Assyrian downfall through Isaiah’s eyes (2 Kings 15–23) 15 through specific optics (focalization) (40) that determine the organization of the overall picture as well as the selection of data. Writers did not feel obliged to present all the historical data or to be objectively correct in presenting details; they preferred to present only the data which “represent” reality. This historiographic technique also allows telescoping (41) several events into one story, even though they need not to be connected in reality. In our case we can see that the biblical writers telescoped into one story not only the shift in Assyrian behavior but also its result – the downfall of the Assyrian Empire. The techniques of telescoping and focalization are responsible for the organization of the entire picture in such a way that it is able to capture the causes underlying the phenomena. What really matters in this historiographic technique is why it happened and not when, where and in which order (42). I have argued that one of the goals of 2 Kgs 15–23 was to explain the real reasons for the Assyrian collapse hidden from an ordinary observer under the overwhelming rhetoric and the power of the Assyrian Empire. Thus, the optics governing the choice of the data and organization of the historical events in these chapters is the presentation of Assyrian decline. This type of historiography, moreover, permits the combination of different sources even though they might have come from different historical periods. Several studies have proved that the text is the combination of sources A and B. Such a combination of the sources into a final text can be seen as a literary device employed to mark the shift in Assyrian expansionist policy. Pointing out the very reasons for pogroms calls for action. The historiography of representation, thus, makes way for the process of enimification, in which human beings are stripped of their dignity and consequently it justifies all kinds of atrocities which the persecutors would never do otherwise (43). Along the same lines the presentation of Sennacherib as a blasphemer calls for the punishment of his hubris. (40) KOFOED, Text and History, 238. (41) Cf. A. MALAMAT, History of Biblical Israel. Major Problems and Minor Issues (CHANE 7; Leiden – Boston 2001) 58. (42) B. Halpern captures this aspect of ancient historiographies in terms of schematic, cultic and stylized history. It “synthesizes rather than supplants the evidence”; B. HALPERN, The First Historians. The Hebrew Bible and History (San Francisco, CA 1988) 227. (43) R.W. RIEBER and J. KELLY, “Substance and Shadow: Images of the Enemy”, The Psychology of War and Peace. The Image of the Enemy (ed. R.W. RIEBER) (New York 1991) 3-39.