King James Version · Under Assyria
Jonah 4
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But it displeased exceedingly, and he was very angry. And he unto , and said, I thee, O , was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto : for I knew that thou art a , and merciful, , and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil. Therefore now, O , take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to than to live. Then said , Doest thou well to be angry? So went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city. And prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over , that it might be a shadow over his head, to him from his grief. So was exceeding glad of the gourd. But prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered. And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of , that he fainted, and wished in himself to , and said, It is better for me to than to live. And said to , Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto . 10Then said , Thou hast had on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and in a night: And should not I spare , that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their and their left hand; and also much 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.