Isaiah 36:1

(Cf. 2 Kings 18:13) in the fourteenth year The year of Sennacherib's expedition was beyond question 701 b.c. If this was really the fourteenth year of Hezekiah his accession must have taken place in 715. On the objections to this date, see Chronological Note, pp. lxxvi f. Assuming that the arguments there given are valid, the error in this verse might be accounted for in either of two ways. (1) It has been suggested that ch. 38 f. stood originally before ch. 36 f., and that in the process of transposition the precise specification of time, which really belonged to ch. 38, was retained as the introduction to the whole group of narratives. The 14th year of Hezekiah would thus be the true date, not necessarily of Sennacherib's invasion, but of Hezekiah's sickness and the embassy of Merodach-Baladan. (2) A second supposition is that the date was inserted here by an editor, who arrived at it by a calculation based on ch. Isaiah 38:5. Deducting the 15 years" lease of life assured to Hezekiah by the prophet from the 29 years of his reign, he rightly concluded that his sickness must have occurred in the 14th year of his reign, and supposing further that all these events were nearly contemporaneous, he substituted this exact date for some vaguer statement which he may have found in his original. A third hypothesis, that the date is correct, but that the name Sennacherib has been wrongly written for Sargon, falls to the ground with the whole theory of an invasion of Judah by the latter monarch.

all the defenced cities of Judah Sennacherib himself boasts that he captured forty-six of them in this campaign.