Lives of Scripture

Adrammelech was a son of Sennacherib, the Assyrian king whose army had besieged Jerusalem and mocked the LORD during Hezekiah's reign, only to be struck down by the angel of the LORD in a single night (2 Kings 19:35). Sennacherib retreated to Nineveh, where sometime later, while he was worshiping in the house of his god Nisroch, his own sons Adrammelech and Sharezer assassinated him with the sword and then fled to the land of Ararat; another son, Esarhaddon, took the throne in his place (2 Kings 19:36-37; Isaiah 37:37-38). Scripture records the assassination without commentary on Adrammelech's motives, but the placement of the account is deliberate: Isaiah had already told Sennacherib, "you shall fall by the sword in your own land" (Isaiah 37:7), and his death at his own sons' hands, in his own capital, before his own god's altar, was that prophecy's exact fulfillment. Adrammelech's act of patricide, murderous and self-interested as it was, still served the LORD's declared word -- a stark example of Scripture's repeated pattern that no human power, however violent, ever escapes the boundaries of God's sovereign purposes.