King James Version · Under Assyria
Hosea 9
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Rejoice not, O Israel, for joy, as other people: for thou hast gone a from thy , thou hast loved a reward upon every cornfloor. The floor and the winepress shall not feed them, and the shall fail in her. They shall not in ’s land; but shall return to , and they shall eat things in . They shall not offer to , neither shall they be pleasing unto him: their shall be unto them as the bread of mourners; all that eat thereof shall be polluted: for their bread for their shall not come into the . What will ye do in the solemn day, and in the day of the feast of ? For, lo, they are gone because of : shall gather them up, shall bury them: the pleasant places for their silver, nettles shall possess them: shall be in their tabernacles. The days of visitation are come, the days of recompence are come; Israel shall know it: the is a fool, the spiritual man is mad, for of thine , and the great hatred. The watchman of was with my : but the is a snare of a fowler in all his ways, and hatred in the house of his . They have deeply corrupted themselves, as in the days of : therefore he will remember their , he will visit their . I found Israel like grapes in ; I saw your fathers as the firstripe in the fig tree at her first time: but they went to , and separated themselves unto that ; and their were according as they loved. As for , their shall fly away like a bird, from the birth, and from the , and from the conception. Though they bring up their children, yet will I bereave them, that there shall not be a man left: yea, woe also to them when I depart from them! , as I saw , is planted in a pleasant place: but shall bring forth his children to the . Give them, O : what wilt thou give? give them a miscarrying and dry breasts. All their wickedness is in : for there I hated them: for the wickedness of their doings I will drive them out of mine house, I will love them no more: all their princes are revolters. is smitten, their root is dried up, they shall bear no fruit: yea, though they bring forth, yet will I even the beloved fruit of their . My will cast them away, because they did not unto him: and they shall be wanderers among the nations.
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.