The Work
Doré's Destruction of Sennacherib's Host (from La Sainte Bible, 1866) became famous as the visual companion to Byron's poem "The Destruction of Sennacherib" (1815) and was reproduced together with that poem in countless Victorian schoolbooks. Doré shows the vast devastated Assyrian camp at dawn, the living king surveying the countless dead while the angel of death retreats into the sky.
Biblical Source
2 Kings 19:35 - "That night the angel of the LORD went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning - there were all the dead bodies!" - and Isaiah 37:36 provide the narrative. The miraculous deliverance of Jerusalem from Sennacherib's siege was understood in the Old Testament tradition as a defining demonstration of Yahweh's power over the greatest empire of its day.
Byron's poem begins "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold / And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold" - a romantic expansion of the biblical narrative that Doré's plate illustrates with equal dramatic force.
Artist and Iconography
Doré's plate emphasizes scale: the vast Assyrian camp stretching to the horizon, the innumerable dead covering the ground, the surviving king and his guard reduced to small figures by the magnitude of the destruction. The angel of death, visible in the upper sky, is already departing - the work done, the judgment complete.