they secured him with chains, and brought forfeited. Even the captives in Mesopotamia him to the king of Babylon." Nebuchad- and Chaldæa were looking forward to a speedy nezzar was then probably at Riblah, at return to their own land. These extravagant which place the Eastern conquerors appear to have usually held their court when in Syria. He bound the captive king "with fetters [intending] to carry him to Babylon" (2 Chron. xxxvi. 6); but took him first to Jerusalem, where he appears to have died before this intention could be executed; and the prophecies require us to conclude that his body was cast forth with indignity, and lay exposed to the elements and beasts of prey, which is what is intended by the burial of an ass.

The preceding invaders appear to have been contented with securing the person of Jehoiakim, and taking him to Nebuchadnezzar; for when they had departed with their royal captive, the people made his son JECONIAH (otherwise Jehoiachim and Coniah) king in the room of his father. He was then (B C. 597) eighteen years of age, and had barely time to manifest his bad disposition, when Nebuchadnezzar himself, who was displeased at this appointment, appeared before Jerusalem. It would seem that he was admitted without opposition, but Jeconiah was, nevertheless, held a close prisoner. The money which remained in the royal treasury, and the golden utensils of the temple, were collected and sent as spoil to Babylon; and the deposed king, and his whole court, seven thousand soldiers, one thousand artisans, and two thousand nobles and men of wealth, altogether, with wives and children, amounting probably to 40,000 persons, were sent away into captivity to the river Chebar (Chaboras) in Mesopotamia. Thus only the lower class of citizens and peasantry were left behind. The future prophet, Ezekiel, was among the captives; and Mattaniah, the remaining son of Josiah, and brother of Jehoiakim, was made king of the impoverished land by Nebuchadnezzar, who, according to the custom in such cases, changed his name to ZEDEKIAH, and bound him by strong and solemn oaths of allegiance.

expectations were strongly discouraged by
Jeremiah in Jerusalem, and by Ezekiel in
Mesopotamia; but their reproofs were not
heeded, nor their prophecies believed. Ac-
cordingly, Zedekiah, who seems not to have
been ill-disposed, otherwise than as influenced
by evil counsellors, was led openly to renounce
his allegiance, in the ninth year of his reign.
The temerity of this act would be astonishing
and unaccountable, were it not that, as usual,
the renunciation was attended by an alliance
with the king of Egypt, Pharaoh-Hophra
the Apries and Vaphres of profane authors

who indeed had acquired a prominence in this quarter which might make the preference of his alliance seem a comparatively safe speculation. Apries, in the early part of his reign, was a very prosperous king. He sent an expedition against the Isle of Cyprus; besieged and took Gaza (Jer. xlvii. 1) and the city of Sidon; engaged and vanquished the king of Tyre; and, being uniformly successful, he made himself master of Phoenicia, and part of Palestine; thus recovering much of that influence in Syria which had been taken from Egypt by the Assyrians and Babylonians.

From the result it is evident that, on receiving the news of this revolt of one who owed his throne to him, and whose fidelity to him had been pledged by the most solemn vows, Nebuchadnezzar resolved no longer to attempt to maintain the separate existence of Judah as a royal state, but to incorporate it absolutely, as a province, with his empire. An army was, with little delay, marched into Judæa, and laid inmediate siege to Jerusalem. Jeremiah continued to counsel the king to save the city and temple by unreserved submission to the Chaldæans, and abandonment of the Egyptian alliance; but his auditors, trusting that the Egyptians would march to the relief of the place, determined to protract the defence of the city to the utmost. The Egyptians did, in fact, march The Hebrews who remained in Judah con- to their assistance; but when Nebuchadtinued however to cherish dreams of inde- nezzar raised the siege of Jerusalem and pendence from the Chaldeans impossible advanced to meet them, they retreated before under the circumstances in which Western him into Egypt, without hazarding a battle. Asia was then placed, or possible only through The withdrawal of the Chaldæan forces such special interventions of Providence as from Jerusalem, with the confident exhad glorified their early history, but all pectation that they would be defeated by further claim to which they had long since the Egyptians, filled the inhabitants with the

Battering-ram and moving towers. (From Nineveh marbles)

province of Hamah. The Babylonian king upbraided Zedekiah for his ingratitude and breach of faith, and ordered a terrible punishment to be inflicted on him. To cut off all future hope of reigning in his race, he ordered his sons to be slain before his eyes; and then, to exclude him from all hope of ever again reigning in his own person, he

none were left but the poor of the land to be vine-dressers and husbandmen. This was about a month after the city was first taken.

