World English Bible · Under Assyria
Isaiah 17
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The burden of . "Behold, is taken away from being a city, and it will be a ruinous heap. The cities of are forsaken. They will be for flocks, which shall lie down, and no one shall make them afraid. The shall cease from , and from , and of . They will be as the of the ," of Armies. "It will happen in that day that the of will be made thin, and the fatness of his will become lean. It will be like when the harvester gathers the wheat, and his arm reaps the grain. Yes, it will be like when one gleans grain in the valley of . Yet will be left there, like the shaking of an olive tree, two or three olives in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the outermost of a fruitful tree," , the of Israel. In that day, people will look to their Maker, and their eyes will have respect for the One of Israel. They will not look to the , the work of their hands; neither shall they respect that which their fingers have made, either the or the . In that day, their strong cities will be like the forsaken places in the woods and on the mountain top, which were forsaken from before the ; and it will be a desolation. For you have forgotten the of your , and have not remembered of your strength. Therefore you plant pleasant plants, and set out foreign seedlings. In the day of your planting, you hedge it in. In the morning, you make blossom, but the harvest flees away in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow. Ah, the uproar of many peoples who roar like the roaring of the seas; and the rushing of nations that rush like the rushing of mighty waters! will rush like the rushing of many waters, but he will rebuke them, and they will flee far off, and will be chased like the of the mountains before the wind, and like the whirling before the storm. At evening, behold, terror! Before the morning, they are no more. This is the of those who plunder us, and the lot of those who rob us.
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