Palestine was the first to suffer. Akhimit, whom Sargon had appointed king of Ashdod, had been dethroned, and the crown given to an usurper named Yavan or “the Greek.” Yavan seems to have been the nominee of Hezekiah, who at this time exercised a sort of suzerainty over the Philistine cities, and he was set up as king for the purpose of heading the Philistine revolt against Assyria. Edom and Moab also sent contingents to the war, and the Ethiopian king of Egypt promised help. Of the details of the struggle between Sargon and the western states we unfortunately know nothing. But it did not last long; neither Babylonia nor Egypt had time to send any assistance to their allies. The _Tartan_ or Commander-in-chief was ordered to invest Ashdod (see Isa. xx. 1), while Sargon himself overran “the wide-spreading land of Judah,” and captured its capital Jerusalem. This conquest of Judah by Sargon explains prophecies of Isaiah which have hitherto been unsolved mysteries. Thus an explanation is at length offered of the circumstances described by the prophet in chapters x. and xi. Here the Assyrian army is described as marching along the usual high-road from the north-east, and as halting at Nob, only an hour’s journey distant from Jerusalem, on the very day when the oracle was uttered,(10) while Isaiah declares that the capital itself shall fall into the hands of the enemy (x. 6, 12, 22, 24, 34). All this is inapplicable to the invasion of Sennacherib, when a detachment only of the Assyrian army was sent against Jerusalem from the south-west, and when Isaiah was commissioned by God to promise that the king of Assyria should “not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with shield, nor cast a bank against it.” The older commentators were accordingly driven to the desperate expedient of supposing that the invasion described by Isaiah in the tenth chapter of his prophecies was an ideal one. Thanks, however, to the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, all is now clear, and we can now understand why it is that the Assyrian monarch, whose march is described by Isaiah, claims to be the conqueror of Calno and Carchemish, of Hamath and Arpad, of Damascus and Samaria (w. 8-10). All these were conquests of Sargon, not of Sennacherib. Ashdod was taken and razed to the ground, and its inhabitants sold into captivity. Yavan managed to escape to the Egyptian king, who was cowardly enough to give him up to his enemies. Edom and Moab were punished for the part they had taken in the rebellion, and the authority of Sargon was paramount as far as the frontier of Egypt.