King James Version · Under Assyria
Isaiah 26
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In that day shall this song be sung in the land of Judah; We have a strong city; will appoint for walls and bulwarks. Open ye the , that nation which keepeth the truth may enter in. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee. ye in for ever: for in is strength: For he bringeth down them that on high; the lofty city, he layeth it low; he layeth it low, even to the ground; he bringeth it even to . The foot shall tread it down, even the feet of , and the steps of . of the is uprightness: thou, most upright, dost weigh of the . Yea, in of thy judgments, O , have we waited for thee; the of our is to thy name, and to the remembrance of thee. With have I thee in the night; yea, with within me will I seek thee early: for when thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn . Let be shewed to , yet will he not learn : in the land of uprightness will he deal unjustly, and will not behold the majesty of . , when thy hand is lifted up, they will not see: but they shall see, and be for their envy at the people; yea, the of thine shall devour them. , thou wilt ordain peace for us: for thou also hast wrought all our works in us. O our , other lords beside thee have had over us: but by thee only will we make mention of thy name. They are , they shall not live; they are deceased, they shall not rise: therefore hast thou visited and destroyed them, and made all their memory to . Thou hast increased the nation, O , thou hast increased the nation: thou art glorified: thou hadst removed it far unto all the ends of the earth. , in trouble have they visited thee, they poured out a when thy chastening was upon them. Like as a woman with child, that draweth near the time of her delivery, is in pain, and crieth out in her pangs; so have we been in thy sight, O . We have been with child, we have been in pain, we have as it were brought forth wind; we have not wrought any in the earth; neither have the inhabitants of the world fallen. Thy men shall live, together with my body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that in : for thy is as the of herbs, and the earth shall cast out . Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself as it were for a little moment, until the be overpast. For, behold, cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their : the earth also shall disclose her , and shall no more cover her slain.
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