the capture is not expressly ascribed in the Scriptures, or that he took the credit of an event -ivhich happened just before his accession. The first year of Sargon is shown by the in- scriptions to have been exactly or nearly equal to the first of ^Merodach-Baladan, i. e. IMardocempadus : there- fore it was current B.C. 721 or 720, and the second year, 720 or 719. This would place Hezekiah's accession B.C. 726, 725, or 724, the first of them being the very date the Hebrew numbers give. Again, iMerodach-Baladan sent messengers to Hezekiah immediately after his sick- ness, and therefore in about his fifteenth year, B.C. 712. '.ccording to Ptolemy's Canon, IMardocempadus reigned 21-710, and, according to Berosus, seized the regal
wer for six months before Elibus. the Belibus of the Canon, and therefore in about 703, this being, no doubt,
a second reign. See IMERonAcii-BALADAx. Here the preponderance of evidence is in favor of tlie earlier dates of Hezekiah. Thus far the chronological data of Egypt and Assyria appear to clash in a manner tliat seems at first sight to present a hopeless knot, but not on this ac- count tw be rashly cut. An examination of the facts of the historj' has afforded Dr. Hincks {Jour, of Sac. Lit- erature, Oct. 1858) what he believes to be the true ex- planation. Tirhakah, he observes, is not exi)]icitly termed Pharaoh or king of Egypt in the Bible, but king of Cush or Ethiopia, from which it might be in- ferred that at the time of Sennacherib's disastrous inva- sion he had not assumed the crown of Egypt. The Assyrian inscriptions of Sennacherib mention kings of Egypt, and a contemporary king of Ethiopia in alliance with them. The history of Egypt at the time, obtain- ed by a comparison of the evidence of Herodotus and others with that of Manetho's lists, would lead to the same or a similar conclusion, which appears to be re- markably confirmed by the prophecies of Isaiah. He holds, therefore, as most probable, that, at the time of Sennacherib's disastrous expedition, Tirhakah Avas king of Ethiopia in alliance with the king or kings of Egj'pt. In fact, in order to reconcile the discrepancy between the date of the fourteenth year of Hezekiah in B.C. 713, and its contemporaneousness with the reign of Tirha- kah, who did not ascend the Egyptian throne till B.C. 689, we have only to suppose that the latter king was the ruler of Ethiopia some years before his accession over Egypt itself. See Tirhakah.
In this, way, however, we again fall into the other difficulty as to the coincidence of this date with that of Sennacherib's invasion. It is true, as above seen, that the warlike operations of Sennacherib recorded in the Bible have been conjectured (Rawlinson, Herodotus, i, 383) to be those of two expeditions. See Sennacherib. The fine paid by Hezekiah is recorded in the inscrip- tions as a result of an expedition of Sennacherib's third year, which, by a comparison of Ptolemy's Canon with Berosus, must be dated B.C. 700, and this would fall so near the close of the reign of the king of Judah (B.C. 697) that the supposed second expedition, of which there Avould naturally be no record in the AssjTian an- nals on account of its calamitous end, could not be placed much later. The Biblical account would, however, be most reasonably explained by the supposition that the two expeditions were but two campaigns of the same war, a war but temporarily interrupted by Hezekiah's submission. Now as even the former (if there were two) of these expeditions of Sennacherib fell in B.C. 700, it would be thirteen years later than the synchro- nism of Tirhakah and Hezekiah as above arrived at. It is probable, therefore, that there is some miscalcula- tion in these dates from the Egyptian and Assj-rian monuments, as indeed seems to be betrayed by the dis- crepancy between Sennacherib's invasion (B.C. 700) and Tirhakah 's reign (not eariier than B.C. 689), as thereby determined, whereas the above Biblical passage makes them contemporaneous. Dr. Hincks {ut sup.), however, proposes to solve this difficulty also by the uncritical supposition that the name of Sennacherib has been in- serted in the Biblical account of the first Assyrian inva- sion of Judah (2 Kings xviii, 13 ; Isa. xxvi, 1 ; 2 Chron. xxxii) by some copyist, who confounded this witli the later invasion by that monarch, whereas the Assj-rian king referred to was Sargon (Isa. xx, 1), his predecessor, A less violent h}-]iothesis for the same purjjose of recon- cilement, and one in accordance with the custom of these Oriental kings, e. g. in the case of Nebuchadnez- zar, is that Sargon sent Sennacherib as viceroy to exe- cute this campaign in Palestine, and that the annals of the reign of the latter refer to different and later expe- ditions when actually king. See Chronology.