World English Bible · Under Assyria
Isaiah 21
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The burden of of the sea. As whirlwinds in the South sweep through, it comes from , from an awesome land. A grievous is declared to me. The treacherous man deals treacherously, and destroys. Go up, ; attack! I have stopped all of sighing. Therefore my thighs are filled with anguish. Pains have seized me, like the pains of a woman in labor. I am in so much pain that I can't hear. I am so dismayed that I can't see. flutters. Horror has frightened me. The twilight that I has been turned into trembling for me. They prepare the table. They set the watch. They eat. They drink. Rise up, you princes, oil the shield! For said to me, "Go, set a watchman. Let him declare what he sees. When he sees a troop, horsemen in pairs, a troop of donkeys, a troop of camels, he shall listen diligently with great attentiveness." He cried like a lion: ", I stand continually on the watchtower in the daytime, and every night I stay at my post. Behold, here comes a troop of men, horsemen in pairs." He answered, "Fallen, fallen is ; and all the engraved of her gods are broken to the ground. You are my , and the grain of my floor!" That which I have heard from of Armies, the of Israel, I have declared to you. The burden of . One calls to me out of , "Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?" The watchman said, "The morning comes, and also the night. If you will inquire, inquire. Come back again." The burden on . You will lodge in the thickets in , you caravans of Dedanites. They brought water to him who was thirsty. The inhabitants of the land of met the fugitives with their bread. For they fled away from the , from the drawn , from the bent bow, and from the heat of battle. For said to me, "Within a year, as a worker bound by contract would count it, all the of will fail, and the residue of the number of the archers, the of the children of , will be few; for , the of Israel, has spoken it."
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