King James Version · Under Assyria
Hosea 6
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Come, and let us return unto : for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight. Then shall we know, if we follow on to know : his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the , as the latter and former unto the earth. O , what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? for your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the early it goeth away. Therefore have I hewed them by ; I have slain them by the words of my : and thy judgments are as that goeth forth. For I mercy, and not ; and the knowledge of more than . But they like men have transgressed : there have they dealt treacherously against me. is a city of them that work , and is polluted with . And as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests in by consent: for they commit lewdness. I have seen an horrible thing in the : there is the whoredom of , Israel is defiled. Also, O Judah, he hath set an harvest for thee, when I returned of my people.
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.