World English Bible · Under Assyria
Hosea 8
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"Put the to your ! Something like an eagle is over house, because they have broken my and rebelled against . They cry to me, 'My , we, Israel, you!' Israel has cast off that which is good. will pursue him. They have set up kings, but not by me. They have made princes, and I didn't approve. Of their silver and their gold they have made themselves idols, that they may . Let throw out his calf idol! My burns against them! How long will it be until they are capable of purity? For this is even from Israel! The workman made it, and it is no ; indeed, the calf of shall be broken in pieces. For they sow the wind, and they will reap the whirlwind. He has no standing grain. The stalk will yield no head. If it does yield, strangers will swallow it up. Israel is swallowed up. Now they are among the nations like a worthless thing. For they have gone up to , like a wild donkey wandering alone. has hired lovers for himself. But although they sold themselves among the nations, I will now gather them; and they begin to waste away because of the of the king of mighty ones. Because has multiplied for sinning, they became for him for sinning. I wrote for him the many things of , but they were regarded as a strange thing. As for the of my , they meat and eat it, but doesn't accept them. Now he will remember their , and punish their . They will return to . For Israel has forgotten his Maker and built palaces; and Judah has multiplied fortified cities; but I will send a on his cities, and it will devour its fortresses."
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.