Isaiah 37:37
ESV
Then Sennacherib king of Assyria departed and returned home and lived at Nineveh.
NIV
So Sennacherib king of Assyria broke camp and withdrew. He returned to Nineveh and stayed there.
NASB
So Sennacherib the king of Assyria departed and returned home and lived in Nineveh.
CSB
So King Sennacherib of Assyria broke camp and left. He returned home and lived in Nineveh.
NLT
Then King Sennacherib of Assyria broke camp and returned to his own land. He went home to his capital of Nineveh and stayed there.
KJV
So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt at Nineveh.
NKJV
So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed and went away, returned home, and remained at Nineveh.
What does Isaiah 37:37 mean?
The Lord's promise to Hezekiah (Isaiah 37:33–35) was not that He would kill an unimaginable number of the Assyrians coming to conquer Jerusalem (Isaiah 36:1–3). God only said He would defend the city and save the survivors of Judah who remained there. When the angel of the Lord killed so many Assyrians in a single night that the army immediately retreated (Isaiah 37:36), the city was rescued. The battle was over.What the Lord had promised Hezekiah through Isaiah was that Sennacherib would not come into the city. Instead, The Assyrian king would be forced to retrace his steps: back into his own territory (Isaiah 37:34). Through Isaiah's poem (Isaiah 37:22–29), God told Sennacherib he would be turned back like a farmer turns a stubborn ox or mule. The king is not one of the thousands slain by the angel of the Lord, but the shock of a single night's carnage must have been intense. He would have had no reason to stay, and no choice but to head home. He may have felt he was running for his life. Nineveh was the main city of the Assyrian empire.
We're not told if Sennacherib fully realized that Hezekiah's God, the Lord of Israel, was real and endlessly powerful. Or, most humiliatingly, that God had beaten him. But the defeat of the army was only part of God's planned response (Isaiah 37:38).
