King James Version · Under Assyria
Judith 3
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1So they sent ambassadors unto him to treat of peace, saying, 2Behold, we the servants of the great king lie before thee; use us as shall be good in thy sight. 3Behold, our houses, and all our places, and all our fields of wheat, and flocks, and herds, and all the lodges of our tents lie before thy ; use them as it pleaseth thee. 4Behold, even our cities and the inhabitants thereof are thy servants; come and deal with them as seemeth good unto thee. 5So the men came to , and declared unto him after this manner. 6Then came he down toward the sea coast, both he and his army, and set garrisons in the high cities, and took out of them chosen men for aid. 7So they and all the country round about received them with garlands, with dances, and with timbrels. 8Yet he did cast down their frontiers, and cut down their groves: for he had decreed to destroy all the gods of the land, that all nations should only, and that all and tribes should call upon him as . 9Also he came over against Esdraelon near unto , over against the great strait of . 10And he pitched between and Scythopolis, and there he tarried a whole month, that he might gather together all the carriages of his army.
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.