Royal Stronghold: The Biblical Kings and Prophets of Lachish

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:03][music] >> Hello All Israel News viewers. I'm Moriah Mu Lan. This is Levy from Discover Israel tour with Levy. Levy, where are we and what are we doing here today? Uh we're at the biblical mount of Lachish, which is called a tell, a artificial mount. Uh we're going to tell the story about the siege on Lachish, uh how Sennacherib comes down here and his army he overruns uh this hill. This was the second most important city during the times of uh King Hezekiah inside of the land of Judea. This is exciting.

[00:00:41]Let's get to it.

[00:00:47]>> [music] >> Welcome to Lachish, the second most important city during the times [music] of King Hezekiah, who was a mighty king of Judea who has this amazing reform and brings the worship back to Jerusalem.

[00:01:01]We're in a very important strategic location, which is the [music] middle ground of the port cities of Ashkelon and Gaza to the hills of Hebron and on our way to Jerusalem. This would have been a strategic city located for the city of trade, uh a major crossroads between the road of Via Maris [music] and on the road on the way to Jerusalem.

[00:01:21]What I'm looking at behind me is uh the oldest military ramp that we have [music] inside of the world. And we can see the military strategies of Sennacherib right here. He had some of the most brutal military strategies that we've have ever heard of. And these are all depicted in a relief found in [music] Nineveh in the 19th century by a British archaeologist. The battles mentioned inside of the book of Kings [music] and in the book of Chronicles, as we remember it, but most of this battle was recorded inside of [music] ancient reliefs and cuneiform letters that we found inside of the palace in Nineveh. Let's talk a little bit about this ramp. How do sieges work? So, the Assyrian military would have circled over Lachish and tried to cut them off from their water sources and their fields on the outside of the city, try to find their way to go inside the city itself. Now, Hezekiah thought this would have happened since they've already heard about the total destruction of all the other 43 cities inside of Judea. And this was a disaster. From here, you could actually see the hilltop of Azekah, which was also a major city in Judea, which was completely destroyed. They saw the pillars of black smoke already coming from there. It was quite a disaster. So, the people kind of getting worried. The Assyrian kingdom were masters at psychological warfare, uh and they did pretty horrible things that we can see on the reliefs is that they would chop the heads off of the prisoners of war and then with a big spear kind of circle around where where we're standing now. Uh so, the people inside of the city could see this. [music] And now these are people that they probably knew because we're talking about Azekah and the rest of Judea. So, as they did in ancient warfare, they would start building what we call in Hebrew Sola La, uh military ramp. So, this is the original ramp. It hasn't been tampered.

[00:03:04]Kind of just took stones from all around, uh about 20 tons, 20,000 tons worth of uh rocks and rubble was then collected [music] here and accumulated to then create this ramp going up. Uh this really [music] started uh a huge fear factor inside the city. Hezekiah reinforces the city gates, which was the most vulnerable part for the city uh >> [music] >> to to infiltrate the city. Uh let's go explore.

[00:03:43]The gate is the most important part of the city. As one can see at Tel Beer Sheva, Tel Gezer, Tel Hazor, during the Judean period of time including from the Solomonic era all the way until Hezekiah era, the gates had these sections which people would be judged, they'd pay their taxes, they'd have their needs be done before they enter the city. So, this was kind of the the entrance of the fortified area and here we're going to see the entrance to the actual city, the gate that we're going to look at now.

[00:04:10]This is one of the biggest gates that we have from the 9th and 8th centuries during the Judean period. So, it had to be a very important and strategic gate. Now, we found something here that we didn't find at any other archaeological site at the gate.

[00:04:32]This is a very surprising thing to find, especially at a city gate. Mainly when people had their needs and they need to go to the restroom, they would either go to a public restroom or they'd have a place outside to do it. [music] And only if you're very, very wealthy, you had your own private toilet inside your house. Now, what we found here at the city gate was [music] a place where someone could come do their needs, which is kind of surprising. So, check it out.

[00:04:56]This is what a historic toilet would look like.

[00:05:00]Uh you'd have to have better aim [music] as a man. Uh or, you know, you could sit down as such.

[00:05:07]Uh you know, you do your needs, then afterwards, if they were very rich, you would take the tail of a rabbit >> [music] >> and use that to wipe yourself and have some water, uh so on and so forth.

