Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Nisroch
The god in whose temple an Assyrian king was murdered by his own sons.
2 Kings 19:37, in every translation this tool compares.
An Assyrian king is murdered by his own sons while worshipping in this god's temple. The name appears in no Assyrian source, which has produced two centuries of proposed corrections and no agreement.
Sennacherib is murdered by his sons while worshipping in this god's temple. The name doesn't appear in Assyrian sources under that spelling, which has produced a long list of proposed emendations. DDD works through and rejects Enlil, Nusku, Marduk, and a supposed Assur-Marduk blend, and lands "with reasonable certitude" on Ninurta, reading Nisroch as a scribal corruption of that god's consonants. A Neo-Assyrian letter to an unnamed king, possibly a veiled warning before the murder, independently names the assassin as Arda-Mulissi, the man the Bible calls Adrammelech, and DDD stresses that the murderer shares a name with the unrelated god Adrammelech of 2 Kings 17:31 only by coincidence.
H5268, 2 occ
- 2 Kings 19:37
- Isaiah 37:38
- DDD s.v. "Nisroch," 630-631
