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Books: A Black-Jewish Alliance That Worked
Lev Raphael

The Rescue of Jerusalem
by Henry T. Aubin
Soho
421pp;$30.00

Was it the Kushites who saved Jerusalem from Assyrian conquest in 701 BCE?

A recent bestseller credited the Irish with "saving civilization," but according to Canadian journalist Henry T. Aubin, civilization was saved long before medieval Irish monks preserved Roman learning. Who those early saviors were and what they saved makes for a complex but fascinating story in Aubin�s book "The Rescue of Jerusalem."

The bulk of Aubin�s work is a dogged examination of political and military conditions at the turn of the 8th century BCE in Judah, Assyria and Egypt, both as reflected in Biblical and other sources, and as interpreted by Biblical historians and archaeologists. The going is often slow, as varying theories are weighed, compared, dismissed or accepted, and texts are sifted for their less-than-obvious meanings.

Aubin argues that the fate of Jerusalem in the year 701 BCE affected the development of Near Eastern and then Western civilization. He marshals many experts to suggest that if the city had fallen to an Assyrian siege, the Jews would not only have been destroyed as a people, but strictly monotheistic Judaism and its offshoots Christianity and Islam would also never have developed. Jewish belief and practice were loosely polytheistic at the time, lacking not only belief in one god and a sense of Jerusalem�s centrality, but also the institution of the synagogue, Sabbath worship, circumcision, and the belief that the Hebrews were God�s chosen.

The odds for an Assyrian victory were high. Jerusalem had neither the military strength nor the defensive walls to protect itself against the kind of onslaught the Assyrians could mount. They had already destroyed the northern Kingdom of Israel and deported its ruling classes. Under the bloodthirsty and cruel Sennaherib (who ruled 705 to 681), most of the Kingdom of Judah, of which Jerusalem was the capital, had also been conquered, along with other neighboring chiefdoms and kingdoms. Judah�s second largest city, Lakhish, had been reduced to rubble.

Some of Aubin�s most gripping sections detail the nature of Assyria�s implacable war machine. Able to field as many as 100,000 troops at a time, Assyria had surged back and forth through the Fertile Crescent, crushing all opposition, moving whole populations around, and publicly torturing to death defeated enemies as a sign it could not be disobeyed.

Aubin quotes Isaiah�s memorable description of the situation in 701: "Your country is desolate, your cities lie in ashes," with Jerusalem "as defenseless as a watchman�s shed in a vineyard or a shed in a cucumber field."

But as we know, Jerusalem was not destroyed, at least not then. The Bible reports that the rescue was due to the miraculous intervention of God, who sent a plague to knock out the Assyrians. But reading the texts closely and using some extra-Biblical sources, Aubin argues quite persuasively that they withdrew because of the news of an approaching Egyptian army, primarily made of Kushites.

More commonly called Nubians, these dark-skinned people inhabited a land south of Egypt, and their huge and powerful horses were actually prized by the Assyrians, who used them to draw their battle chariots. At the time of the siege, the Kushites actually controlled most of Egypt, having succeeded in uniting a country split among 11 different sovereign entities with three separate pharaohs.

For centuries, historians tended to credit the Kushites with basically driving the Assyrians away from Jerusalem in 701. But Aubin argues that in the late 1880s, increasing colonial domination of Africa, linked to racism, led to a widespread denigration of the Kushite role in Jerusalem�s rescue. Aubin�s aim in writing this book is thus revisionist, or perhaps counter-revisionist might be more accurate, given the major shift of opinion over a century ago. There�s also a personal motive: providing a role model for his adopted black son, who did not seem to respond to tales of other heroes. Whether that clouds his judgment is hard to say, given that the book itself can be cloudy.

Aubin studied history at the University of Strasbourg, but his career has taken him from the Philadelphia Bulletin to the Washington Post to the Montreal Gazette. Because he�s a journalist, one might have expected him to pay more attention to a clearer narrative line. Then we might have had a book as gripping as Richard Elliott Friedman�s "Who Wrote the Bible?" which manages to be immensely readable while working with even thornier textual and historical matters. Aubin�s book is also sorely lacking in detailed maps and illustrations, which might have brought the sometimes dull text to life. But besieged as it may be at times by confusing details and longueurs, the story of the Jewish people�s surprising and epochal deliverance from its dire fate 2,700 years ago survives in a new light. New to today�s readers, anyway.