World English Bible · Under Assyria
Isaiah 6
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In the year that King , I saw sitting on a , high and lifted up; and his train filled . Above him stood the . Each one had six . With two he covered . With two he covered his feet. With two he flew. One called to another, and said, ", , , is of Armies! The whole earth is full of his !" The foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. Then I said, "Woe is me! For I am undone, because I am a man of and I live among a people of , for my eyes have seen the King, of Armies!" Then one of the flew to me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the . He touched my with it, and said, "Behold, this has touched your ; and your is taken away, and your forgiven." I heard voice, saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" Then I said, "Here I am. Send me!" He said, "Go, and tell this people, 'You hear indeed, but don't understand. You see indeed, but don't perceive.' Make of this people fat. Make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their , and turn again, and be healed." Then I said, ", how long?" He answered, "Until cities are waste without inhabitant, houses without man, the land becomes utterly waste, and has removed men far away, and the forsaken places are many within the land. If there is a tenth left in it, that also will in turn be consumed, as a terebinth, and as an oak whose stump when they are cut down, so the is its stump."
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