[1] It was no ordinary day that saw the discomfiture of the
Assyrian host before the walls of Jerusalem. We can
scarcely understand the terror and dismay with which a
religious Jew must have watched the growth of those mighty
Oriental despotisms which, rising one after the other in
the valley of the Euphrates and of the Tigris, aspired to
nothing less than the conquest of the known world. The
victory of a conqueror like Sennacherib meant the
extinction of national life and of personal liberty in the
conquered people; it meant often enough violent
transportation from their homes, separation from their
families, with all the degrading and penal accompaniments
of complete subjugation. It meant this to the conquered
pagan cities; for Jerusalem it meant this and more. The
knowledge and worship of God, by institutions of Divine
appointment, maintained only in that little corner of the
wide world, were linked on to the fortunes of the Jewish
state, and in the victory of Sennacherib would be involved
not merely political humiliation, but religious darkness.
When, then, his armies advanced across the continent again
and again, making of a city a heap, and of a fenced city a
ruin, and at last appeared before Jerusalem, when the blast
of the terrible men was as a storm against the wall, there
was natural dismay in every religious and patriotic soul.
It seemed as though a veil or covering, like that which was
spread over the holy things in the Jewish ritual, was being
spread more and more completely over all nations at each
step of the Assyrian monarch's advance, and in those hours
of darkness all true-hearted men in Jerusalem waited for
God. He had delivered them from Egyptian slavery; He had
given them the realm of David and Solomon. He who had done
so much for them would not desert them now. In His own way
He would rebuke this insolent enemy of his truth and His
people, and this passionate longing for His intervention
quickened the eye and welled the heart of Jerusalem when at
last it came. The destruction of Sennacherib's host was one
of those supreme moments in the history of a people which
can never be lived over again by posterity. The sense of
deliverance was proportioned to the agony which had
preceded it. To Isaiah and his contemporaries it seemed as
though a canopy of thick darkness was lifted from the face
of the world, as though the recollections of slaughter and
of death were entirely swallowed up in the absorbing sense
of deliverance, as though the tears of the city had been
wiped away and the rebuke of God's people was taken from
earth, and therefore from the heart of Israel there burst
forth a welcome proportioned to the anxious longing that
had preceded it, "Lo, this is our God; we have waited for
Him; He will save us."--_Liddon._