ancient historical texts and provided a scientific basis for discussing the fate of
the lost tribes, presented Nineveh as the place from which the captives were
“distributed” to other locations following their initial deportation.^52
While the geographical settings in Jonah reflect the scope of the empire,
Isaiah echoes the power of its propaganda. Isaiah, an enthusiastic and at times
uncritical consumer of Assyrian propaganda, refers to an idealized army drawn
directly from the self-promoting image of the Assyrians. Of its soldiers, “none
shall slumber nor sleep; neither shall the girdle of their loins be loosed, nor the
latchet of their shoes be broken” ( 5 : 27 ).^53 Isaiah’s words reflect the impact of the
“terrifying mask [that Assyria] deliberately turned towards the outside
world.”^54 No wonder, then, that Isaiah has God declare: “O Assyria, the rod
of mine anger... the staff in their hand is mine indignation” (Isaiah 10 : 5 ).
Isaiah describes the Assyrians as coming from the edges of the earth, with
an army like a knife: “He [God] will hiss unto them from the end of the earth
[mi-ketse ha-Aretz]: and, behold, they shall come with speed swiftly” ( 5 : 26 ). “In
the same day shall the Lord shave with a razor that is hired, namely, by them
beyond the river, by the king of Assyria, the head, and the hair of the feet: and it
shall also consume the beard” (Isaiah 7 : 18 – 20 ). The image of the army as a
razor echoes Bradley Parker’s finding that “the Assyrian military traveled in [a]
straight line from one destination [to] the next,”^55 and conjures up a vocabulary
of demarcation and redistribution. In Isaiah’s prophecy, the Assyrian army is in
God’s service, cutting out the contours of anoikoumenethat stretched from the
Persian Gulf (“Assyria”) to Egypt. At these extreme points lay the edges of the
earth. The phrase “edges of the earth” recurs throughout Isaiah’s prophecies.^56
Parker has shown that the borders of Assyria proper were heavily garrisoned
and guarded, and this was well known to Assyria’s neighbors.^57 Words denot-
ing boundary (missru) or territory/domain (tahu ̄mu,of similar root as the
Hebrew wordtehum,means “pale,” “domain,” or “boundary”) appear more
than 300 times in Assyrian sources. Phrases referring to the “violation” of
this territory occur at least 15 times.^58 These border garrisons may be the
literal edges of the earth from which, in Isaiah’s text, God will summon his
avenging army.
Characteristic of a number of imperial boundaries, the border was not “a
stark line, [but] instead a porous zone or continuum, often a hundred kilo-
meters deep.” It was strongly felt both in concrete and representational terms
across a large swath of land, a further factor in the adoption of Assyrian notions
of space and geography by a number of its neighbors and even its enemies.
Isaiah’s “ends of the earth” and “four corners of the earth” aren’t a mere
mimicking of Assyrian phraseology. They reflect what Mark Hamilton has
called the “bidirectional and interactive” quality of Assyrian communication.^59
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