"Therefore this is what the Lord says concerning the king of Assyria: 'He will not enter this city or shoot an arrow here. He will not come before it with shield or build a siege ramp against it. By the way he came he will return; he will not enter this city,' declares the Lord. 'I will defend this city and save it, for My sake and for the sake of David My servant!'" (Isaiah 37:33-35)
The Lord defends the city for His sake (because the heathen king blasphemed His name) and defends it for David's sake (because of the promises He made to him). David has been dead for about three centuries by this time but that doesn't negate the promises the Lord made to him about remaining faithful to those who are faithful to Him. The Lord will allow the city to fall to an enemy a little over a century later due to how much idolatry the people will have fallen into by then, but during King Hezekiah's reign and during the reigns of some of the successive kings there has been a revival. The king and his people are looking to the Lord for help, not to idols for help. This is how David lived his life---looking to the Lord for help---and the people of Hezekiah's day have the same attitude. The Lord is going to reward their attitude of faith just as He rewarded David's attitude of faith.
We have already talked about how Sennacherib was forced to withdraw from nearby Lachish in order to fight at Libnah, likely due to an uprising there against him, and then he heard that the forces of Egypt were marching toward the southern border of Assyria and he had to go there to line up in battle array against them to defend his border. That is the fulfillment of the Lord's promise to send Sennacherib back by the way he came.
While Sennacherib is absent from the region of Judah, the Lord fulfills another portion of His promise---the portion that states no Assyrian arrow will fly into the city and that the Assyrians will not build a siege ramp against the wall. "Then the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning---there were all the dead bodies!" (Isaiah 37:36) We read about this event when we studied the kings of Israel and Judah. We don't know by what method the Lord put them to death but it happened as swiftly as the final plague of Egypt in which the firstborn of all the Egyptians and of all their livestock perished suddenly in the night.
We don't know at what point Sennacherib broke camp at Lachish. We were told of him breaking camp earlier in our study as if it had already happened before the deaths of his soldiers but this next segment makes it sound as if he doesn't leave Lachish until 185,000 of his men perish. The chronology of these events is not entirely clear and I'm not certain that this next verse means he breaks camp after so many of his men die or whether it happened before. It could simply be that this verse is saying something like, "Thus was the Lord's word fulfilled that Sennacherib would depart. All these things happened as the Lord said they would."
"So Sennacherib of Assyria broke camp and withdrew. He returned to Nineveh and stayed there." (Isaiah 37:37) He returned to his palace in the capitol city of Nineveh, intending to come back later to lay siege to Jerusalem, but he was prevented from doing so, just as the Lord said. "One day, while he was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisrok, his sons Addrammelek and Sharezer killed him with the sword, and they escaped to the land of Ararat. And Esarhaddon his son succeeded him as king." (Isaiah 37:38)
Sennacherib's death did not occur immediately upon his return to Nineveh. According to Assyrian records, about twenty years elapsed between his retreat and his death. He himself wrote some records in the annals of Assyrian history after he left the land of Judah. But during that period of time he did not make a second attempt of a siege upon Jerusalem, perhaps having too much fear in his heart after the supernatural slaughter of so many of his soldiers, perhaps having too many matters to attend to on the homefront and too many rebellions to quell in the areas he'd already conquered. Whatever the reason for his failure to return as he threatened, we know it was by the divine hand of God that he did not return. The Lord kept His promise to Hezekiah.
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