World English Bible · Under Assyria
Hosea 1
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word that came to the son of , in the days of , , , and , kings of Judah, and in the days of the son of , king of Israel. When spoke at first by , said to , "Go, take for yourself a wife of prostitution and children of ; for the land commits great , forsaking ." So he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim; and she conceived, and bore him a son. said to him, "Call his name , for yet a little while, and I will of on the house of Jehu, and will cause of the to cease. It will happen in that day that I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of ." She conceived again, and bore a daughter. Then he said to him, "Call her name Lo-Ruhamah, for I will no longer have mercy on the , that I should in any way pardon them. But I will have mercy on the house of Judah, and will them by their , and will not them by bow, , battle, horses, or horsemen." 8Now when she had weaned Lo-Ruhamah, she conceived, and bore a son. He said, "Call his name Lo-Ammi, for you are not my people, and I will not be yours. Yet the number of the will be as the sand of the sea, which can't be measured or counted; and it will come to pass that, in the place where it was said to them, 'You are not my people,' they will be called 'sons of the living .' The children of Judah and the will be gathered together, and they will appoint themselves one head, and will go up from the land; for great will be the day of .
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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.