😇 Angels are God’s Invisible Army. Thank You, Saint Michael!
💭 Researchers have discovered an ancient military base that may corroborate a Bible story about God’s angels fending off an attack on Jerusalem.
The tale says that around 2,700 years ago, the Lord sent a messenger angel to fight an army of Assyrian soldiers who came to conquer the Holy Land.
The Angel of the Lord is then said to have descended on the invading military and killed 185,000 soldiers in a single night.
A peer-reviewed paper in the prestigious journal Near Eastern Archaeology reports the first-ever discoveries of ancient Assyrian military camps. Created circa 700 BC during military conquests across the Middle East, they mark the expansion of the Assyrian Empire, which became the prototype for the subsequent Persian, Greek, and Roman empires.
The initial discovery came from a scene carved into the stone walls of the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s palace commemorating his conquest of Lachish, a city to the south of Jerusalem. Matching the landscape in this image to features of the actual landscape (using early aerial photographs of Lachish prior to modern development) created a virtual map to the site of Sennacherib’s camp. This led to ruins similar in size and shape to the camp in Sennacherib’s relief. An archaeological survey of the site found no evidence of human habitation for 2,600 years, followed by pottery sherds from the exact time of Sennacherib’s invasion of Lachish, after which it was again abandoned for centuries. Moreover, the ancient Arabic name for the ruins was Khirbet al Mudawwara, “The Ruins of the Camp of the Invading Ruler.”
The Daily Mail reported: “Before Compton discovered the Assyria site, researchers had only encountered one other ancient military campsite in the area.
The Assyrian Empire operated from 1365 to 609 BC, hundreds of years before the time of Christ.
The invasion of Jerusalem was driven by the empire’s king Sennacherib who wanted to assert his political and economic dominance over all routes across the Syrian Desert that led to the Mediterranean Sea.
Three Bible stories in the book of ‘Isaiah, 37:36-38’ ‘2 Kings, 19:35’ and ‘2 Chronicles, 32:21’ detailed how the Assyrian soldiers were slain the night before they attacked Jerusalem.
In all stories, the Israelite deity Yahweh, sent an angel who passed through the camp while the soldiers slept, slaying them all for threatening his followers.
Bible passage 19:35 from the book ‘2 Kings’ says: ‘And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred fourscore and five thousand; and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.’
The angel of the Lord – written in Hebrew as Malak Yahweh – translates to messenger of the Lord and was sent to protect Jerusalem after its ruler, Hezekiah, prayed to God for safety.
The account in the Bible is found in three locations:
2 Chronicles 32:21;
“and the LORD sent an angel who annihilated every valiant warrior, leader, and commander in the camp of the king of Assyria. So the king of Assyria returned in disgrace to his land. He went to the temple of his god, and there some of his own children struck him down with the sword.” (2 Chronicles 32:21)
2 Kings 19:35;
and
Isaiah 37:36-38
“And that night the angel of the LORD went out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians. And when people arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies. Then Sennacherib king of Assyria departed and went home and lived at Nineveh. And as he was worshiping in the house of Nisroch his god, Adrammelech and Sharezer, his sons, struck him down with the sword and escaped into the land of Ararat. And Esarhaddon his son reigned in his place.”