Byron's Uncharacteristic Biblical Subject
Interestingly, Byron is usually considered a wholly secular poet. For Byron, largely interested in adventure, satire, and vers de societé (verse chronicling the doings of high society), this Old Testament subject seems an unlikely one. “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” however, is the most famous poem on a biblical subject to come out of the English Romantic movement. Although Byron’s fellow poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge both became professed Christians in the later portions of their careers, neither wrote a biblical poem as famous or as memorable as that written by Byron, so often castigated in conservative quarters as an unreliable freethinker.
Christianizing of a Jewish Subject
Byron’s poem takes completely the position found in the Old Testament. Sennacherib is an evil tyrant, and Judah’s delivery from him was a result of miraculous divine intervention. If anything, Byron’s poem could be criticized for taking an overly Christian view of what was originally a Jewish subject. This Christianizing is also seen in the final line of the first stanza, where the mention of Galilee alludes to Jesus Christ. As a geographical term for the lake near the head of the Jordan River, the word “Galilee” was not in use until the third or second century b.c.e., so its presence here is anachronistic. However, its strong Christian associations—Galilee being the region where Jesus Christ grew up and began his ministry—were clearly important to Byron, even though his musical collaborator, Isaac Nathan, was a Jew.
Historical and Political Context
To an Englishman writing in 1815, the threat posed to Jerusalem by the tyrant Sennacherib would have had its natural analogue in the threat posed to peace and order by the French emperor Napoleon. Byron referred to Napoleon as “a wolf” in other poems. The Napoleonic allusion is not the predominant theme of the poem, however; “The Destruction of Sennacherib” is mainly about the Assyrian emperor, about the original biblical story of his demise.
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