King James Version · Under Assyria
Isaiah 39
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere.
At that time , the son of , king of , sent letters and a present to : for he had heard that he had been sick, and was recovered. And was glad of them, and shewed them the house of his precious things, the silver, and the gold, and the spices, and the precious ointment, and all the house of his armour, and all that was found in his : there was nothing in his house, nor in all his , that shewed them not. Then came the unto king , and said unto him, What said these men? and from whence came they unto thee? And said, They are come from a far country unto me, even from . Then said he, What have they seen in thine house? And answered, All that is in mine house have they seen: there is nothing among my that I have not shewed them. Then said to , Hear the word of of hosts: Behold, the days come, that all that is in thine house, and that which thy fathers have laid up in store until this day, shall be carried to : nothing shall be left, saith . And of thy sons that shall issue from thee, which thou shalt beget, shall they take away; and they shall be in the palace of the king of . Then said to , Good is the word of which thou hast spoken. He said moreover, For there shall be peace and truth in my days.
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