World English Bible · Under Assyria
Isaiah 25
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, you are my . I will exalt you! I will your name, for you have done wonderful things, things planned long ago, in complete and truth. For you have made a city into a heap, a fortified city into a , a palace of strangers to be no city. It will never be built. Therefore a strong people will you. A city of awesome nations will fear you. For you have been a to , a to in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shade from the heat, when the blast of the dreaded ones is like a storm against the wall. As the heat in a dry place you will bring down the noise of strangers; as the heat by the shade of a cloud, the song of the dreaded ones will be brought low. In this mountain, of Armies will make all peoples a feast of choice meat, a feast of choice wines, of choice meat full of marrow, of well refined choice wines. He will destroy in this mountain the surface of the covering that covers all peoples, and that is spread over all nations. He has swallowed up ! will wipe away tears from off all faces. He will take the of his people away from off all the earth, for has spoken it. It shall be said in that day, "Behold, this is our ! We have waited for him, and he will us! This is ! We have waited for him. We will be glad and rejoice in his !" For hand will rest in this mountain. will be trodden down in his place, even like straw is trodden down in the water of the dunghill. He will spread out his hands in the middle of it, like one who swims spreads out hands to swim, but his pride will be humbled together with the craft of his hands. He has brought the high of your walls down, laid low, and brought to the ground, even to .
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