ashshur

One Hebrew name does the work of several English ones. It can point to the country itself, the ground a river runs past and the place Israelites were marched off to. It can point to the state, above all in the standing title "the king of Assyria," which accounts for well over half of all its appearances and carries the story from 2 Kings 15 through 2 Kings 20 and its retellings in 2 Chronicles and Isaiah. And it can point to the nation as a single character in the story, one who marches, boasts, falls, and is judged.

The prophets add a further shade. For Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, Assyria is less a country than a temptation: the strong neighbor Israel and Judah keep running to for protection instead of trusting God, almost always named in the same breath as Egypt (מִצְרַיִם). Hosea pictures the trip north as a stray donkey wandering off to hire lovers, and Ezekiel makes the Assyrians the handsome men Jerusalem's sister lusted after.

Two further uses sit at the edges. In the list of nations in Genesis 10 the word is a man's name, Asshur, one of Shem's sons, which is why some English Bibles keep the older spelling in that one verse. And Assyria's oldest capital city bore the same name as the country, which is part of why Genesis 10:11 and Ezekiel 27:23 are read in more than one way. Its most famous city, Nineveh (נִינְוֵה), gets a name of its own.

In the list of nations in Genesis 10, and in the genealogy that repeats it in 1 Chronicles, this is a man's name: Asshur, set among the sons of Shem beside Elam, Arpachshad, Lud, and Aram. That chapter works by naming an ancestor and letting the people descended from him carry the name forward, so the man and the country are told as one story.

English Bibles usually keep the spelling "Asshur" in these two verses and switch to "Assyria" everywhere else. In Hebrew it is the same name both times, and the reader who notices the two spellings has spotted a decision made by translators, not a difference in the text.