rd.

4. About the same time also the king of Assyria wrote an epistle to
Hezekiah, in which he said he was a foolish man, in supposing that he
should escape from being his servant, since he had already brought under
many and great nations; and he threatened, that when he took him, he
would utterly destroy him, unless he now opened the gates, and willingly
received his army into Jerusalem. When he read this epistle, he despised
it, on account of the trust that he had in God; but he rolled up the
epistle, and laid it up within the temple. And as he made his further
prayers to God for the city, and for the preservation of all the people,
the prophet Isaiah said that God had heard his prayer, and that he
should not be besieged at this time by the king of Assyria [2] that for
the future he might be secure of not being at all disturbed by him;
and that the people might go on peaceably, and without fear, with
their husbandry and other affairs. But after a little while the king
of Assyria, when he had failed of his treacherous designs against the
Egyptians, returned home without success, on the following occasion: He
spent a long time in the siege of Pelusium; and when the banks that he
had raised over against the walls were of a great height, and when
he was ready to make an immediate assault upon them, but heard that
Tirhaka, king of the Ethiopians, was coming and bringing great forces to
aid the Egyptians, and was resolved to march through the desert, and so
to fall directly upon the Assyrians, this king Sennacherib was disturbed
at the news, and, as I said before, left Pelusium, and returned back
without success. Now concerning this Sennacherib, Herodotus also says,
in the second book of his histories, how "this king came against
the Egyptian king, who was the priest of Vulcan; and that as he was
besieging Pelusium, he broke up the siege on the following occasion:
This Egyptian priest prayed to God, and God heard his prayer, and sent
a judgment upon the Arabian king." But in this Herodotus was mistaken,
when he called this king not king of the Assyrians, but of the Arabians;
for he saith that "a multitude of mice gnawed to pieces in one night
both the bows and the rest of the armor of the Assyrians, and that it
was on that account that the king, when he had no bows left, drew off
his army from Pelusium." And Herodotus does indeed give us this history;
nay, and Berosus, who wrote of the affairs of Chaldea, makes mention of
t