King James Version · Under Assyria
Judith 16
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1Then began to sing this in all Israel, and all the people sang after her this song of . 2And said, Begin unto my with timbrels, sing unto my with cymbals: tune unto him a new psalm: exalt him, and call upon his name. 3For breaketh the battles: for among the camps in the midst of the people he hath me out of the hands of them that persecuted me. 4 came out of the mountains from the north, he came with ten thousands of his army, whereof stopped the torrents, and their horsemen have covered the hills. 5He bragged that he would burn up my borders, and kill my young men with , and dash the sucking children against the ground, and make mine infants as a prey, and my virgins as a spoil. 6But hath disappointed them by the hand of a woman. 7For the mighty one did not fall by the young men, neither did the sons of the Titans smite him, nor high giants set upon him: but the daughter of weakened him with the beauty of her countenance. 8For she put off the garment of her widowhood for the exaltation of those that were oppressed in Israel, and her with ointment, and bound her hair in a tire, and took a linen garment to deceive him. 9Her ravished his eyes, her beauty took his prisoner, and the fauchion passed through his neck. 10The quaked at her boldness, and the were daunted at her hardiness. 11Then my afflicted shouted for joy, and my weak ones cried aloud; but they were astonished: these lifted up their voices, but they were overthrown. 12The sons of the damsels have pierced them through, and wounded them as fugitives’ children: they by the battle of . 13I will sing unto a new song: O , thou art great and , wonderful in strength, and invincible. 14Let all creatures thee: for thou spakest, and they were made, thou didst send forth thy , and it created them, and there is none that can resist thy voice. 15For the mountains shall be moved from their foundations with the waters, the rocks shall melt as wax at thy : yet thou art merciful to them that fear thee. 16For all is too little for a sweet savour unto thee, and is not sufficient for thy burnt offering: but he that feareth is great at all times. 17Woe to the nations that rise up against my kindred! Almighty will take of them in the day of , in putting and worms in their ; and they shall feel them, and weep for ever. 18Now as soon as they entered into , they ; and as soon as the people were purified, they offered their burnt offerings, and their free , and their gifts. 19 also dedicated all the stuff of , which the people had given her, and gave the canopy, which she had taken out of his bedchamber, for a gift unto . 20So the people continued feasting in before for the space of three months and remained with them. 21After this time every one returned to his own , and went to , and remained in her own possession, and was in her time honourable in all the country. 22And many her, but none knew her all the days of her life, after that her husband was , and was gathered to his people. 23But she increased more and more in , and waxed old in her husband’s house, being an hundred and five years old, and made her maid free; so she in : and they buried her in the cave of her husband . 24And the her seven days: and before she , she did distribute her goods to all them that were nearest of kindred to her husband, and to them that were the nearest of her kindred. 25And there was none that made the any more afraid in the days of , nor a long time after her .
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.