King James Version · Under Assyria
Hosea 12
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere.
feedeth on wind, and followeth after the east wind: he daily increaseth lies and desolation; and they do make a with the , and oil is carried into . hath also a controversy with Judah, and will punish according to his ways; according to his doings will he him. He took his brother by the heel in the , and by his strength he had with : Yea, he had over , and prevailed: he wept, and made unto him: he found him in Beth–el, and there he spake with us; Even of hosts; is his memorial. Therefore turn thou to thy : keep mercy and , and wait on thy continually. He is a merchant, the balances of deceit are in his hand: he loveth to oppress. And said, Yet I am become rich, I have found me out substance: in all my labours they shall find none in me that were . And I that am thy from the land of will yet make thee to in tabernacles, as in the days of the solemn feast. I have also spoken by , and I have multiplied , and used similitudes, by the ministry of . Is there in ? surely they are : they bullocks in ; yea, their are as heaps in the furrows of the fields. And fled into the country of , and Israel for a wife, and for a wife he kept sheep. And by a brought Israel out of , and by a was he preserved. provoked him to most bitterly: therefore shall he leave his upon him, and his shall his return unto him.
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.