Hezekiah not only reversed his father's policy of appeasement with the Assyrians, but also "did what was right in the sight of the Lord" (18:3). Second Kings 18-20 and portions of Isaiah are filled with graphic information about the results of Hezekiah's religious reform and his revolt against the Assyrians. Numerous Assyrian records that speak of the revolts in Philistia and Judah and the Assyrian response to them are also available (see Ussishkin 1979 and Yadin 1963, 2:428-38 for pictures of reliefs concerning Sennacherib and Hezekiah).

The time was right for Hezekiah to assert some independence, for after the fall of Samaria, Assyria's king Sargon II was busy putting down problems in Babylonia (foreshadowing the defeat of Nineveh by Babylon), Syria, Asia Minor (ruled then by the legendary King Midas, according to Pfeiffer 1973, 364), and other places. Chapter 6 described the problems Sargon II was having in Philistia, especially in Ashdod and Ekron. Egypt, as well, was beginning to flex its muscles again.

The time was also right for Hezekiah to institute his religious reforms as described in 2 Kings 18:1-6, which included his destruction of the bronze serpent Nehushtan, the serpent Moses had made in the wilderness so long ago, but which evidently had become an object of worship. According to 2 Chronicles 30 Hezekiah also issued a call to the survivors of the ten northern tribes of Israel to come to Jerusalem to worship the Lord God.

It was at this time that the Assyrians allowed an Israelite priest to return to what had been Israelite territory, to Bethel, to teach the people placed there by the Assyrians how to worship the God of Israel. This, however, resulted in a mixed religion for the mixed people in Samaria (2 Kings 17:24-33).

Hezekiah was able to keep out of harm's way until Sennacherib (705-681 B.C.) ascended to the Assyrian throne after Sargon II. It is during the reign of this Assyrian king that biblical historians place 2 Kings 18:7, "He [Hezekiah] rebelled against the king of Assyria and would not serve him" (Bright 1981, 284 and Pfeiffer 1973, 365, for example). According to the Assyrian records (ANET, 287-88), Hezekiah allied himself with the Philistine city of Ashkelon, as well as with an anti-Assyrian segment of Ekron that overthrew their king Padi and turned him over to Hezekiah.

Sennacherib could not march down immediately to teach Hezekiah and the others a lesson, so Hezekiah had time to strengthen his defenses (2 Chron. 32:1-8, 30). He strengthened Jerusalem's walls, raised towers, and "made weapons and shields in abundance" (2 Chron. 32:5). To secure his people's water supply, he also constructed a water tunnel within the walls of the city of David, a tunnel that still today is called "Hezekiah's water tunnel." A translation of the Hebrew inscription that once adorned its ceiling is as follows:

It is still a treat to walk in the cool waters of the unlit tunnel (see 2 Kings 20:20 and 2 Chron. 32:30).

Finally, after settling the troubles in Babylon, Sennacherib was able to come down to Philistia and Judah in 701 B.C. According to Sennacherib's own record (in cuneiform on a clay prism), several kings, including the king of Philistine Ashdod, traveled north to meet him, kissed his feet, and offered their loyalty. Evidently Ashkelon continued to resist; its king was captured (though perhaps without a battle) and deported, along with his family, to Assyria. Heavy tribute was imposed upon Ashkelon, and a new king loyal to Assyria was placed on the throne there. Sennacherib moved next against Ekron and was able to occupy it (as well as nearby Timnah). The rulers of the city were impaled, and captives were taken; at some point Hezekiah was forced to return Padi, the former king, to Ekron. Then Sennacherib invaded, occupied, and plundered much of Judah. What happened to Hezekiah and Judah can be read in vivid detail in 2 Kings 18:13-19:36 and Isaiah 36-37.

It is interesting to note some of the similarities between the biblical text and that of Sennacherib. Sennacherib spoke of Hezekiah's hope that help might come from Egypt:

Compare this with 2 Kings 18:19-21.

Relying on Egypt is exactly what the prophet Isaiah warns against in 30:1-2:

In 2 Kings 19:8-9, we read that soldiers from Ethiopia were indeed moving up to Canaan. Sennacherib met and defeated this force at Eltekeh, near Ekron, and then said of Hezekiah:

Sennacherib described specifically how he captured the cities and all the booty, how he took prisoners, and how Hezekiah paid him forced tribute:

Second Kings 18:14-17 states that Hezekiah was required to give the Assyrian king "three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold." This is not as much as in the Assyrian account, but it is a hefty amount, especially considering that one talent equaled about seventy-five pounds of either precious metal. In fact, the temple of the Lord and Hezekiah's treasury had to be stripped to gather together that much gold and silver.

According to the biblical account, Sennacherib was not able to capture Jerusalem. This may be confirmed by the fact that he recorded on his palace walls in Nineveh the graphic conquest of Lachish, a city of Judah, but nowhere recorded a siege or conquest of Jerusalem. Second Kings 19:35-36 comments that divine intervention sent Sennacherib back to Nineveh a defeated man, as prophesied by Isaiah.

