King James Version · Under Assyria
Prayer of Manasseh
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is.
1O , Almighty of our fathers, , , and , and of their ; who hast made and earth, with all the ornament thereof; who hast bound the sea by the word of thy ; who hast shut up the deep, and sealed it by thy terrible and name; whom all men fear, and tremble before thy ; for the majesty of thy cannot be borne, and thine angry threatening toward is importable: but thy merciful promise is unmeasurable and unsearchable; for thou art , of great , , very merciful, and repentest of the evils of men. Thou, O , according to thy great goodness hast promised and forgiveness to them that have against thee: and of thine infinite hast appointed unto , that they may be . Thou therefore, O , that art the of the , hast not appointed to the , as to , and , and , which have not against thee; but thou hast appointed unto me that am a : for I have above the number of the sands of the sea. My , O , are multiplied: my are multiplied, and I am not worthy to behold and see the height of for of mine . I am with many iron bands, that I cannot lift up mine head, neither have any : for I have provoked thy , and done evil before thee: I did not thy will, neither kept I thy : I have set up , and have multiplied offences. Now therefore I bow the knee of mine , beseeching thee of . I have , O , I have , and I mine : wherefore, I humbly beseech thee, forgive me, O , forgive me, and destroy me not with mine . Be not angry with me for ever, by reserving evil for me; neither condemn me to the lower parts of the earth. For thou art the , even the of them that ; and in me thou wilt shew all thy goodness: for thou wilt me, that am unworthy, according to thy great mercy. Therefore I will thee for ever all the days of my life: for all the powers of do thee, and thine is the . .
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.
All of Prayer of Manasseh