Assyria

Assyria was one of the great empires of the ancient Near East, centred on the upper Tigris valley in what is now northern Iraq. Its name derives from its first capital, Asshur, and Scripture traces its origins to the dispersion after Babel, when “from that land he went into Assyria and built Nineveh” (Genesis 10:11-12); Asshur descends from Shem (Genesis 10:22). From the ninth century BC it rose to dominate the region under warlike kings — Tiglath-pileser III, Shalmaneser V, Sargon II, Sennacherib, and Esarhaddon — ruling by terror, tribute, and the mass deportation of conquered peoples.

Assyria fell heavily upon the divided kingdom of Israel. Tiglath-pileser carried off the Transjordan tribes and Galilee (2 Kings 15:29), and after Hoshea’s revolt the Assyrians besieged Samaria and destroyed the northern kingdom in 722 BC, deporting its people — the scattering known as the exile of the ten tribes — and resettling the land with foreign peoples (2 Kings 17:5-6; 2 Kings 17:23-24).

Judah too felt Assyria’s power. In 701 BC Sennacherib invaded, captured the fortified cities, and besieged Lachish, then sent the Rabshakeh to taunt Jerusalem and blaspheme the LORD (2 Kings 18:13; Isaiah 36:1-20). King Hezekiah spread the threatening letter before the LORD and prayed; Isaiah declared that the proud Assyrian was merely the rod of God’s anger, who would not enter the city (Isaiah 10:5-15; Isaiah 37:33-35). That night the angel of the LORD struck the Assyrian camp, and Sennacherib withdrew, later murdered by his own sons (2 Kings 19:35-37).

The prophets also turned to Assyria’s great city Nineveh. Jonah was sent to preach there, and the city repented and was spared in his day (Jonah 3:5-10); but Nahum and Zephaniah later announced its doom for its cruelty and pride (Nahum 3:1-7; Zephaniah 2:13), fulfilled when Nineveh fell to the Babylonians and Medes in 612 BC. Assyria stands in Scripture as a sobering display of God’s sovereignty over the nations — using even a brutal empire as an instrument of judgment, yet holding it accountable and casting it down in its turn.

Yet Assyria does not vanish from the promise. Isaiah’s vision reaches beyond judgment to a day when “Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth”, the LORD calling Assyria “the work of my hands” (Isaiah 19:24–25). Nineveh’s repentance at Jonah’s preaching becomes, on the lips of Jesus, a witness against his own generation: “The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here” (Matthew 12:41). So the empire that embodied the pride of the nations becomes also a sign that the gospel gathers even Israel’s old oppressors into the worship of the one true God.