World English Bible · Under Assyria
Amos 8
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Thus showed me: behold, a basket of summer fruit. He said, ", what do you see?" I said, "A basket of summer fruit." Then said to me, "The end has come on my people Israel. I will not again pass by them any more. The songs of will be in that day," . " bodies will be many. In every place they will throw them out with silence. Hear this, you who to swallow up , and cause of the land to fail, saying, 'When will the be gone, that we may sell grain? And the , that we may market wheat, making the ephah small, and the large, and dealing falsely with balances of deceit; that we may buy for silver, and for a pair of , and sell the sweepings with the wheat?'" has by the pride of , "Surely I will never forget any of their works. Won't the land tremble for this, and everyone mourn who dwells in it? Yes, it will rise up wholly like ; and it will be stirred up and sink again, like of . It will happen in that day," , "that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day. I will turn your feasts into , and all your songs into ; and I will make you wear on all your bodies, and baldness on every head. I will make it like the for an only son, and its end like a bitter day. Behold, the days come," , "that I will send a in the land, not a of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing words. They will wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east; they will run back and forth to seek word, and will not find it. In that day the beautiful virgins and the young men will faint for thirst. Those who by the of , and say, 'As your , Dan, lives,' and, 'As of lives,' they will fall, and never rise up again."
A public domain modern English translation, free to read and share. 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.