Interestingly, the Greek historian Herodotus also records (bk. 2. 141) a defeat of Sennacherib at about this time on the Egyptian-Palestinian border, due to divine intervention -- the intervention of an Egyptian god. Reportedly, a plague of mice was sent, causing an Assyrian retreat and heavy loss of life to the Assyrians. There is no way to be certain, but this story could have been the backdrop for Sennacherib's attack on Ashkelon and southern Philistia. In any event, Sennacherib broke off his attack on Philistia and Judah and returned to Nineveh, having had a successful campaign, by his account. Apparently, he did punish Hezekiah further, however: "His towns which I had plundered, I took away from his country and gave them (over) to Mitinti, king of Ashdod, Padi, king of Ekron, and Sillibel, king of Gaza. Thus I reduced his country. . . " (ANET, 287-88). There were no more rebellions against Assyria in Philistia until the final quarter of the seventh century. Egypt continued to be a problem, necessitating Assyrian military campaigns through Philistia, but these campaigns seem to have assumed Philistine cooperation, and the region was used as the staging area for attacks on Egypt. Let us now go to the archaeological record to see more clearly what was happening at some of the Philistine sites at the end of the eighth and beginning of the seventh centuries B.C.

Ekron figures prominently in the Assyrian records of Sargon II and Sennacherib, and it probably was one of the cities captured by Hezekiah when the biblical record states, "He attacked the Philistines as far as Gaza and its territory, from watchtower to fortified city" (2 Kings 18:8). You may recall that the archaeological record thus far reveals that Ekron was not, evidently, a major Philistine city from the days of King David until the end of the eighth century B.C., in King Hezekiah's day. The evidence thus far seems to indicate that perhaps only the upper city of approximately ten acres was occupied continuously during this two-hundred-year period. Evidence at Ekron of occupation by King Hezekiah late in the eighth century B.C. includes storage jars that bear the stamp l'melekh on the handles. This Hebrew phrase means "belonging to the king." Most of the more than one thousand stamped handles that have been found thus far have been found in Judah and are dated stratigraphically to the reign of Hezekiah. These royally owned vessels, which contained olive oil, grain, or wine, held food supplies that probably were part of Hezekiah's preparations to stand against the Assyrians (see for example Kelm and A. Mazar 1989, 43, for brief discussion and picture of those found at Timnah; A. Mazar 1990, 455-58; Ussishkin 1985, 142-44). The storage jar stamps sometimes contain the name of a city, and one of the stamps found at Ekron has the name Hebron on it.

At some point near the end of the eighth century B.C., Ekron passed into the hands of the Assyrians. As has been mentioned, Sargon II both pictured the siege of Ekron on his wall reliefs at Khorsabad and also mentioned Ekron's name. He pictured the city as having been fortified by a low crenelated (notched) outer wall as well as a crenelated inner wall with towers holding archers who were defending Ekron with their arrows. Ekron's role in Hezekiah's revolt against Sennacherib, with Hezekiah holding Padi, king of Ekron, hostage in Jerusalem has also been mentioned. The wall that both Sargon II and Sennacherib encountered in their campaigns against Ekron is presently visible at the site. This is the ashlar-faced wall that was uncovered by accident through the aid of a backhoe in 1984. The upper city on its highest point also had a citadel tower of boulder-sized stones constructed during the last half of the eighth century B.C.

Under Assyrian control, Philistine Ekron began its period of greatest growth and wealth. The summer excavations of 1990 confirmed that the seventh-century city expanded well beyond the mound on its northwest side to the vicinity of the Wadi Timnah. The evidence shows that Ekron in the seventh century B.C. covered seventy to eighty acres.

Hezekiah's Jerusalem was also expanding during this period of time. It was growing in part due to the flow of refugees from the north after the fall of Israel in 722/1 B.C. Due to the nature of the artifacts found at Tel Miqne-Ekron from the seventh century and the end of the eighth, it is thought that some Israelites also moved, voluntarily or otherwise, to Ekron.

Clearly, time and money were spent rebuilding the city early in the seventh century B.C. Approaching the tell from the southwest, one can see the remains of the stone wall at the base of the tell that may be pictured on Sargon II's reliefs at Khorsabad. The remains of the stone wall are also visible at the crest of the mound, and in between the two walls is a long line of what used to be the stables for many horses. The entryway into the city was on the south side, and the gateway was protected by a gatehouse to the south making the complex similar to the entryways found at Gezer, Lachish, and Philistine Ashdod. The gateway had a guard tower and chambers on each side. Only the east side of the gate has been excavated, leaving the west side, which is poking through the surface, for future archaeologists.

