King James Version · Under Assyria
Jonah 3
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And unto the second time, saying, Arise, go unto , that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee. So arose, and went unto , according to the word of . Now was an exceeding great city of three days’ journey. And began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and shall be overthrown. So the people of , and proclaimed a , and put on , from the greatest of them even to the least of them. For word came unto the king of , and he arose from his , and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with , and sat in . And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through by the of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed, nor drink water: But let man and beast be covered with , and cry mightily unto : yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the that is in their hands. Who can tell if will turn and , and turn away from his , that we not? And saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.
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.