THE RESCUE OF JERUSALEM

An intriguing argument, in the absence of much direct historical evidence, that Israel was delivered from its Assyrian enemy by an African savior.

In 701 b.c., a great army of Assyrians in the service of the ruler Sennacherib descended on Israel, Canaan, and Judah on a mission of conquest. Approaching Jerusalem after several victories, this army was, according to the Bible, devastated by an “angel of the Lord” and forced to withdraw. This “angel,” scholars have guessed, was likely some sort of smallpox-like plague; in whatever event, the deliverance of Jerusalem assured the survival of the Hebrew kingdom and of its god, Yahweh—and, by extension, enabled Jerusalem to endure as the center of three great monotheistic religions. Aubin, a reporter for the Montreal Gazette, works his way through a great library of historical texts to support his thesis that the angel was in fact the army of the Kushite pharaoh of Egypt, made up largely of black Africans from what is now the Sudan. Led by the general Taharqa, who would go on to become a pharaoh himself and whom the Greek historian Strabo ranked among the great but underpublicized warriors of the ancient world, this African army seldom figures in modern biblical scholarship—the result, Aubin argues, of a racist campaign over the last two centuries to erase the Kushite contribution to Israel’s survival. That argument is sometimes overstated, though Aubin finds a useful foil in the unapologetically racist though influential scholar Archibald Henry Sayce (1845–1933), who dismissed the possibility that a “Negro dynasty” could have effected the rescue of distant Jerusalem. Even so, Aubin writes about complex matters of history, archaeology, and biblical exegesis with a generally light hand, and his book, though its reliance on learned guesswork may give traditionally minded scholars pause, offers an eminently plausible interpretation of one of history’s great turning points.

Sure to provoke discussion, and deserving of a broad audience.