When Sennacherib the Assyrian emperor came against Jerusalem, his pride was as tall as his army. The midrash tells how God humbled him in a sequence of ordinary-seeming errands. First Sennacherib was told, "I will cut your hair." He needed scissors. "Go to that house and bring a pair," he was told. He went, and there he met the ministering angels disguised as men, grinding date-stones.
He asked for the scissors. "First grind a measure of date-stones," the men said, "and then you will have them." The emperor — who had trampled kingdoms — stooped and ground the stones. Only then did they hand him the scissors.
By now it was dark. God said to him, "Go fetch some fire." He went, but as he blew on the embers to rouse a flame, his beard caught and singed. Then God came and shaved his head and his beard clean. Of this the prophet wrote (Isaiah 7:20): It shall also consume the beard.
As Rav Pappa summarized in a folk proverb, "Singe the face of a Syrian, and if it pleases him, set his beard on fire too, and you will not be able to laugh enough." The Talmud (Sanhedrin 95b-96a) remembers Sennacherib not by his military might but by this small, ridiculous scene — the great emperor grinding date-stones and then standing bare-skulled in the dark. God's victories are sometimes stitched from the smallest humiliations.