When the Jewish embassy arrived at Lachish, the Egyptian party seems still to have been in the ascendant. In spite of the prophet’s warning, envoys had been sent to Egypt (Isa. xxx. xxxi.), and had returned full of confidence in an alliance, which yet was to be to them not “an help nor profit, but a shame and also a reproach.” The battle of Eltekeh dissipated their hopes. This was fought after the capture of Lachish, when Sennacherib was endeavouring to take the neighbouring fortress of Libnah (2 Kings xix. 8, 9). The Rab-shakeh or Prime Minister had been sent against Jerusalem along with the Tartan or Commander-in-chief and the Rab-saris or Chamberlain, and after delivering his message to its defenders had returned to Sennacherib, leaving a considerable force under the Tartan encamped outside its walls. The message had been delivered in Hebrew, not in Assyrian or in Aramaic (Syrian), which at that time was the general language of trade and diplomacy in Western Asia, like French in modern Europe. Every politician was expected to speak it, and Hezekiah’s ministers take it for granted that the Rab-shakeh would be able to do so. The fact that he preferred to speak in Hebrew gives us a high idea of the education of the age. Every cultivated Assyrian was acquainted with Accadian, the old dead language of Babylonia, which was to an Assyrian what Latin is to us; and in addition to this diplomatists and men of business were required to know Aramaic, while we here find the highest of Assyrian officials further able to converse in Hebrew. A reminiscence of the disaster which befel the Assyrian army was preserved in an Egyptian legend, which ascribed it to the piety of an Egyptian king. Influenced by this legend, some scholars have supposed that it took place at Pelusium, on the Egyptian frontier; but the language of Scripture seems hardly to leave a doubt that it really happened before Jerusalem. The result was the abrupt breaking up of the Assyrian camp and the termination of the siege of Jerusalem. Sennacherib hastened back to Nineveh, and the court annalists were bidden to draw a veil of silence over the conclusion of the campaign.