King James Version · Under Assyria
Amos 8
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere.
Thus hath shewed unto me: and behold a basket of summer fruit. And he said, , what seest thou? And I said, A basket of summer fruit. Then said unto me, The end is come upon my people of Israel; I will not again pass by them any more. And the songs of shall be howlings in that day, saith : there shall be many bodies in every place; they shall cast them forth with silence. Hear this, O ye that swallow up , even to make of the land to fail, Saying, When will the be gone, that we may sell corn? and the , that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small, and the great, and falsifying the balances by deceit? That we may buy for silver, and for a pair of ; yea, and sell the refuse of the wheat? hath by the excellency of , Surely I will never forget any of their works. Shall not the land tremble for this, and every one mourn that dwelleth therein? and it shall rise up wholly as a flood; and it shall be cast out and drowned, as by the flood of . And it shall come to pass in that day, saith , that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day: And I will turn your feasts into , and all your songs into ; and I will bring up upon all loins, and baldness upon every head; and I will make it as the of an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day. Behold, the days come, saith , that I will send a in the land, not a of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of : And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of , and shall not find it. In that day shall the fair virgins and young men faint for thirst. They that by the of , and say, Thy , O Dan, liveth; and, The manner of Beer–sheba liveth; even they shall fall, and never rise up again.
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.