King James Version · Under Assyria
Amos 2
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Thus saith ; For three of , and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because he burned the bones of the king of into lime: But I will send a upon , and it shall devour the palaces of Kerioth: and shall with tumult, with shouting, and with the sound of the : And I will the judge from the midst thereof, and will all the princes thereof with him, saith . Thus saith ; For three of Judah, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they have despised of , and have not kept his , and their lies caused them to err, after the which their fathers have walked: But I will send a upon Judah, and it shall devour the palaces of . Thus saith ; For three of Israel, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they sold for silver, and for a pair of ; That pant after of the earth on the head of , and turn aside of the meek: and a man and his will go in unto the same maid, to profane my name: And they lay themselves down upon clothes laid to pledge by every , and they drink the of the condemned in the house of their . Yet destroyed I the before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars, and he was strong as the oaks; yet I destroyed his fruit from above, and his roots from beneath. Also I brought you up from the land of , and led you forty years through , to possess the land of the . And I up of your sons for , and of your young men for Nazarites. Is it not even thus, O ye ? saith . But ye gave the Nazarites to drink; and commanded , saying, not. Behold, I am pressed under you, as a cart is pressed that is full of sheaves. Therefore the flight shall from the swift, and the strong shall not strengthen his force, neither shall the mighty himself: Neither shall he stand that handleth the bow; and he that is swift of foot shall not himself: neither shall he that rideth the horse himself. And he that is courageous among the mighty shall flee away in that day, saith .
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Under Assyria, 745 BC to 612 BC ›
Assyria at full stretch, deporting whole populations as policy. The northern kingdom is destroyed in 722 BC and Judah survives as a tribute-paying vassal.
- Assyria
- The first empire to run mass deportation as ordinary administration: move the leadership somewhere else, settle strangers in their place, and the province stops being a nation. It worked. Samaria fell in 722 BC and the northern tribes did not come back. Assyria also advertised its cruelty deliberately, carving flayings and impalements on palace walls where envoys would see them, because terror is cheaper than garrisons.
- Judah
- Survives by paying. Hezekiah rebels, Sennacherib takes forty-six Judean towns and besieges Jerusalem in 701 BC, and the city holds. The Assyrian account boasts of shutting Hezekiah up like a bird in a cage and pointedly does not claim to have taken the city, which is one of the more interesting silences in ancient records.
- Egypt
- The splintered reed of a staff that Assyria's field commander mocks Judah for leaning on. It promises help and cannot deliver, and Isaiah spends decades saying so. Assyria eventually invades and sacks Thebes.
- Further afield
- Greece is in its archaic period, founding colonies from Spain to the Black Sea. Rome is under kings. Assyria's own libraries are collecting the literature of Mesopotamia, which is how Gilgamesh survived to be read again in the nineteenth century.