World English Bible · Under Assyria
Isaiah 15
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere.
The burden of . For in a night, Ar of is laid waste, and brought to nothing. For in a night of is laid waste, and brought to nothing. They have gone up to Bayith, and to , to the , to weep. wails over and over . Baldness is on all of their heads. Every beard is . In their streets, they clothe themselves in . In their streets and on their housetops, everyone wails, weeping abundantly. cries out with . Their voice is heard even to . Therefore the armed men of cry aloud. Their tremble within them. cries out for ! Her nobles flee to , to Eglath Shelishiyah; for they go up by the ascent of with weeping; for on to , they raise up a cry of . For the waters of will be desolate; for the grass has withered away, the tender grass fails, there is no green thing. Therefore they will carry away the abundance they have gotten, and that which they have stored up, over the brook of the willows. For the cry has gone around the borders of , its to Eglaim, and its to Beer . For the waters of Dimon are full of ; for I will bring yet more on Dimon, a lion on those of who escape, and on of the land.
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.
All of Isaiah