buted to
Isaiah.

The Jewish king was to give up his wives and daughters as hostages,
to pledge himself to pay a regular tribute, and disburse immediately a
ransom of thirty talents of gold, and eight hundred talents of silver:
he could only make up this large sum by emptying the royal and sacred
treasuries, and taking down the plates of gold with which merely a short
while before he had adorned the doors and lintels of the temple. Padi
was released from his long captivity, reseated on his throne, and
received several Jewish towns as an indemnity: other portions of
territory were bestowed upon Mitinti of Ashdod and Zillibel of Graza as
a reward for their loyalty.*

* The sequence of events is not very well observed in the
Assyrian text, and the liberation of Padi is inserted in 11.
8-11, before the account of the war with Hezekiah. It seems
very unlikely that the King of Judah would have released his
prisoner before his treaty with Sennacherib; the Assyrian
scribe, wishing to bring together all the facts relating to
Ekron, anticipated this event. Hebrew tradition fixed the
ransom at the lowest figure, 300 talents of silver instead
of the 800 given in the Assyrian document (2 Kings xviii.
14), and authorities have tried to reconcile this divergence
by speculating on the different values represented by a
talent in different countries and epochs.

Hezekiah issued from the struggle with his territory curtailed and his
kingdom devastated; the last obstacle which stood in the way of the
Assyrians' victorious advance fell with him, and Sennacherib could
now push forward with perfect safety towards the Nile. He had, indeed,
already planned an attack on Egypt, and had reached the isthmus, when a
mysterious accident arrested his further progress. The conflict on
the plains of Altaku had been severe; and the army, already seriously
diminished by its victory, had been still further weakened during the
campaign in Judaea, and possibly the excesses indulged in by the soldiery
had developed in them the germs of one of those terrible epidemics which
had devastated Western Asia several times in the course of the century:
whatever may have been the cause, half the army was destroyed by
pestilence before it reached the frontier of the Delta, and Sennacherib
led back the shattered remnants of his force to Nineveh.*

* The Assyrian texts are silent about this catastr