World English Bible · Under Assyria
Nahum 3
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Woe to the bloody city! It is all full of lies and robbery—no end to the prey. The noise of the whip, the noise of the rattling of wheels, prancing horses, and bounding chariots, the horseman charging, and the flashing , the glittering spear, and a multitude of slain, and a great heap of corpses, and there is no end of the bodies. They stumble on their bodies because of of the prostitution of the alluring , the mistress of , who sells nations through her prostitution, and families through her . "Behold, I am against you," of Armies, "and I will lift your skirts over your . I will show the nations your , and the kingdoms your . I will throw filth on you and make you vile, and will make you a spectacle. It will happen that all those who look at you will flee from you, and say, ' is laid waste! Who will mourn for her?' Where will I seek comforters for you?" Are you better than No-Amon, who was situated among the rivers, who had the waters around her, whose rampart was the sea, and her wall was of the sea? and were her boundless strength. Put and Libya were her helpers. Yet was she . She went into . Her young children also were dashed in pieces at the head of all the streets, and they cast lots for her honorable men, and all her great men were bound in chains. You also will be drunken. You will be hidden. You also will seek a because of . All your fortresses will be like fig trees with the first-ripe figs. If they are shaken, they fall into the of the eater. Behold, your troops among you are women. The of your land are set wide open to your . The has devoured your bars. Draw water for the siege. Strengthen your fortresses. Go into the , and tread the mortar. Make the brick kiln strong. There the will devour you. will cut you off. It will devour you like the . Multiply like . Multiply like the . You have increased your merchants more than the stars of the skies. The strips and flees away. Your guards are like the , and your officials like the swarms of , which settle on the walls on a cold day, but when the sun appears, they flee away, and their place is not known where they are. Your slumber, king of . Your nobles lie down. Your people are scattered on the mountains, and there is no one to gather them. There is no healing your wound, for your injury is fatal. All who hear the report of you clap their hands over you, for who hasn't felt your endless ?
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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.