World English Bible · Under Assyria
Jonah 4
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But it displeased exceedingly, and he was angry. He to , and said, "Please, , wasn't this what I said when I was still in my own country? Therefore I hurried to flee to , for I knew that you are a and merciful, , and abundant in , and you relent of doing harm. Therefore now, , take, I beg you, my life from me, for it is better for me to than to live." said, "Is it right for you to be angry?" Then went out of the city and sat on the east side of the city, and there made himself a booth and sat under it in the shade, until he might see what would become of the city. prepared a and made it to come up over , that it might be a shade over his head to him from his discomfort. So was exceedingly glad because of . But prepared a worm at dawn the next day, and it chewed on so that it withered. When the sun arose, prepared a sultry east wind; and the sun beat on head, so that he was faint and requested for himself that he might . He said, "It is better for me to than to live." said to , "Is it right for you to be angry about ?" He said, "I am right to be angry, even to ." 10 said, "You have been concerned for , for which you have not labored, neither made it grow; which came up in a night and in a night. Shouldn't I be concerned for , that great city, in which are more than one hundred twenty thousand persons who can't discern between their and their left hand, and also many animals?"
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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.