Thus was the land made desolate, that "she might enjoy her sabbaths," or the arrearage of sabbatic years, of which she had been defrauded by the avarice and disobedience of the people. That these sabbatic years, being the celebration of every seventh year as a season of rest, even to the soil which then lay fallow, amounted to not less than seventy, shows how soon, and how long, that important and faith-testing institution had been neglected by the nation. The early predictions of Moses, and the later one of Jeremiah,† that the land should enjoy the rest of which it had been defrauded, is very remarkable, when we consider that, as exemplified in Israel, it was not the general policy of the conquerors to leave the conquered country in desolation, but to replenish it by foreign colonists, by whom it might be cultivated.

*

Nebuchadnezzar made Gedaliah, a Hebrew of distinction, governor of the poor remnant which was left in the land. Gedaliah was a well-disposed man, of a generous and unsuspecting nature, who was anxious to promote the well-being of the people by reconciling them to the Babylonian government. In this design he was assisted by Jeremiah, who had been released from prison when the city was taken, and was treated with much consideration by the Babylonian general, to whose care he had been recommended by Nebuchadnezzar himself. Nebuzaradan indeed offered to take him to Babylon and provide for him there; but the prophet chose rather to remain with his friend Gedaliah, who fixed his residence at Mizpeh beyond Jordan.

As soon as the Babylonian army had withdrawn, those nobles and warriors returned who had saved themselves by flight in the first instance. Among these was Ishmael, a prince of the royal family, who, jealous of the possession by Gedaliah of the government to which he considered that his birth gave him the best right, formed a conspiracy to take away his life. This was intimated to the governor, but he treated it as an infamous calumny upon Ishmael, which generous confidence was rewarded by his being

* Lev. xxvi. 34.

murdered, with all the Hebrews and Chaldæans at Mizpeh who were attached to him, by that bad man and his dependants. The vengeance of the Chaldæans was now to be dreaded, and therefore Ishmael and all his followers fled toward the country of the Ammonites (who had promoted the designs of Ishmael). They attempted to take with them the king's daughter and the residue of the people; but these were recovered by Johanan and other officers, who pursued them, so that Ishmael escaped with only eight men to the Ammonites. Johanan and the others were fearful of the effects of the resentment of the Chaldæans for the massacre of which Ishmael had been guilty. They therefore determined to take refuge in Egypt with all the people. This intention was earnestly opposed by Jeremiah, who, in the name of Jehovah, promised them peace and safety if they remained; but threatened death by pestilence, famine, and sword, if they went down to Egypt. They went, however, and compelled Jeremiah himself to go with them; and it is alleged by tradition that they put him to death in that country for the ominous prophecies he continued to utter there:

Nebuzaradan soon after arrived in the country with the view of avenging the murder of Gedaliah and the massacre of the Chaldæans who were with him; but the country was so thin of inhabitants, in consequence of the secession to Egypt, that he could find no more than seven hundred and forty-five persons in the land, whom he sent into captivity beyond the Euphrates. Thus signally was the long-predicted depopulation of the land completed; and although nomadic tribes wandered through the country, and the Edomites settled in some of its southern parts, yet the land remained, on the whole, uninhabited, and ready for the Hebrews, whose return had as much been the subject of prophecy as their captivity had been.

For the clearer apprehension of the facts which have been stated, it will be desirable to trace the further operations of the Babylonians in those quarters.

