World English Bible · Under Assyria
Isaiah 27
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In that day, with his hard and great and strong will punish leviathan, the fleeing , and leviathan, the twisted ; and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea. In that day, sing to her, "A pleasant ! I, , am its keeper. I will water it every moment. Lest anyone damage it, I will keep it night and day. is not in me, but if I should find and , I would do battle! I would march on them and I would burn them together. Or else let him take hold of my strength, that he may make peace with me. Let him make peace with me." In , will take root. Israel will blossom and bud. They will fill the surface of the world with fruit. Has he struck them as he struck those who struck them? Or are they killed like those who killed them were killed? In measure, when you send them away, you contend with them. He has removed them with his rough blast in the day of the east wind. Therefore by this the of will be forgiven, and this is all the fruit of taking away his : that he makes all the stones of the as chalk stones that are beaten in pieces, so that the and the shall rise no more. For the fortified city is solitary, a habitation deserted and forsaken, like . The calf will feed there, and there he will lie down, and consume its . When its boughs are withered, they will be broken off. The women will come and set them on , for they are a people of no . Therefore he who made them will not have on them, and he who formed them will show them no . It will happen in that day that will thresh from the flowing stream of the to the brook of ; and you will be gathered one by one, . It will happen in that day that a great will be blown; and those who were ready to in the land of , and those who were outcasts in the land of , shall come; and they will in the mountain at .
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