It contains no notice of any events in Sennacherib's first or second year; and it may consequently make other omissions covering equal or larger intervals.

Thus the destruction of the Assyrian army at Pelusium may have been followed by a pause of some years' duration in the usual aggressive expeditions; and it may very probably have encouraged the Babylonians in the attempt to shake off the Assyrian yoke, which they certainly made towards the middle of Sennacherib's reign.
But while it appears to be probable that consequences of some importance followed on the Pelusiac calamity, it is tolerably certain that no such tremendous results flowed from it as some writers have imagined.

The murder of the disgraced Sennacherib "within fifty-five days" of his return to Nineveh, seems to be an invention of the Alexandrian Jew who wrote the Book of Tobit.

The total destruction of the empire in consequence of the blow, is an exaggeration of Josephus, rashly credited by some moderns.

Sennacherib did not die till B.C.681, seventeen years after his misfortune; and the Empire suffered so little that we find Esar-haddon, a few years later, in full possession of all the territory that any king before him had over held, ruling from Babylonia to Egypt, or (as he himself expresses it) "from the rising up of the sun to the going down of the same." Even Sennacherib himself was not prevented by his calamity from undertaking important wars during the latter part of his reign.