King James Version · Under Assyria
Hosea 7
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When I would have healed Israel, then the of was discovered, and the wickedness of : for they commit falsehood; and the thief cometh in, and the troop of robbers spoileth without. And they consider not in their that I remember all their wickedness: now their own doings have beset them about; they are before . They make the king glad with their wickedness, and the princes with their lies. They are all , as an oven heated by the baker, who ceaseth from raising after he hath kneaded the dough, until it be leavened. In the day of our king the princes have made him sick with bottles of ; he stretched out his hand with scorners. For they have made ready their like an oven, whiles they lie in wait: their baker sleepeth all the night; in the morning it burneth as a flaming . They are all hot as an oven, and have devoured their judges; all their kings are fallen: there is none among them that calleth unto me. , he hath mixed himself among the people; is a cake not turned. Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not: yea, gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet he knoweth not. And the pride of Israel testifieth to : and they do not their , nor seek him for all this. also is like a silly without : they call to , they go to . When they shall go, I will spread my net upon them; I will bring them down as the fowls of the ; I will them, as their hath heard. Woe unto them! for they have fled from me: unto them! because they have transgressed against me: though I have them, yet they have spoken lies against me. And they have not cried unto me with their , when they howled upon their beds: they assemble themselves for corn and , and they rebel against me. Though I have bound and strengthened their arms, yet do they imagine mischief against me. They return, but not to : they are like a deceitful bow: their princes shall fall for the rage of their : this shall be their derision in the land of .
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.