King James Version · Under Assyria
Isaiah 27
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In that day with his sore and great and strong shall punish leviathan the piercing , even leviathan that crooked ; and he shall the dragon that is in the sea. In that day sing ye unto her, A of red . I do keep it; I will water it every moment: lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day. Fury is not in me: who would set the and against me in battle? I would go through them, I would burn them together. Or let him take hold of my strength, that he may make peace with me; and he shall make peace with me. He shall cause them that come of to take root: Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the of the world with fruit. Hath he smitten him, as he smote those that smote him? or is he slain according to the slaughter of them that are slain by him? In measure, when it shooteth forth, thou wilt debate with it: he stayeth his rough wind in the day of the east wind. By this therefore shall the of be purged; and this is all the fruit to take away his ; when he maketh all the stones of the as chalkstones that are beaten in sunder, the groves and shall not stand up. Yet the defenced city shall be desolate, and the habitation forsaken, and left like a : there shall the calf feed, and there shall he lie down, and consume the thereof. When the boughs thereof are withered, they shall be broken off: the women come, and set them on : for it is a people of no : therefore he that made them will not have mercy on them, and he that formed them will shew them no . And it shall come to pass in that day, that shall beat off from the channel of the river unto the stream of , and ye shall be gathered one by one, O ye . And it shall come to pass in that day, that the great shall be blown, and they shall come which were ready to in the land of , and the outcasts in the land of , and shall in the mount at .
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