It appears then that Sennacherib, after punishing the people of Ekron, broke up from before that city, and entering Judaea proceeded towards Jerusalem, spreading his army over a wide space, and capturing on his way a vast number of small towns and villages, whose inhabitants he enslaved and carried off to the number of 200,000.  Having reached Jerusalem, he commenced the siege in the usual way, erecting towers around the city, from which stones and arrows were discharged against the defenders of the fortifications, and “casting banks” against the walls and gates.  Jerusalem seems to have been at this time very imperfectly fortified.  The “breaches of the city of David” had recently been “many;” and the inhabitants had hastily pulled down the houses in the vicinity of the wall to fortify it.  It was felt that the holy place was in the greatest danger.  We may learn from the conduct of the people, as described by one of themselves, what were the feelings generally of the cities threatened with destruction by the Assyrian armies.  Jerusalem was at first “full of stirs and tumult;” the people rushed to the housetops to see if they were indeed invested, and beheld “the choicest valleys full of chariots, and the horsemen set in array at the gates.”  Then came “a day of trouble, and of treading down, and of perplexity”—­a day of “breaking down the walls and of crying to the mountains.”  Amidst this general alarm and mourning there were, however, found some whom a wild despair made reckless, and drove to a ghastly and ill-timed merriment.  When God by His judgments gave an evident “call to weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth—­behold joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine”—­“Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall die.”  Hezekiah after a time came to the conclusion that resistance would be vain, and offered to surrender upon terms, an offer which Sennacherib, seeing the great strength of the place, and perhaps distressed for water, readily granted.  It was agreed that Hezekiah should undertake the payment of an annual tribute, to consist of thirty talents of gold and three hundred talents of silver, and that he should further yield up the chief treasures of the place as a “present” to the Great King.  Hezekiah, in order to obtain at once a sufficient supply of gold, was forced to strip the walls and pillars of the Temple, which were overlaid in parts with this precious metal.  He yielded up all the silver from the royal treasury and from the treasury of the Temple; and this amounted to five hundred talents more than the fixed rate of tribute.  In addition to these sacrifices, the Jewish monarch was required to surrender Padi, his Ekronite prisoner, and was mulcted in certain portions of his dominions, which were attached by the conqueror to the territories of neighboring kings.