Just inside the gateway is ample evidence of the industry that must have filled Assyrian coffers -- olive oil production. This was Ekron's industrial zone. Presence of a street with industrial buildings on both sides is obvious. More than one hundred olive oil presses have been found there, which, as we have said, would have enabled Ekron to produce one thousand tons (290,000 gallons) of olive oil in a season; this is one-fifth of the olive oil currently produced for export in Israel!²

Many of these olive presses are visible right at surface level. There are also several that can be seen in the area off the tell to the northwest. The nearby Kibbutz Revadim has based its reconstruction of the olive oil industry at Ekron on the complex excavated near the gateway. The rectangular buildings in this complex are divided into three rooms: the olive oil production room, the storage/work room, and an anteroom that is just off the street.

In the production room is a large rectangular stone basin where the olives were first crushed with a stone roller. Probably the pulp was then washed, and the oil that was skimmed off was the finest oil, or virgin oil. To obtain more oil, the pulp would then have been placed in woven baskets on top of the vats on either side of the crushing basin. The vats have a circular hole in them so that, as the pulp was crushed, the oil would have flowed into the vats. To apply pressure to the pulp, a wooden beam, with one end anchored in a hole in the wall of the building, was placed over the pulp bag, with stone weights at the end of the beam opposite the wall. The people of the seventh century B.C. had developed a simple machine similar to a nutcracker (but bigger). The pressure applied on the beam by the weights would have slowly squeezed additional oil from the olives through the woven baskets into the vats below. Since the stone vats do not have a plugged hole in them, the oil must have been dippered out, or perhaps the vat was lined with a bag that was then lifted out when full.

As the production rooms were excavated, numerous storage jars, some crushed, some not, were taken out. In one oil production room, more than one hundred restorable vessels were extracted, plus thirty-four conical ceramic stoppers for the storage jars, numerous small jugs, and other finds. The adjacent storage/work room held at least eighty-eight restorable vessels, eight well-preserved iron agricultural tools hidden in a ceramic jar below the floor, and the most unexpected find of all, a stone niche with a four-horned altar inside it.

I remember when this particular altar was found. We were beginning to close down the site for the season, when two flat, parallel upright stones with dirt between them were uncovered. The area supervisor suspected a burial, and everyone was surprised when an altar was uncovered instead (more information on this altar will be given in the following section).

The anterooms leading to the street contained ceramic vessels used for food preparation and hundreds of loom weights. Since the finds mentioned above were somewhat typical for many of the production rooms, it is hypothesized that textiles were a secondary industry at Ekron. Olive harvest and the pressing of olive oil is seasonal (lasting approximately four months of the year), so it appears that these rooms had another function during the off season. This supports the Assyrian records of kings Esarhaddon (681-669) and Ashurbanipal (668-627), who recorded that some of the items they valued for booty or tribute from their subjects were "linen garments with multicolored trimmings" (ANET, 290-95; see Yadin 1963, 2:440-53, for the reliefs).

It was precisely during the reigns of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal and their predecessor, Sennacherib, that Ekron grew to its greatest extent in the approximately six hundred years of Philistine history in Canaan. The Assyrians had created a kind of "Pax Assyriaca," allowing Ekron to become the largest known center of olive oil production in the ancient Near East (Gitin 1990, 39).

Ekron was ideally suited for such a distinction. Due to a persistent problem with Egypt throughout the reigns of Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurbanipal, a stable Philistia was important for the logistical movement of Assyrian men and supplies. The highways between Assyria and Egypt went through Philistia. It appears that Philistia was exempt from the usual practice of deporting the native inhabitants of a conquered state (such as was done with Israel) and moving a foreign people in. In Philistia the enemy king was simply replaced, without a major movement of peoples. Philistia was the linchpin between the Assyrian empire and Egypt (Eph`al 1979, 276-89).

Economically, Philistia was linked to trade between Egypt and Arabia as well as linked to trade to the north with Syria, Assyria, and points beyond. Assyria may have realized that the economy of the empire could be affected by damaging the social fabric of Philistia. Ekron had olive oil, a commodity that could be sold to help finance wars, and the Assyrian empire had the markets to sell the oil. Ekron was located on the eastern edge of the coastal plain near the hills where the olives were grown. It was also close enough to the coast for access to shipping the product throughout the Near East. The labor force was kept intact by the Assyrians, and at least two kings of Ekron were subject to Assyria in the seventh century B.C. King Padi was put back on the throne by Sennacherib, and a king named Ikausu governed during at least part of Esarhaddon's reign, according to Assyrian records (ANET, 291). Ekron and some other parts of Philistia lived a privileged life during the seventh century; this was not true, however, of the forty-six cities of Judah that Sennacherib boasted about destroying.

The properous life is dramatically evident in the upper city in the northern sector of Ekron. Here a new industrial sector was constructed, but since this area was higher than other parts of the mound and not flat, terrace walls were needed. Huge field stones, two and one-half feet in diameter, were stacked, creating walls the remains of which are at least ten feet high. Industrial rooms were placed alongside these walls, eventually creating terraces of buildings stepping down towards the center of the town.³

Field IV in the center of the tell, sometimes referred to as the elite zone, has also yielded olive presses. There, typical olive presses, though perhaps in secondary use, have been found alongside four-horned altars. Now is perhaps an appropriate time to discuss these altars further.