510 Mark Leuchter Esarhaddon’s inscription legitimizes his building policy in Babylon, an effort geared to secure Assyrian hegemony through diplomacy in sharp distinction to the actions of his father Sennacherib, who devastated the city in 689. Commencing the building program 11 years after Sennacherib completed his campaign, the inscription establishes the divine ordination of Esarhaddon’s efforts, making him the bearer of Marduk’s will and presenting the building policy as the restoration of Babylon’s sanctity (23). The manner in which this process is realized is through a literary feature of the inscription itself, with the cuneiform symbol representing the number 70 inverted to appear as the symbol representing the number 11. Though it is clearly a text generated by Esarhaddon’s court scribes, the impetus of inversion is ascribed to Marduk himself (24). Esarhaddon’s inscriptions (such as the one cited above) dramat- ically re-envisioned the relationship between Assyria and Babylon, two nations of a common culture that nevertheless had battled each other for centuries regarding political dominance in Mesopotamia. Whereas Esarhaddon’s predecessors had attempted to subdue Babylon by force — and Sennacherib’s devastation of the city in 689 provides the classic example of this long standing policy — Esarhaddon’s great innovation rested in an attempt to unify the political and religious predilections of the two nations under his auspices. Though the inscriptions geared for his own Assyrian audience deploy the prideful language typical of Akkadian monarchic self-aggrandizement, the related texts meant for Babylonian audiences attempted to mend the rift by suggesting that Esarhaddon represented their best interests (25). It is difficult to avoid seeing uncanny similarities between Esarhaddon’s inscription and the Jeremianic material under considera- tion. Both texts deal with a divine decree concerning a 70-year repression, and both texts rely upon scribal methodology to invert the decree. In the case of the Esarhaddon text, the inversion takes place with the cuneiform symbol itself; the atbash code in the Jeremianic text represents an analogous method applied to the Hebrew alphabetic (23) The theological and propagandistic aspects of this passage have been discussed by L.K. HANDY, “The Role of Huldah in Josiah’s Cult Reform”, ZAW 106 (1994) 40-46. (24) HANDY, “The Role of Huldah”, 41-42. (25) For a detailed analysis of Esarhaddon’s diplomatic policies, see B.N. PORTER, Images, Power Politics. Figurative Aspects of Esarhaddon’s Babylonian Policy (Philadelphia 1993).