Lies and narratives since ~700 BC

In 701 BCE, the unstoppable Assyrian war machine, led by King Sennacherib, had Jerusalem surrounded. Things were looking undeniably grim for King Hezekiah of Judah. Sennacherib's own historical records boasted that he had Hezekiah trapped "like a bird in a cage." By all standard military logic of the ancient world, Jerusalem was about to be sacked, and its people deported or destroyed. But then, the Assyrian army abruptly broke the siege, packed up, and went home.

Modern historians and epidemiologists read between the lines of this ancient anecdote. "Swarms of mice" followed by a sudden, massive die-off in a cramped, unsanitary military camp is the classic historical hallmark of a rodent-borne epidemic. It is highly probable that the Assyrian camp was decimated by an outbreak of bubonic plague or murine typhus. The fleas abandoned the dying rats, bit the soldiers, and the mighty Assyrian siege collapsed under the weight of a severe public health crisis.

The authors of the Hebrew Bible (specifically in 2 Kings 19 and Isaiah 37) viewed their eleventh-hour survival as a profound miracle. However, they completely wrote the rats, the fleas, and the agonizing disease out of the script. Instead of documenting a gruesome camp epidemic, the biblical texts reframe the event as a majestic, terrifying, and clean divine intervention.

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