36. Some attribute the destruction to the agency of the plague (see on Isa 33:24), which may have caused Hezekiah's sickness, narrated immediately after; but Isa 33:1, 4, proves that the Jews spoiled the corpses, which they would not have dared to do, had there been on them infection of a plague. The secondary agency seems, from Isa 29:6; 30:30, to have been a storm of hail, thunder, and lightning (compare Ex 9:22-25). The simoon belongs rather to Africa and Arabia than Palestine, and ordinarily could not produce such a destructive effect. Some few of the army, as 2Ch 32:21 seems to imply, survived and accompanied Sennacherib home. HERODOTUS (2.141) gives an account confirming Scripture in so far as the sudden discomfiture of the Assyrian army is concerned. The Egyptian priests told him that Sennacherib was forced to retreat from Pelusium owing to a multitude of field mice, sent by one of their gods, having gnawed the Assyrians' bow-strings and shield-straps. Compare the language (Isa 37:33), "He shall not shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with shields," which the Egyptians corrupted into their version of the story. Sennacherib was as the time with a part of his army, not at Jerusalem, but on the Egyptian frontier, southwest of Palestine. The sudden destruction of the host near Jerusalem, a considerable part of his whole army, as well as the advance of the Ethiopian Tirhakah, induced him to retreat, which the Egyptians accounted for in a way honoring to their own gods. The mouse was the Egyptian emblem of destruction. The Greek Apollo was called Sminthian, from a Cretan word for "a mouse," as a tutelary god of agriculture, he was represented with one foot upon a mouse, since field mice hurt corn. The Assyrian inscriptions, of course, suppress their own defeat, but nowhere boast of having taken Jerusalem; and the only reason to be given for Sennacherib not having, amidst his many subsequent expeditions recorded in the monuments, returned to Judah, is the terrible calamity he had sustained there, which convinced him that Hezekiah was under the divine protection. RAWLINSON says, In Sennacherib's account of his wars with Hezekiah, inscribed with cuneiform characters in the hall of the palace of Koyunjik, built by him (a hundred forty feet long by a hundred twenty broad), wherein even the Jewish physiognomy of the captives is portrayed, there occurs a remarkable passage; after his mentioning his taking two hundred thousand captive Jews, he adds, "Then I prayed unto God"; the only instance of an inscription wherein the name of GOD occurs without a heathen adjunct. The forty-sixth Psalm probably commemorates Judah's deliverance. It occurred in one "night," according to 2Ki 19:35, with which Isaiah's words, "when they arose early in the morning," &c., are in undesigned coincidence.
      they . . . they--"the Jews . . . the Assyrians."

JFB.