King James Version · Under Assyria
Hosea 14
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O Israel, return unto thy ; for thou hast fallen by thine . Take with you words, and turn to : say unto him, Take away all , and receive us graciously: so will we render the calves of our . shall not us; we will not ride upon horses: neither will we say any more to the work of our hands, Ye are our gods: for in thee findeth mercy. I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely: for mine is turned away from him. I will be as the unto Israel: he shall grow as the lily, and cast forth his roots as . His shall spread, and his beauty shall be as the olive tree, and his smell as . They that under his shadow shall return; they shall revive as the corn, and grow as : the scent thereof shall be as the of . shall say, What have I to do any more with idols? I have heard him, and observed him: I am like a green fir tree. From me is thy fruit found. Who is , and he shall understand these things? prudent, and he shall know them? for the ways of are right, and the shall walk in them: but the transgressors shall fall therein.
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.