King James Version · Under Assyria
Isaiah 38
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In those days was sick unto . And the the son of came unto him, and said unto him, Thus saith , Set thine house in order: for thou shalt , and not live. Then turned toward the wall, and unto , And said, Remember now, O , I beseech thee, how I have walked before thee in truth and with a perfect , and have done that which is good in thy sight. And wept sore. 4Then came the word of to , saying, Go, and say to , Thus saith , the of thy , I have heard thy , I have seen thy tears: behold, I will add unto thy days fifteen years. And I will thee and this city out of the hand of the king of : and I will defend this city. And this shall be a sign unto thee from , that will do this thing that he hath spoken; Behold, I will bring again the shadow of the degrees, which is gone down in the sun dial of , ten degrees backward. So the sun returned ten degrees, by which degrees it was gone down. The writing of king of Judah, when he had been sick, and was recovered of his sickness: I said in the cutting off of my days, I shall go to the of the : I am deprived of the residue of my years. I said, I shall not see , even , in the land of the living: I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of the world. Mine age is departed, and is removed from me as a ’s tent: I have like a weaver my life: he will cut me off with pining sickness: from day even to night wilt thou make an end of me. I till morning, that, as a lion, so will he break all my bones: from day even to night wilt thou make an end of me. Like a crane or a swallow, so did I chatter: I did mourn as a : mine eyes fail with looking upward: O , I am oppressed; undertake for me. What shall I say? he hath both spoken unto me, and himself hath done it: I shall go softly all my years in the bitterness of . O , by these things men live, and in all these things is the life of : so wilt thou recover me, and make me to live. Behold, for peace I had great bitterness: but thou hast in love to it from of corruption: for thou hast cast all my behind thy back. For the cannot thee, can not celebrate thee: they that go down into cannot for thy truth. The living, the living, he shall thee, as I do this day: to the children shall make known thy truth. was ready to me: therefore we will sing my songs to the stringed instruments all the days of our life in the . For had said, Let them take a lump of figs, and lay it for a plaister upon the boil, and he shall recover. also had said, What is the sign that I shall go up to the ?
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