King James Version · Under Assyria
Nahum 3
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Woe to the bloody city! it is all full of lies and robbery; the prey departeth not; The noise of a whip, and the noise of the rattling of the wheels, and of the pransing horses, and of the jumping chariots. The horseman lifteth up both the bright and the glittering spear: and there is a multitude of slain, and a great number of carcases; and there is none end of their corpses; they stumble upon their corpses: Because of of the whoredoms of the wellfavoured , the mistress of witchcrafts, that selleth nations through her whoredoms, and families through her witchcrafts. Behold, I am against thee, saith of hosts; and I will discover thy skirts upon thy , and I will shew the nations thy , and the kingdoms thy . And I will cast filth upon thee, and make thee vile, and will set thee as a gazingstock. And it shall come to pass, that all they that look upon thee shall flee from thee, and say, is laid waste: who will bemoan her? whence shall I seek comforters for thee? Art thou better than populous No, that was situate among the rivers, that had the waters round about it, whose rampart was the sea, and her wall was from the sea? and were her strength, and it was infinite; Put and Lubim were thy helpers. Yet was she , she went into : her young children also were dashed in pieces at the top of all the streets: and they cast lots for her honourable men, and all her great men were bound in chains. Thou also shalt be drunken: thou shalt be hid, thou also shalt seek strength because of . All thy strong holds shall be like fig trees with the firstripe figs: if they be shaken, they shall even fall into the of the eater. Behold, thy people in the midst of thee are women: the of thy land shall be set wide open unto thine : the shall devour thy bars. Draw thee waters for the siege, fortify thy strong holds: go into , and tread the morter, make strong the brickkiln. There shall the devour thee; shall cut thee off, it shall eat thee up like the cankerworm: make thyself many as the cankerworm, make thyself many as the . Thou hast multiplied thy merchants above the stars of : the cankerworm spoileth, and flieth away. Thy are as the , and thy captains as the great , which camp in the hedges in the cold day, but when the sun ariseth they flee away, and their place is not known where they are. Thy slumber, O king of : thy nobles shall in : thy people is scattered upon the mountains, and no man gathereth them. There is no healing of thy bruise; thy wound is grievous: all that hear the bruit of thee shall clap the hands over thee: for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?
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.