King James Version · Under Assyria
Tobit 12
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is.
1Then called his son , and said unto him, My son, see that the man have his wages, which went with thee, and thou must give him more. 2And said unto him, O , it is no harm to me to give him half of those things which I have brought: 3For he hath brought me again to thee in safety, and made whole my wife, and brought me the money, and likewise healed thee. 4Then the old man said, It is due unto him. 5So he called , and he said unto him, Take half of all that ye have brought and go away in safety. 6Then he took them both apart, and said unto them, , him, and magnify him, and him for the things which he hath done unto you in the sight of all that live. It is good to , and exalt his name, and honourably to shew forth the works of ; therefore be not slack to him. 7It is good to keep close the secret of a king, but it is honourable to the works of . Do that which is good, and no evil shall touch you. 8 is good with and alms and . A little with is better than much with unrighteousness. It is better to give alms than to lay up gold: 9For alms doth from , and shall purge away all . Those that exercise alms and shall be filled with life: 10But they that are to their own life. 11Surely I will keep close nothing from you. For I said, It was good to keep close the secret of a king, but that it was honourable to the works of . 12Now therefore, when thou didst , and thy daughter in law, I did bring the remembrance of your prayers before the One: and when thou didst bury , I was with thee likewise. 13And when thou didst not delay to rise up, and leave thy dinner, to go and cover , thy good deed was not hid from me: but I was with thee. 14And now hath sent me to heal thee and thy daughter in law. 15I am , one of the seven , which present the prayers of , and which go in and out before the of the One. 16Then they were both troubled, and fell upon their faces: for they feared. 17But he said unto them, Fear not, for it shall go well with you; therefore. 18For not of any of mine, but by the will of our I came; wherefore him for ever. 19All these days I did appear unto you; but I did neither eat nor drink, but ye did see a . 20Now therefore give thanks: for I go up to him that sent me; but write all things which are done in a book. 21And when they arose, they saw him no more. 22Then they the great and wonderful works of , and how had appeared unto them.
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.