World English Bible · Under Assyria
Hosea 14
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Israel, your ; for you have fallen because of your . Take words with you, and . Tell him, "Forgive all our , and accept that which is good; so we offer bulls as we of our . can't us. We won't ride on horses; neither will we say any more to the work of our hands, 'Our gods!' for in you finds mercy." "I will heal their waywardness. I will love them freely; for my is turned away from them. I will be like the to Israel. He will blossom like the lily, and send down his roots like . His will spread, and his beauty will be like the olive tree, and his fragrance like . Men will in his shade. They will revive like the grain, and blossom like . Their fragrance will be like the of . , what have I to do any more with idols? I answer, and will take care of him. I am like a green cypress tree; from me your fruit is found." Who is , that he may understand these things? Who is prudent, that he may know them? For the ways of are right, and walk in them, but the rebellious stumble in them.
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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.