Hezekiah and Sennacherib

Hezekiah "removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan." "He trusted in the LORD God of Israel; so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah." "He rebelled against the king of Assyria, and served him not."

"Now in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah did Sennacherib king of Assyria come up against all the fenced cities of Judah, and took them." Hezekiah sends to Lachish: "I have offended; return from me." Sennacherib demands "three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold." Hezekiah gives the silver of the temple and palace and cuts the gold from the temple doors.

The Tartan, the Rabsaris and the Rabshakeh come with an army to "the conduit of the upper pool." "What confidence is this wherein thou trustest?… thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, even upon Egypt." The king's officials ask him to speak Aramaic, not "in the Jews' language in the ears of the people that are on the wall." He shouts louder in Hebrew: "Let not Hezekiah deceive you… Hath any of the gods of the nations delivered at all his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath, and of Arpad?" The people answer nothing; the officials come to Hezekiah with torn clothes.

Sennacherib's own account

Sennacherib's annals, on clay prisms (the Taylor Prism in the British Museum, the Oriental Institute Prism in Chicago, and the Jerusalem prism at the Israel Museum, inscribed 691–689 BC), describe the 701 BC campaign: "As for Hezekiah the Judean… 46 of his strong walled cities… I besieged and conquered… Himself I made a prisoner in Jerusalem, his royal residence, like a bird in a cage." He lists tribute including 30 talents of gold and 800 talents of silver. He does not claim to have taken Jerusalem.

Lachish

Sennacherib decorated a room of his palace at Nineveh with reliefs of the siege of Lachish (now in the British Museum): siege ramps, battering rams, archers, impaled defenders and families going into exile. At Tel Lachish, excavators found the Assyrian siege ramp, a Judahite counter-ramp, hundreds of arrowheads and the burnt destruction of Level III. It is one of the best-documented sieges in ancient history.

Nehushtan

Hezekiah's destruction of a bronze serpent ascribed to Moses (Numbers 21:9) shows how a sacred object could become an object of worship. The copper serpent from the Timna shrine is a comparable object of an earlier period, not Nehushtan.