Lives of Scripture

Sharezer was a son of Sennacherib, the Assyrian king who had besieged Jerusalem under Hezekiah and blasphemously mocked the LORD as no different from the powerless gods of nations Assyria had already conquered (2 Kings 18-19; Isaiah 36-37). After the LORD struck down Sennacherib's besieging army by His angel, Sennacherib withdrew to Nineveh in disgrace. Some time later, while he was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisroch, his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer struck him down with the sword and killed him, then fled to the land of Ararat; another son, Esarhaddon, succeeded him as king (2 Kings 19:36-37; Isaiah 37:37-38). Scripture records this assassination as the direct fulfillment of Isaiah's earlier word to Sennacherib: "I will make him fall by the sword in his own land" (Isaiah 37:7). The account offers no motive for Sharezer's act against his own father -- only the bare, brutal fact of it -- but frames it as God bringing His pronounced judgment to pass, even through the violent ambitions of pagan princes who had no thought of obeying Him. The proud king who had defied the living God met his end not in battle but by his own sons' hands, in the house of the very idol he served.