King James Version · Under Assyria
Isaiah 16
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Send ye to the ruler of the land from to , unto the mount of the daughter of . For it shall be, that, as a wandering bird cast out of the nest, so the daughters of shall be at the fords of . Take , execute ; make thy shadow as the night in the midst of the noonday; hide the outcasts; bewray not him that wandereth. Let mine outcasts with thee, ; be thou a covert to them from the of the spoiler: for the extortioner is at an end, the spoiler ceaseth, the oppressors are consumed out of the land. And in mercy shall be established: and he shall sit upon it in truth in the of , judging, and seeking , and hasting . We have heard of the pride of ; he is very proud: even of his haughtiness, and his pride, and his : but his lies shall not be so. Therefore shall howl for , every one shall howl: for the foundations of shall ye mourn; surely they are stricken. For the fields of languish, and of : the lords of the heathen have broken down the principal plants thereof, they are come even unto , they wandered through : her are stretched out, they are gone over the sea. Therefore I will bewail with the weeping of of : I will water thee with my tears, O , and : for the shouting for thy summer fruits and for thy harvest is fallen. And gladness is taken away, and joy out of the plentiful field; and in the vineyards there shall be no singing, neither shall there be shouting: the treaders shall tread out no in their presses; I have made their vintage shouting to cease. Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp for , and mine inward parts for –haresh. And it shall come to pass, when it is seen that is weary on the , that he shall come to his sanctuary to ; but he shall not prevail. This is the word that hath spoken concerning since that time. But now hath spoken, saying, Within three years, as the years of an hireling, and the of shall be contemned, with all that great multitude; and shall be very small and feeble.
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