Isaiah had predicted that God would break Assyria's power in the Promised Land (14:24-27). This short section records how He miraculously fulfilled that promise. This divine act of massive proportions settled the issue of Assyria's fate and provided the crowning demonstration that Yahweh controls world history. He will always fulfill His promises.
37:36 The Lord Himself slew 185,000 of the Assyrian soldiers in one night. Evidently this was an act of the angel of the Lord similar to the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn before the Exodus (Exod. 12:12-13, 23; cf. 2 Sam. 24:1, 15-16; Luke 12:20).369The verb "to smite"implies smiting with a disease.370
37:37 Sennacherib, the great "king of Assyria"(cf. 36:4, 13), then returned to Assyria having lost a large part of his army and having heard a rumor about the advancing Ethiopian king (vv. 7-9). He lived in Nineveh for 20 years before his death, and he conducted other military campaigns, but none in Palestine.
37:38 Ironically, it was while worshipping in the temple of his idol in Nineveh that God affected Sennacherib's assassination, whereas it was while worshipping the true God in His temple in Jerusalem that God moved to spare Hezekiah's life. The Babylonian royal chronicles recorded the assassination of Sennacherib and the accession of Esarhaddon in 681 B.C.371It was not the Assyrian way to record their national disasters, so it is understandable that archaeologists have discovered no Assyrian accounts of Sennacherib's humiliations.