Art

It is always terribly hard to be sure exactly what happened, but it is easy to collect opinions.

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Dieu a établi la prière pour communiquer
à ses ceatures la dignité de la causalité.
Pascal

The Bible says Sennacherib’s campaign was foiled
By angels: in Herodotus it says, by mice—
Innumerably nibbling all one night they toiled
To eat away his bowstrings as warm wind eats ice.

But muscular archangels, I suggest, employed
Seven little jaws to labour at each slender string,
And by their aid, weak masters though they be, destroyed
The smiling-lipped Assyrian, cruel bearded king.

No stranger that omnipotence should choose to need
Small helps than great—no stranger if His action lingers
Till men have prayed, and suffers their weak prayers indeed
To move as very muscles in his delaying fingers,

Who, in His longanimity and love for our
Small dignities, enfeebles, for a time, His power.

       C.S. Lewis, “Sonnet” (Oxford Magazine, May 14, 1936) [link]

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The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
   And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
   When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
   That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
   That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
   And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
   And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
   But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
   And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
   With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
   The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

       Lord Byron, “The Destruction of Sennacherib” [link].

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The next king was the priest of Hephaestus whose name was Sethos. He despised and had no regard for the warrior Egyptians, thinking he would never need them; besides otherwise dishonoring them, he took away the chosen lands which had been given to them, twelve fields to each man, in the reign of former kings. So when presently king Sanacharib came against Egypt, with a great force of Arabians and Assyrians, the warrior Egyptians would not march against him.

The priest, in this quandary, went into the temple shrine and there before the god’s image bitterly lamented over what he expected to suffer. Sleep came on him while he was lamenting, and it seemed to him the god stood over him and told him to take heart, that he would come to no harm encountering the power of Arabia: “I shall send you champions,” said the god.

So he trusted the vision, and together with those Egyptians who would follow him camped at Pelusium, where the road comes into Egypt; and none of the warriors would go with him, but only merchants and craftsmen and traders. Their enemies came there, too, and during the night were overrun by a horde of field mice that gnawed quivers and bows and the handles of shields, with the result that many were killed fleeing unarmed the next day.

And to this day a stone statue of the Egyptian king stands in Hephaestus’ temple, with a mouse in his hand, and an inscription to this effect:

       “Look at me, and believe.”

Herodotus, Histories, II, 141, 1-6 (tr. A.D. Godley) [link].

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[The Lord says] “I will shield this city [Jerusalem] and rescue it for the sake of my reputation and because of my promise to David my servant.” That very night the Lord’s messenger went out and killed 185,000 men in the Assyrian camp. When they got up early the next morning, there were all the corpses. So King Sennacherib of Assyria broke camp and went on his way. He went home and stayed in Nineveh.

2 Kings 19:34-36