The year after the conquest of Judæa, Nebuchadnezzar resolved to take a severe revenge upon all the surrounding nations which had solicited the Judahites to a confederacy against him, or had encouraged

† 2 Chron. xxxvi. 21.

them to rebel, although they now, for the found but little spoil to reward their long most part, rejoiced in their destruction. toil and patience in the siege. This had These were the Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, Arabians, the Sidonians, Tyrians, and Philistines; nor did he forget the Egyptians, who had taken a foremost part in action or intrigue against him. This had been foretold by the prophets. It had been foretold that all these nations were to be subdued by Nebuchadnezzar, and were assigned to share with the Hebrews the bondage of seventy years to that power. Some of them were conquered sooner and some later; but the end of this period was the common term for the deliverance of them all from their bondage to Babylon.

After Nebuchadnezzar had subdued the eastern and western states in his first campaign, he commenced the siege of the strong city of old Tyre, on the continent, in the year B. C. 584, being two years after the destruction of Jerusalem. This siege occupied thirteen years, a fact which illustrates, perhaps, not so much the strength of the place as the vitality of a commercial state. This is, however, only to intimate that during this period the city was invested by a Chaldæan army; for many other important enterprises were undertaken and accomplished during the same period. It was during the siege that Nebuzaradan marched into Judæa to avenge the murder of Gedaliah and the Chaldæans, as was just related.

Before Tyre was taken, the inhabitants, having the command of the sea, fled with all their effects to the insular Tyre in its neighborhood; so that the Chaldæan army

been foretold by the prophet Ezekiel (Ezek. xxix. 18-20), but although Nebuchadnezzar and his army were to obtain "no wages for the great service they had served against Tyre," in the long course of which" every head was made bald and every shoulder peeled," yet as a compensation they were promised the plunder of "the land of Egypt, her multitude, her spoil, and her prey." Accordingly, in the spring of the year B. C. 570, after the war with Tyre was finished, Nebuchadnezzar invaded Egypt, and, from a concurrence of weakening circumstances in that country, was enabled to overrun the whole country from Migdol, its northern extremity, near the Red Sea, to Syene, the southern, bordering upon Ethiopia. This he also subdued, together with the other auxiliaries of the Egyptians. The reigning king was the same Pharaoh-Hophra, or Apries, who was on the throne at the time Jerusalem was besieged, and whose faint and abortive motion to relieve his allies has been recorded. This proud and haughty tyrant was reduced to vassalage; and so wasted and depopulated was the land by the invaders, that it lay comparatively desorate for forty years. The king was himself soon after defeated and captured by his discontented and revolted subjects, under Amasis, who was made king, and who was reluctantly compelled by the clamors of the soldiers to inflict death upon his predecessor. Amasis was confirmed in the throne by the Assyrian king.

them. That they were appointed to be promises and designs of God of no effect? "stewards of the mysteries of God," is the Nay, much otherwise; but rather tended to substance of the considerations stated there illustrate the more strongly his Almightiness, and enforced in subsequent passages. The history itself shows under what forms and obligations the stewardship was imposed, and how unfaithfully its duties were discharged; and we are come to the punishments which that unfaithfulness incurred.

And did that unfaithfulness render the

by the accomplishment of all his designs, in spite of, and even through, the reluctance, the improbity, and the treachery of the instruments he employed. They might have worked his high will with great happiness and honor to themselves; but since they did not choose this, they were compelled to work

that will even by their misery and dishonor. | notwithstanding their misdoings, is by no It was not in the power of the instruments means of difficult detection. Politically to frustrate the intentions of Jehovah; they considered, it may be resolved into what only had power to determine whether that has been in all ages and countries the leadwill should be accomplished with happiness ing cause of calamity and miscarriageor with misery to themselves, and, in conse- a reliance upon men and upon individual quence, somewhat to vary the mode in character, which at best is but temporary which those designs were exhibited and fulfilled.

The main cause of the personal and national failure of the Israelites, as instruments of a design which was accomplished

and fluctuating, rather than upon institutions which are permanent and unchanging. In these, every needful amelioration is an abiding good; whereas the existence of a good king, or judge, or priest, is at the most but "a