Lachish

What is known

• Joshua is recorded as conquering Lachish and its king during the Israelite conquest of Canaan (Joshua 10:31-32); it was later rebuilt as one of Judah's most heavily fortified cities
• Sennacherib of Assyria besieged and captured Lachish in 701 BC; the siege is depicted in extraordinary detail on the Lachish Reliefs, carved panels from his palace at Nineveh now held in the British Museum
• Excavations uncovered a massive Assyrian siege ramp at Lachish, which its excavators describe as the only one surviving anywhere in the ancient Near East and the oldest known; Area R alone produced 859 arrowheads, an iron chain from a battering ram, iron armour scales and the perforated stones the defenders dropped on it, and inside the wall opposite it D. Ussishkin found a Judean counter-ramp raised to meet it
• The dating of the destruction took fifty years to settle. J. L. Starkey, following W. F. Albright, assigned the Level III destruction to Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BC; O. Tufnell argued for Sennacherib in 701 BC, and D. Ussishkin's excavation of the siege ramp itself settled it on her side. Level III is 701 BC and Level II is 586 BC, and until that was resolved the reliefs could not be tied to any particular biblical moment
• The Lachish Letters — 21 inscribed ostraca, 18 of them found by J. L. Starkey in a guardroom of the gate in 1935 and three more in 1938 — date to just before the Babylonian conquest of 586 BC. Letter 4 is the famous one: its writer is watching for the fire signals of Lachish, and says he cannot see Azekah. It is very widely quoted as 'can no longer see Azekah', which would mean Azekah had just fallen. A. Zammit's 2016 Oxford study of the ostraca points out that the 'no longer' is not in the Hebrew, and that it is what produced the dramatic reading. The resonance with Jeremiah 34:7, where Lachish and Azekah are the last fortified cities left, survives the correction; the story of watching Azekah's fires go out does not

History

Founded

Fortified Canaanite Bronze Age city; became the second most important city in Judah after Jerusalem by the 8th century BC

Population

A major fortified city; estimated to have housed several thousand residents at its Iron Age peak

Industry

Administrative and military center; site of royal storage jars stamped with 'lmlk' (belonging to the king) seals

Coordinates

31.5645° N, 34.8483° E

Rulers and powers

• Canaanite city-state — Bronze Age
• Kingdom of Judah, royal fortress city — 10th-6th century BC

Archaeology

Four expeditions have worked Tel Lachish. J. L. Starkey dug it for the Wellcome-Marston expedition from 1932 until 10 January 1938, when he was murdered on the road while travelling to the opening of the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem; O. Tufnell then spent twenty years publishing his material, and the four Lachish volumes she brought out between 1938 and 1958 are still the foundation. Y. Aharoni dug two seasons at the Solar Shrine in 1966 and 1968. D. Ussishkin excavated for Tel Aviv University from 1973 to 1994, with the main field seasons ending in 1987, and it was his work on the Assyrian siege ramp that finally fixed the Level III destruction to Sennacherib in 701 BC rather than to Nebuchadnezzar. A fourth expedition under Y. Garfinkel, M. G. Hasel and M. G. Klingbeil worked the north-eastern corner from 2013 to 2017 and found a previously unknown Canaanite temple of the twelfth century BC, an ivory comb carrying a full early alphabetic sentence, and a Level V city wall its excavators date by radiocarbon to the last quarter of the tenth century BC and connect to Rehoboam. That last claim is contested from two directions — I. Finkelstein on the chronology, and D. Ussishkin on whether it is a Level V city wall at all — and it should be read as a claim with named opponents rather than as a settled result. Separately, S. Ganor and I. Kreimerman of the Israel Antiquities Authority published the Iron Age gate shrine, whose altar horns had been trimmed and beside which a stone toilet seat had been installed; the toilet showed no chemical trace of use, and the excavators read it as symbolic desecration in the manner of 2 Kings 10:27, tied to the reform of 2 Kings 18:4.

Scripture references

• Joshua 10:31-32
• 2 Kings 18:14
• 2 Kings 18:17
• 2 Chronicles 11:9
• 2 Chronicles 32:9
• Isaiah 36:2
• Jeremiah 34:7
• Micah 1:13

On a modern map

Lachish today

Further reading

• Lachish - Wikipedia
• A. Zammit, The Lachish Letters: A Reappraisal of the Ostraca Discovered in 1935 and 1938 at Tell ed-Duweir (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2016)
• S. Ganor and I. Kreimerman, "The Iron Age Inner City Gate and Gate Shrine at Tel Lakhish," 'Atiqot 111 (2023)
• Southern Adventist University: the Fourth Expedition to Lachish
• Y. Vaknin, R. Shaar, E. Ben-Yosef and O. Lipschits, "Archaeomagnetic Dating of the Outer Revetment Wall at Tel Lachish," Tel Aviv 51:1 (2024), 73-94 — the source for the Area R find counts
• Palestine Exploration Fund: James Leslie Starkey