King James Version · Under Assyria
Micah 2
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Woe to them that devise , and work evil upon their beds! when the morning is , they practise it, because it is in the of their hand. And they fields, and take them by ; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage. Therefore thus saith ; Behold, against this family do I devise an evil, from which ye shall not remove your necks; neither shall ye go haughtily: for this time is evil. In that day shall one take up against you, and with a doleful , and say, We be utterly spoiled: he hath changed the of my people: how hath he removed it from me! turning away he hath divided our fields. Therefore thou shalt have none that shall cast a cord by lot in of . ye not, say they to them that : they shall not to them, that they shall not take . O thou that art named the house of , is of straitened? are these his doings? do not my words do good to him that walketh uprightly? Even of late my people is up as an enemy: ye pull off the robe with the garment from them that pass by securely as men averse from war. The women of my people have ye cast out from their pleasant houses; from their children have ye taken away my for ever. Arise ye, and depart; for this is not your rest: because it is polluted, it shall destroy you, even with a sore . If a man walking in and falsehood do lie, saying, I will unto thee of and of ; he shall even be the of this people. I will surely assemble, O , all of thee; I will surely gather of Israel; I will put them together as the sheep of Bozrah, as the flock in the midst of their fold: they shall make great noise by reason of of men. The breaker is come up before them: they have broken up, and have passed through the , and are gone out by it: and their king shall pass before them, and on the head of them.
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.