King James Version · Under Assyria
Micah 6
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Hear ye now what saith; Arise, contend thou before the mountains, and let the hills hear thy voice. Hear ye, O mountains, ’s controversy, and ye strong foundations of the earth: for hath a controversy with his people, and he will plead with Israel. O my people, what have I done unto thee? and wherein have I wearied thee? testify against me. For I brought thee up out of the land of , and thee out of the house of servants; and I sent before thee , , and Miriam. O my people, remember now what king of consulted, and what the son of answered him from unto ; that ye may know the of . Wherewith shall I come before , and bow myself before the high ? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my for my , the fruit of my body for the of ? He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy ? ’s voice crieth unto the city, and the man of shall see thy name: hear ye the , and who hath appointed it. Are there yet the of wickedness in the house of , and the scant measure that is ? Shall I count them pure with balances, and with the bag of deceitful weights? For the rich men thereof are full of , and the inhabitants thereof have spoken lies, and their is deceitful in their . Therefore also will I make thee sick in smiting thee, in making thee desolate because of thy . Thou shalt eat, but not be satisfied; and thy casting down shall be in the midst of thee; and thou shalt take hold, but shalt not ; and that which thou deliverest will I give up to . Thou shalt sow, but thou shalt not reap; thou shalt tread the olives, but thou shalt not anoint thee with oil; and sweet , but shalt not drink . For the of are kept, and all the works of the house of , and ye walk in their counsels; that I should make thee a desolation, and the inhabitants thereof an hissing: therefore ye shall bear the of my people.
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.