Then the angel of the LORD went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.
Then the angel of the Lord went forth ... Some attribute the destruction to the agency of the plague (note, Isaiah 33:24), which may have caused Hezekiah's sickness, narrated immediately after; but Isaiah 33:1; Isaiah 33:4, 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 Isaiah 29:6; Isaiah 30:30, to have been a storm of hail, thunder and lightning (cf. Exodus 9:22-25). The simoom belongs rather to Africa and Arabia than Palestine, and ordinarily could not produce such a destructive effect. Some few of the army, as 2 Chronicles 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' bowstrings and shield-straps. Compare the language (Isaiah 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 at 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 honouring to their own gods.
The mouse was the Egyptian emblem of destruction. The Greek Apollo was called Smin thian, 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 grain (cf. 1 Samuel 6:18). Farrer, however, thinks the repulse of Sennacherib from Pelusium was in the first invasion, and not in this second one, and was due to the advance of Tirhakah, the ally of Sethos and Hezekiah. Egyptian fable may, nevertheless, have drawn from the miraculous destruction of Sennacherib's host at Jerusalem in the second invasion the marvelous colouring which they gave to his repulse at Pelusium in the first invasion.
The two events may have become confused together in the accounts. 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 Kouyunjik, built by him (140 feet long by 120 broad), wherein even the Jewish physiognomy of the captives is portrayed, there occurs a remarkable passage; after his mentioning his taking 200,000 captive Jews, he adds, 'Then I prayed unto God;' the only instance of an inscription wherein the name of GOD occurs without a pagan adjunct. The 46th Psalm probably commemorates Judah's deliverance. It occurred in one "night," according to 2 Kings 19:35, with which Isaiah's words, "when they arose early in the morning," etc., are in undesigned coincidence.
When they arose early behold, they (were) all dead corpses - "they ... they," the Jews, the Assyrians. G. Rawlinson thinks the destruction was not near Jerusalem, but at Libnah, on the borders of Egypt. His reason is the words, Sennacherib 'shall not come before this city with shield, nor cast a bank against it' (Isaiah 37:33). But Rabshakeh did come near it with "a great army" (Isaiah 36:2). However, Rabshakeh returned and perhaps with him the army (Isaiah 37:8), and found Sennacherab at Libnah. Thus "they ... they" will be respectively the surviving Assyrians with Sennacherib, and the smitten Assyrians.