World English Bible · Under Assyria
Hosea 6
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"Come! Let's ; for he has torn us to pieces, and he will heal us; he has injured us, and he will bind up our wounds. After two days he will revive us. On the third day he will raise us up, and we will live before him. Let's . Let's press on to know . As surely as the sun rises, will appear. He will come to us like the , like the spring that waters the earth." ", what shall I do to you? Judah, what shall I do to you? For your love is like a morning cloud, and like the that disappears early. Therefore I have cut them to pieces with ; I killed them with the words of my . Your judgments are like a flash of lightning. For I mercy, and not ; and the knowledge of more than . But they, like , have broken . They were to me there. is a city of those who work ; it is stained with . As gangs of robbers wait to ambush a man, so the company of priests on toward , committing shameful crimes. In the I have seen a horrible thing. There is prostitution in . Israel is defiled. "Also, Judah, there is a harvest appointed for you, when I restore the fortunes of my people.
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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.