King James Version · Under Assyria
Isaiah 34
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Come near, ye nations, to hear; and , ye people: let the earth hear, and all that is therein; the world, and all things that come forth of it. For the of is upon all nations, and his fury upon all their armies: he hath them, he hath them to the slaughter. Their slain also shall be cast out, and their stink shall come up out of their carcases, and the mountains shall be melted with their . And of shall be dissolved, and shall be rolled together as a : and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from , and as a falling fig from the fig tree. For my shall be bathed in : behold, it shall come down upon , and upon the people of my , to . of is filled with , it is made fat with fatness, and with of lambs and goats, with the kidneys of rams: for hath a in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of . And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls; and their land shall be soaked with , and their made fat with fatness. For it is ’s , and the year of recompences for the controversy of . And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch. It shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up for ever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it . But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness. They shall call the nobles thereof to , but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing. And shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls. The wild of shall also meet with the wild of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest. There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow: there shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her mate. Seek ye out of the book of , and read: no one of these shall fail, none shall want her mate: for my it hath commanded, and his it hath gathered them. And he hath cast the lot for them, and his hand hath divided it unto them by line: they shall possess it for ever, from generation to generation shall they therein.
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