King James Version · Under Assyria
Tobit 3
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1Then I being grieved did weep, and in my sorrow , saying, 2O , thou art , and all thy works and all thy ways are , and thou judgest truly and justly for ever. 3Remember me, and look on me, punish me not for my and ignorances, and the of my fathers, who have before thee: 4For they not thy : wherefore thou hast us for a spoil, and unto , and unto , and for a of to all the nations among whom we are dispersed. 5And now thy judgments are many and true: deal with me according to my and my fathers’: because we have not kept thy , neither have walked in truth before thee. 6Now therefore deal with me as seemeth best unto thee, and command to be taken from me, that I may be dissolved, and become earth: for it is profitable for me to rather than to live, because I have heard false reproaches, and have much sorrow: command therefore that I may now be out of this distress, and go into the place: turn not thy away from me. 7It came to pass the same day, that in a city of , the daughter of was also reproached by her ’s maids; 8Because that she had been married to seven husbands, whom Asmodeus the had killed, before they had lain with her. Dost thou not know, said they, that thou hast strangled thine husbands? thou hast had already seven husbands, neither wast thou named after any of them. 9Wherefore dost thou beat us for them? if they be , go thy ways after them, let us never see of thee either son or daughter. 10When she heard these things, she was very sorrowful, so that she thought to have strangled herself; and she said, I am the only daughter of , and if I do this, it shall be a unto him, and I shall bring his old age with sorrow unto the . 11Then she toward the window, and said, art thou, O my , and thine and name is and honourable for ever: let all thy works thee for ever. 12And now, O , I set mine eyes and toward thee, 13And say, Take me out of the earth, that I may hear no more the . 14Thou knowest, , that I am pure from all with man, 15And that I never polluted my name, nor the name of , in the land of my : I am the only daughter of , neither hath he any child to be his , neither any , nor any son of his alive, to whom I may keep myself for a wife: my seven husbands are already ; and why should I live? but if it please not thee that I should , command some regard to be had of me, and taken of me, that I hear no more . 16So the prayers of them both were heard before the majesty of the great . 17And was sent to heal them both, that is, to scale away the whiteness of ’s eyes, and to give the daughter of for a wife to the son of ; and to bind Asmodeus the ; because she belonged to by right of . The selfsame time came home, and entered into his house, and the daughter of came down from her upper chamber.
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.