King James Version · Under Assyria
Micah 3
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere.
And I said, Hear, I you, O heads of , and ye princes of the ; Is it not for you to know ? Who hate the good, and love the evil; who pluck off their skin from off them, and their from off their bones; Who also eat of my people, and flay their skin from off them; and they break their bones, and chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as within the caldron. Then shall they cry unto , but he will not hear them: he will even hide from them at that time, as they have behaved themselves ill in their doings. Thus saith concerning that make my people err, that bite with their teeth, and cry, Peace; and he that putteth not into their mouths, they even prepare war against him. Therefore night shall be unto you, that ye shall not have a ; and it shall be dark unto you, that ye shall not divine; and the sun shall go down over , and the day shall be dark over them. Then shall the be , and the confounded: yea, they shall all cover their ; for there is no answer of . But truly I am full of by of , and of , and of might, to declare unto his , and to Israel his . Hear this, I you, ye heads of the house of , and princes of the , that abhor , and pervert all equity. They build up with , and with . The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon , and say, Is not among us? none evil can come upon us. Therefore shall for your sake be plowed as a field, and shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the of the forest.
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.