The Empires of the Bible from the Confusion of Tongues to the Babylonian Captivity

EMPIRE IN UNDISPUTED SWAY

Nimrod’s ambition was continued by others in that day, and has been continued even to the present hour. So full is this true that the history of this thing—the history of kingdoms by the ambition of rulers rising into empire, dominating the world for a little season, and falling before the rising of another of the same kind and to the same purpose—is largely the history of the world. But it was a task, it cost a mighty and long-continued struggle, for imperial power so to fix and establish itself as to reign in undisputed sway. Nimrod began it, and after him others continued it in the empires of Shinar, Chaldea, Elam, Karrak, Accad, Babel, early Assyria, Egypt, later Assyria, and Babylonia: it required the exercise of all the power of these dominions in succession to establish recognized imperial sway. It required the perpetual hammering of all these in succession so to subdue the native love and assertion of individual God-given freedom in mankind that it would last submit unresisting to imperial sway. Through all this period of history, from Nimrod to Nebuchadnezzar, not only was each monarch obliged to conquer for himself all the people who had been subjected to the empire before him, but in many instances each succeeding king to the throne of the established empire was obliged to conquer to himself the very people of the empire to which he had succeeded, and which his predecessor, often his own father, had conquered. And often beyond this, so strong was the love freedom and so persistent was the assertion of it, that as empire spread it became necessary, not only that each succeeding monarch should conquer anew to himself the very people who had been conquered by his own father, but he himself, to maintain his dominion, was compelled to conquer and reconquer annually the very same people during the whole of his reign. For instance, Shalmaneser II, 905-870 B. C., in his reign of thirty-five year made thirty-three military expeditions, twenty-nine of which he led in person, and many of which were made into the same countries and to conquer the same peoples whom he himself had conquered in the year or years before. And such was the experience of both his predecessors and his successors in the imperial power of Assyria. Yet they all persistently continued it for eight hundred years, reducing the peoples to the condition presented in the Bible in the Assyrian’s own boast, that he was enabled to gather the riches of the peoples as one gathereth eggs form under sitting hen, when she is so subdued that she neither “moved the wing nor opened the mouth nor peeped.” ²⁴ And so it continued until the empire of Assyria itself was finally broken down by a concerted revolt and Babylon, Egypt, and Media. EB xviii.1

But no sooner was the Assyrian empire dissipated by these three powers, than the king of Babylon indulged the same old imperial ambition, and began the invasion of the peoples and nations to subdue them unto himself. In this he was fully succeeded by his son Nebuchadnezzar, “the terrible of the nations.” ²⁵ And the conquests made by this “terrible of the nations.” were indeed so terrible, after this so long and so severe pressure that had been put upon them by Assyria, that at last they were so worn by the perpetual hammering, which was now heavier than all in the strokes of this “hammer of the whole earth,” ²⁶ that they yielded. They practically accepted the situation as one which could not be escaped, and sat down in sullen submission to one single word-power. EB xviii.2