During the campaign of Sennacherib, king of Assyria, the great city of Lachish had fallen or surrendered. At the time of the successive kings of Judea who followed the Assyrian onslaught, a Judean garrison was established there on the ruins of Lachish in order to monitor the southern border of the kingdom, as King Rehoboam had wanted after the devastating campaign of Pharaoh Shoshenq. Lachish then made headlines again during a campaign of the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar against Judea.
Let's look at the continuation of the historical and biblical chronologies (for earlier dates, refer to the previous articles since Adam):
year 3035 (711 BCE): Sennacherib's campaign against Judea; siege of Lachish
year 3148 (612 BCE): destruction of Nineveh by Nebuchadnezzar, Babylonian general
year 3150 (610 BCE): alliance of Pharaoh Necho with the remnants of the Assyrian army against Nebuchadnezzar
year 3152 (608 BCE): execution by Necho of Josiah king of Judea at Megiddo; reign of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah
year 3155 (605 BCE): battle of Carchemish; victory of Nebuchadnezzar against the Assyrian-Egyptian coalition
year 3155 (605 BCE): Nebuchadnezzar enters Judea and takes Jerusalem
year 3155 (605 BCE): Nebuchadnezzar takes to Babylon part of the Judean intelligentsia including Daniel; Nebuchadnezzar becomes king of Babylon
year 3158 (602 BCE): Jehoiakim, king of Judea, breaks his allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar
year 3163 (597 BCE): Nebuchadnezzar besieges Jerusalem and Jehoiakim is killed
year 3163 (597 BCE): Nebuchadnezzar appoints Zedekiah to the throne of Judea
year 3166 (594 BCE): Zedekiah's rebellion against the Babylonian yoke
year 3167 (593 BCE): Ezekiel prophesies about the messianic times
year 3171 (589 BCE): Nebuchadnezzar campaigns again against Judea, seizes garrisons including Lachish, and besieges Jerusalem
year 3173 (587 BCE): fall of Jerusalem and destruction of Solomon's Temple
After his first campaign against Judea and the exile of its king Jehoiachin, Nebuchadnezzar had placed Zedekiah on the throne of Judea, which had become a vassal state. But after a few years of reign, Zedekiah had nourished the hope that a new alliance with the Pharaoh of Egypt, Psamtik II son of Necho, would help him to throw off the Babylonian yoke.
When Psamtik II died in 589 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar seized the opportune moment to campaign again against Judea because of a succession crisis in Egypt. He was not wrong because the Egyptian army could not come to Zedekiah's aid early enough, and Jerusalem had to withstand the Babylonian siege alone.
Nebuchadnezzar's army attacked all the garrisons spread across the Judean territory on the ruins of the ancient cities that Sennacherib king of Assyria had already conquered and destroyed. In the Judean Lowlands he attacked the garrisons of Beit Shemesh, Azekah and, the southernmost, Lachish.
The site of Lachish was identified in the mid-1930s by the British archaeological expedition led by James Starkey. The excavations revealed traces of the Assyrian siege (vividly illustrated in the bas-relief of Lachish now exhibited in the British Museum in London), as well as evidence of the Babylonian campaign. Concerning the latter, Starkey made an important discovery known today as the "Lachish letters". These letters were in fact messages written in ink on broken pieces of pottery (these pieces are technically called ostraca) between the commanders of the Judean forts in the region before and during the Babylonian conquest.
There are several letters from Lachish, all of which provide evidence for the authenticity of the biblical narrative. The most famous of these letters is Letter IV, which contains the following message:
I have written on the gate [of the garrison] according to all the [instructions] that you sent me. [...] And Semach-Yahu took Shema-Yahu (with him) and they went up into the city, [...] for we watch the signals of the fire of Lachish according to all the signals that my lord gave me, for we do not see the signals of Azekah.
Two important points emerge from this letter.
First, it links different garrison locations in a single letter: Lachish, Azekah, and a third garrison unnamed but supposed to be Mareshah that was intermediate between the first two. The commander of this in-between garrison, who could normally see both the signal fires of Lachish and Azekah, informs his commander in Lachish that he can no longer see the fire of Azekah. In other words, Azekah has already fallen into the hands of the Babylonian army!
Secondly, the name of Semach-Yahu: one might have assumed that this commander had been killed in this campaign. But another Babylonian document shows that he had been captured and exiled, like other prominent figures before him, whether religious, royal or aristocratic. For the document in question shows that the son of Semach-Yahu, and therefore his family, received food rations in Babylon, and therefore that they were exiled there. The clay tablets on which these food rations were inscribed, by family, represent the archives of Al-Yahudu which was the name given to the exiled Judean community in Babylonian archives. The name Yahudu obviously means Judea. In this document, dated 561 BC, we find the food ration of Rapa-yama son of Semach-Yamu.
Lachish letter IV is so important, from the point of view of biblical archaeology, that it appeared on a series of stamps issued by Israel in the past.
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Albert Benhamou
Private tour guide in Israel
March 2025