[00:05:27]If I was a king of Judea, I would have walked these streets, I would have seen these views, felt this wind. And this is the place that I would have gone, the highest place inside of the mount, which is the high commissioner or the king's place where he would sit. Now, this was just part of the courtyard and a part of the palace. We know that the palace reigned a lot larger than this as this as being the capital city. Um here we have a very cool exhibition, which shows the kings of Israel, those who walked in the eyes of God, those who didn't find favor in the eyes of God. Each one had a different reign [music] and the length of the seat is the people who managed to rule for the longest or the kings who managed to long rule for the longest.

[00:06:08]This is such a cool place. I'm looking at the chairs that speak about the reign of all these kings. Going to say sit on King Hezekiah's little chair over here.

[00:06:20]And I'm just thinking about the fact that, you know, at some point we had uh kings. We didn't always have kings, we had prophets. But those who were wise amongst the [music] kings, they would ask the prophets for their advice. So, to ask the wisdom of the prophets was something that wise kings [music] would do and we would do wise to do the same.

[00:06:41]If we look at Lachish where it's located, we can see the road leading straight to Gaza and the road even till today, a road called road 35 [music] leading straight to Ashkelon. So, from Ashkelon to get to Hebron, Lachish is directly in the middle. And if I'm on my way to Jerusalem from Ashkelon, which is the port city, I would go through Lachish all the way until to come to Jerusalem, which was uh the most important city in Judea. So, any tradesperson [music] who wanted to bring products from uh the port cities all the way to Jerusalem would have to pass through Lachish and we would be able to control those roads, hence its importance when it came to trade. You could see what [music] at the hilltop with our 360 view like main biblical cities were. So, we would have seen the war journey of Sennacherib. We could really feel the pressure coming in from this vantage point. You could see the king starting to get worried.

[00:07:33]>> [music] >> I'm at the breaching [music] point where the second most important city in Judea falls. Here we could see the ramp that Assyrians built from this side. Here we can see the counter ramp that the Judeans build. Unfortunately, the Assyrians after 25 days do manage to breach inside the city, cause a great massacre, bring the remains of the people back to Nineveh, and then they counter the attack and move their way onto Jerusalem. Let's talk about Jerusalem. This was the attempted downfall and wiping out of any seed left of Israel, right? There wouldn't be any Jews today if this story would have been completed. Sennacherib in the Bible says he brings 185,000 warriors down and causes this great siege on Jerusalem. As they're marching there underneath, the person leading the siege, Rabshakeh, spoke fluent Hebrew.

[00:08:27]We can find similarities with psychological warfare today. He then puts a siege around Jerusalem and starts saying, "Don't believe in the God that Hezekiah tells you about because look what he's done to your cities, completely wiped them out. If you want to eat from your fig trees and drink from your water sources and go to your fields, come make this peace treaty with us." Thank God, the hand of God shows his might, a great disease spreads out through the camps [music] and 185,000 fall there. The first great defeat for Sennacherib. Rabshakeh then goes back to [music] report of these failings and we have the final survival of the Jewish people. [music] This was on our last threads and this helped us to sprout into where we are today.

[00:09:23]>> [music] >> I'm here on the ramp that they used to try and conquer Lachish. And I'm thinking about the way that we can be discouraged from entering into some kind of conquering mode because of the discouragement of other people. That they will tell you that your God is not strong enough. Don't listen to him or his [music] prophets. Don't listen to anything that he says because you will not win. And it's during times like this that we need to look back at our personal victories in life, how God did come through for us, so that when people come against us and they profoundly take the name of our God and debate him in a way and challenge him and say, "Your God has nothing on us. Don't listen to your God." We have to remember that the God that we serve has been victorious in the past and he'll be victorious again. What a phenomenal site to see just how much we've gone through and how much we've been conquered, but also when we rely on God, God really does help us no matter what happens. Levi, what do you think about this place?

[00:10:28]God definitely showed his hand after the destruction of this site. So, even at our lowest moments, we can't show despair. Especially at these hard times, Israel Israel's been through some troubling times.

[00:10:40]Lots of instability. So, I'm glad to be out here again and tell our story, our 3,000-year-old story, which makes this land so rich, which makes it so important and you know, I'm just glad to be out again.

[00:10:54]I love it. Thank you guys so much for watching. [music] If you want more Israel-related content, go to allisraelnews.com, hit the notification bell, hit subscribe and Levi and I will see you in the next one.

[00:11:03]>> [music] [music]