King James Version · Under Assyria
Isaiah 15
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The burden of . Because in the night Ar of is laid waste, and brought to silence; because in the night of is laid waste, and brought to silence; He is gone up to Bajith, and to , the , to weep: shall howl over , and over : on all their heads shall be baldness, and every beard . In their streets they shall gird themselves with : on the tops of their houses, and in their streets, every one shall howl, weeping abundantly. And shall cry, and : their voice shall be heard even unto : therefore the armed soldiers of shall cry out; his life shall be grievous unto him. shall cry out for ; his fugitives shall flee unto , an heifer of three years old: for by the mounting up of with weeping shall they go it up; for in of they shall raise up a cry of . For the waters of shall be desolate: for the hay is withered away, the grass faileth, there is no green thing. Therefore the abundance they have gotten, and that which they have laid up, shall they carry away to the brook of the willows. For the cry is gone round about the borders of ; the howling thereof unto Eglaim, and the howling thereof unto Beer–elim. For the waters of Dimon shall be full of : for I will bring more upon Dimon, lions upon him that escapeth of , and upon of the land.
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