World English Bible · Under Assyria
Hosea 2
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"Say to your brothers, 'My people!' and to your sisters, 'My loved one!' Contend with your mother! Contend, for she is not my wife, neither am I her husband; and let her her prostitution from her , and her adulteries from between her breasts; lest I strip her , and make her as in the day that she was born, and make her like a , and set her like a dry land, and kill her with thirst. Indeed, on her children I will have no mercy, for they are children of . For their mother has . She who conceived them has done shamefully; for she said, 'I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.' Therefore behold, I will hedge up your way with , and I will build a wall against her, that she can't find her way. She will follow after her lovers, but she won't overtake them; and she will seek them, but won't find them. Then she will say, 'I will go and return to my first husband, for then it was better with me than now.' For she didn't know that I gave her the grain, the , and the oil, and multiplied to her silver and gold, which they used for . Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my , and will pluck away my wool and my flax which should have covered her . Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one will her out of my hand. I will also cause all her celebrations to cease: her feasts, her new moons, her , and all her solemn assemblies. I will lay waste her and her fig trees, about which she has said, 'These are my wages that my lovers have given me,' and I will make them a forest, and the animals of the field shall eat them. I will visit on her the days of , to which she when she decked herself with her earrings and her jewels, and went after her lovers and forgot me," . "Therefore behold, I will allure her, and bring her into , and speak tenderly to her. I will give her vineyards from there, and the valley of Achor for a door of ; and she will respond there as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of . It will be in that day," , "that you will call me 'my husband,' and no longer call me 'my master.' For I will take away the names of out of her , and they will no longer be mentioned by name. In that day I will make a for them with the animals of the field, and with the birds of , and with the creeping things of the ground. I will break the bow, , and the battle out of the land, and will make them lie down safely. I will betroth you to me . Yes, I will betroth you to me in , in justice, in , and in . I will even betroth you to me in ; and you shall know . It will happen in that day, that I will respond," . "I will respond to , and they will respond to the earth; and the earth will respond to the grain, and the , and the oil; and they will respond to . I will sow her to me in the earth; and I will have mercy on her who had not obtained mercy; and I will tell those who were not my people, 'You are my people;' and they will say, 'You are My !'"
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.