King James Version · Under Assyria
Isaiah 7
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And it came to pass in the days of the son of , the son of , king of Judah, that Rezin the king of , and the son of , king of Israel, went up toward to war against it, but could not prevail against it. And it was told the house of , saying, is confederate with . And was moved, and of his people, as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind. Then said unto , Go forth now to meet , thou, and Shear–jashub thy son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the fuller’s field; And say unto him, Take heed, and be quiet; fear not, neither be fainthearted for the two tails of these smoking firebrands, for the of Rezin with , and of the son of . Because , , and the son of , have taken evil against thee, saying, 6Let us go up against Judah, and vex it, and let us make a breach therein for us, and set a king in the midst of it, even the son of Tabeal: Thus saith , It shall not stand, neither shall it come to pass. For the head of is , and the head of is Rezin; and within threescore and five years shall be broken, that it be not a people. And the head of is , and the head of is ’s son. If ye will not , surely ye shall not be established. Moreover spake again unto , saying, Ask thee a sign of thy ; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above. But said, I will not ask, neither will I . And he said, Hear ye now, O house of ; Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my also? Therefore himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings. shall bring upon thee, and upon thy people, and upon thy ’s house, days that have not come, from the day that departed from Judah; even the king of . And it shall come to pass in that day, that shall hiss for the fly that is in the uttermost part of the rivers of , and for the bee that is in the land of . And they shall come, and shall rest all of them in the desolate valleys, and in the holes of the rocks, and upon all , and upon all bushes. In the same day shall shave with a razor that is hired, namely, by them beyond the river, by the king of , the head, and the hair of the feet: and it shall also consume the beard. And it shall come to pass in that day, that a man shall nourish a young cow, and two sheep; And it shall come to pass, for the abundance of milk that they shall give he shall eat butter: for butter and honey shall every one eat that is left in the land. And it shall come to pass in that day, that every place shall be, where there were a thousand at a thousand silverlings, it shall even be for and . With arrows and with bows shall men come thither; because all the land shall become and . And on all hills that shall be digged with the mattock, there shall not come thither the fear of and : but it shall be for the sending forth of oxen, and for the treading of lesser cattle.
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