Assyria and the Bible
As some of y’all might know, I’m teaching Western Civilization 1 next semester. In an effort to avoid spending five straight weeks doing nothing but preparing for class (basically what I spent all of January and half of February doing), I’ve been preparing lectures on weekends, hoping to be (mostly) done by the time Fall Semester 2011 starts.
I got to the Assyrians today. Those were not nice people. Like Ashurnasirpal II (883 – 859 BC), who in his official inscriptions boasted:
“I put up a pillar the city gate, and I skinned the chiefs who revolted against me, and covered the pillar with their skins. I walled up others in the middle of the pillar itself, and some of them I impaled on stakes and arranged them around the pillar. Inside the city, I skinned many more and covered the walls with their skins. As for the royal officials, I cut off their genitals…”
Dude! And this was his official propaganda. Imagine if he had made campaign commericals:
Vote Ashurnasirpal II. He’ll flay our enemies and make a pillar from their corpses! Paid for by Citizens For More Flaying In Government.
What’s interesting is that for a long time Assyria was considered mythical, or at best, only vaguely historical, like King Arthur and the Round Table. So all the bits in the Bible about Assyria were myths developed by the ancient Israelites to spice up their history. Then in the 19th and early 20th centuries a bunch of British and French guys went to Iraq to dig and found all these ancient cities buried in the sand, forgotten for thousands of years. They found the palaces of these Assyrian kings from the Bible, Sennacherib and Shalmaneser V and Tiglath-Pileser III, these huge ruined palaces filled with statues and inscriptions glorifying these kings and their cruelty, exactly as they were described in the books of Kings and Chronicles.
So the Bible, whatever one might think about it theologically, is an excellent source for Assyrian history, especially since the ancient Israelites were often at the business end of the Assyrian war machine. So they would have a bit of a different perspective on the whole “pillars of corpses” thing. Like this description of the Assyrian capital of Nineveh from the book of Nahum:
“Woe to the city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims! The crack of whips, the clatter of wheels, galloping horses and jolting chariots! Charging cavalry, flashing swords and glittering spears! Many casualties, piles of dead, bodies without number, people stumbling over the corpses – all because of the want lust of a harlot, alluring, the mistress of sorceries, who enslaved nations by her prostitution, and peoples by her witchcraft.”
Of course, the book of Nahum is a prophecy predicting the downfall of Assyria. It ends like this:
“O king of Assyria, your shepherds slumber, your nobles lie down to rest. Your people are scattered on the mountains with no one to gather them. Nothing can heal your wound; your injury is fatal. Everyone who hears the news about you claps his hands at your fall, for who has not felt your endless cruelty?”
How’s that for an epitaph?
-JM