Lachish

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disloyalty to his Egyptian overlord, Pharaoh Akhenaten. In the 13th century B.C. Joshua, after his conquest of Jericho, Ai and Gibeon, captured five Amorite kings, including Japhia of Lachish, in a cave at Makkedah and put them to death; then in the following year he took Lachish and the neighboring city of Mareshah (Joshua 10). The palace was rebuilt by David or Solomon in the 10th century B.C. Around 920 B.C. Solomon's son Rehoboam fortified the town, which had an area of 75,000sq.m/90,000sq.yds (2 Chronicles 11,11). In the eighth century B.C. King Amaziah of Judah, who had fled from Jerusalem, was killed here (2 Kings 14,19).

Lachish was captured in 701 B.C. by the Assyrian king Sennacherib (2 Kings 18,13-17), who depicted this event in reliefs in his palace in Nineveh. During Starkey's excavations a pit was found containing the skeletons of 1,500 men who died on that occasion. In 588 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar conquered the town (two years before his conquest of Jerusalem). The period immediately before this catastrophe is documented in the Lachish Letters (now in the British Museum and the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem). The town was reoccupied after the Israelites' return from the Babylonian Captivity, and later a Persian fortress was built in the town.

In the second century B.C. it declined into an insignificant village.