King James Version · Under Assyria
Tobit 11
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is.
1After these things went his way, praising that he had given him a prosperous journey, and and Edna his wife, and went on his way till they drew near unto . 2Then said to , Thou knowest, brother, how thou didst leave thy : 3Let us haste before thy wife, and prepare the house. 4And take in thine hand the gall of the fish. So they went their way, and the dog went after them. 5Now sat looking about toward for her son. 6And when she espied him coming, she said to his , Behold, thy son cometh, and the man that went with him. 7Then said , I know, , that thy will open his eyes. 8Therefore anoint thou his eyes with the gall, and being pricked therewith, he shall rub, and the whiteness shall fall away, and he shall see thee. 9Then ran forth, and fell upon the neck of her son, and said unto him, Seeing I have seen thee, my son, from henceforth I am content to . And they wept both. 10 also went forth toward the door, and stumbled: but his son ran unto him, 11And took hold of his : and he strake of the gall on his fathers’ eyes, saying, Be of good , . 12And when his eyes began to smart, he rubbed them; 13And the whiteness pilled away from the corners of his eyes: and when he saw his son, he fell upon his neck. 14And he wept, and said, art thou, O , and is thy name for ever; and are all thine : 15For thou hast scourged, and hast taken on me: for, behold, I see my son . And his son went in rejoicing, and told his the great things that had happened to him in . 16Then went out to meet his daughter in law at the of , rejoicing and praising : and they which saw him go marvelled, because he had received his sight. 17But gave thanks before them, because had mercy on him. And when he came near to his daughter in law, he her, saying, Thou art welcome, daughter: be , which hath brought thee unto us, and be thy and thy mother. And there was joy among all his brethren which were at . 18And Achiacharus, and Nasbas his brother’s son, came: 19And ’ was kept seven days with great joy.
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.