King James Version · Under Assyria
Isaiah 2
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The word that the son of saw concerning Judah and . And it shall come to pass , that the mountain of ’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of , to the house of the of ; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his : for out of shall go forth , and the word of from . And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of , come ye, and let us walk in of . Therefore thou hast forsaken thy people the house of , because they be replenished from the east, and are soothsayers like the , and they please themselves in the children of strangers. Their land also is full of silver and gold, neither is there any end of their ; their land is also full of horses, neither is there any end of their chariots: Their land also is full of idols; they the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made: And the mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth himself: therefore forgive them not. Enter into , and hide thee in , for , and for the of his majesty. The lofty looks of man shall be humbled, and the haughtiness of men shall be , and alone shall be exalted in that day. For of hosts shall be upon every one that is proud and lofty, and upon every one that is lifted up; and he shall be brought low: And upon all the cedars of , that are high and lifted up, and upon all the oaks of , And upon all the high mountains, and upon all the hills that are lifted up, And upon every high tower, and upon every fenced wall, And upon all the ships of , and upon all pleasant pictures. And the loftiness of man shall be , and the haughtiness of men shall be made low: and alone shall be exalted in that day. And the idols he shall utterly abolish. And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for , and for the of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth. In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols of gold, which they made each one for himself to , to the moles and to the bats; To go into the clefts of the rocks, and into the tops of the ragged rocks, for , and for the of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth. Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?
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