King James Version · Under Assyria
Isaiah 11
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And there shall come forth a out of the stem of , and a Branch shall grow out of his roots: And of shall rest upon him, of and , of and might, of knowledge and of the ; And shall make him of quick in the : and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears: But with shall he judge , and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the of his , and with the breath of his shall he . And shall be the girdle of his loins, and the girdle of his reins. The wolf also shall with , and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. 7And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of , as the waters cover the sea. And in that day there shall be a root of , which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the seek: and his rest shall be . And it shall come to pass in that day, that shall set his hand again the second time to recover of his people, which shall be left, from , and from , and from , and from , and from , and from , and from , and from the islands of the sea. And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth. The envy also of shall depart, and the of Judah : shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex . But they shall fly upon the shoulders of the toward the west; they shall spoil them of the east together: they shall lay their hand upon and ; and shall them. And shall of the sea; and with his mighty wind shall he shake his hand over the river, and shall smite it in the seven streams, and make men go over dryshod. And there shall be an highway for of his people, which shall be left, from ; like as it was to Israel in the day that he came up out of 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.
All of Isaiah