World English Bible · Under Assyria
Jonah 2
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Then to , his , out of the fish's belly. He said, "I called because of my affliction to . He answered me. Out of the belly of I cried. You heard my voice. For you threw me into the depths, in of the seas. The flood was all around me. All your waves and your billows passed over me. I said, 'I have been banished from your sight; yet I will look again toward your temple.' The waters surrounded me, even to the . The deep was around me. The weeds were wrapped around my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains. The earth barred me in ; yet you have brought my life up from , my . "When fainted within me, I remembered . My came in to you, into your temple. Those who regard idols forsake their own mercy. But I will to you with the voice of . I will pay that which I have . belongs to ." Then spoke to the fish, and it vomited out on the dry land.
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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.