2001 AD and 722 BC -- two dates separated by over twelve centuries yet linked by a great disaster. The first date, 2001 AD, will remain forever etched in our memories -- the day when, in the words of the Times newspaper, "war came to America" with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, with the destruction of the World Trade Towers and part of the Pentagon, with the loss of thousands of lives.

The effects on the American psyche will be far greater and wide-ranging. In an article in the Times entitled "Invulnerable no more" Ann Treneman writes, "When you grow up in America, you know certain things. You live in the best country in the world. You are the richest country in the world. And you live in a country whose mainland has never seriously been attacked from the outside. You are invulnerable to such a thing."

She concludes, "Now America has come under attack in a way that even Hollywood could never have contemplated. The unthinkable has happened, and the fortress will never be the same again. America will come together to deal with this -- Oklahoma taught us this on a much smaller scale -- but no one will ever feel truly safe again, and such a change goes to the heart of the American soul."

The second date, 722 BC, will be of little significance to most of us, unless we are familiar with ancient history. However, it was an equally devastating moment when a whole nation was finally destroyed with the capture of its capital city.

The superpower of the day, Assyria by name, had marched through the ancient world conquering all before it with a brutal style of warfare which relied on massive armies, superbly equipped with the world's first great siege-machine manipulated by an efficient corps of engineers.

However, as one writer puts it, "psychological terror was Assyria's most effective weapon. It was ruthlessly applied, with corpses impaled on stakes, severed heads stacked in heaps, and captives skinned alive." You will be glad that there are no pictures from this day that we can view on a screen.

After overrunning most of Israel, these same Assyrian forces entered Samaria in the year 722 BC after a horrendous three year siege with a huge loss of life. Those who survived the privations of the siege and the subsequent violence, torture, and rape were herded together and carried off into exile -- never to return. The Assyrian annals, written on clay, record the words of Sargon the commander of the invading forces -- "I besieged and conquered Samaria, led away as booty 27,290 inhabitants."

One writer comments that these were "the most traumatic political events in the entire history of Israel." And the reason for the trauma was that Israel, like America, imagined itself to be secure from such attacks and that such a thing could never happen to them. The people of Israel believed that they were invulnerable and that, while other nations around them succumbed to the invaders, they were secure because they were God's chosen people. They were sadly and tragically wrong.