relentless tyrant. His vices brought their own punishment in the contemptible weakness to which the state was reduced. When the army of Esarhaddon, the new sovereign of Assyria, made its appearance under the walls, Jerusalem offered no resistance, and the unworthy heir of David and Solomon was led away to learn wisdom and piety in the dungeons of Babylon. Esarhaddon completed the plan of colonization commenced by his predecessors, and established bodies of his own subjects in the desolated provinces of Israel. So frightful had been the ravages inflicted on these beautiful and luxuriant plains, that the new colonists found themselves in danger from beasts of prey. The strangers had brought their own religious rites with them. The Babylonians had set up the pavilions of Benoth the Cuthites, the settlers from Hamath, the Avites, and the Sepharvites, had each their separate divinity. They trembled before the lions, which infested their territory; and looked on them not only with terror, but with religious awe, as manifest instruments of divine wrath. The remaining Israelites, no doubt, proclaimed that they were sent by their God; and the strangers, in the true spirit of polytheism, recognized the anger of the local deity, whom they supposed offended by the intrusion of their national gods into his territory. They appealed in haste to Esarhaddon, by whose command an Israelitish priest was sent to propitiate the God of the land, whom they readily admitted to a participation in divine honours with their native deities; and thus a mingled worship of idolatry and true religion grew up in these provinces.

The lessons of adversity were not lost on Ma nasseh he was restored to his throne, and the end of his long reign of fifty-five years, past in the observance of law and religion, in some degree compensated for the vices of his youth. His son

Amon, who succeeded, following the early career of his father, fell a victim to a conspiracy among his own officers.

At the age of eight years (B. C. 640) Josiah came to the throne. The memory of this prince is as deservedly dear to the Jews, as that of Manasseh is hateful. Josiah surpassed even his most religious predecessors, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Azariah, or Hezekiah, in zeal for the reformation of the national religion. His first care was to repair the temple. While the work was proceeding, the king and the whole nation heard with the highest exultation, that Hilkiah, the high priest, had discovered the original copy of the law.

But so

little were its real contents known, that, on its first reading, the king was struck with terror at its awful denunciations. The book was read in public; Josiah and all the nation renewed the solemn covenant with their God. The king proceeded to carry into execution the divine precepts of the Law. He began by the total extirpation of idolatry, not merely in Judæa, but throughout all the holy land. The vessels of the temple, which had been abused to unhallowed uses, were burned to ashes; all the high places levelled the worship of the host of heaven suppressed-the filthy and sanguinary rites of the Sodomites and worshippers of Moloch forbidden-the sacred places defiled. The horses dedicated to the sun-the altars which

Ahaz had built on the top of the royal palace-the high places which Solomon had consecrated to the deities of his foreign wives-the altar raised by Jeroboam at Bethel-were not merely destroyed, but defiled with that from which Jewish feelings revolted with horror, as the foulest contamination, the ashes and the bones of dead men. The authority of Josiah was acknowledged, and his orders fulfilled to the most remote part of Palestine; an apparent proof that, notwithstanding the numbers that had been carried away into the foreign colonies, the ten tribes were not so entirely exterminated, but that their descendants, at least of the lower orders, were still the predominant population of the country. Josiah completed his reform by the celebration of the great national festival, the passover, on a scale of grandeur and magnificence unknown to the later ages of the Jewish kingdom. Yet the virtues of Josiah delayed only for a time the fate of Jerusalem. The hopes of reuniting the dominions of David and Solomon into one powerful kingdom, animated with lofty religious zeal, and flourishing under the wise and beneficent constitution of Moses, were cut short, so Divine Providence ordained, by the unfavourable circumstances of the times, and the death of the wise and virtuous king. A monarch of great power and abilities, Necho, was now the Pharaoh of Egypt. He determined to act on the offensive against the rival empire of Assyria, at this time, probably, weakened by internal dissensions among the different kingdoms of which it was composed. His design was to gain possession of Carchemish, a city which commanded the passage of the Euphrates, and make that river his frontier.

Josiah was bound to the Assyrian interest by the terms of his vassalage, by treaty, by gratitude for the permission to extend his sovereignty over Samaria. From one, or all of these motives, or from a desire of maintaining his own independence, instead of allowing free passage to the army of Necho, he determined on resistance. A battle took place, in which Josiah was unfortunately shot by an arrow. On the scene of the battle it is difficult to decide. The sacred writers place it at Megiddo, in the district of Manasseh, to reach which the Egyptian army must have passed through the whole of Judæa, and almost under the walls of Jerusalem. Herodotus, with greater local probability, fixes the scene of action at Magdolum, on the frontier of Egypt-Josephus at Mendes. The Jewish copyists may have substituted the more familiar name, Megiddo, for the remote Magdolum.

At this period of the approaching dissolution of the Jewish state, appeared the prophet Jeremiah, a poet, from his exquisitely pathetic powers, admirably calculated to perform the funeral obsequies, over the last of her kings, over the captive people, the desolate city, the ruined temple. The prophet himself, in the eventful course of his melancholy and persecuted life, learnt that personal familiarity with affliction, which added new energy to his lamentations over his country and his religion. To our great loss his elegy on the death of Josiah, in which the nation joined with heartfelt anguish, is not now extant among his prophecies. Necho, after his victory over the Assyrians and the capture of Carchemish, took possession of Jerusalem, where, by a hasty choice, Jehoahaz, a younger son

of Josiah, had been raised to the throne. The capture of the city under the name of Hadutis (the holy city) is related by Herodotus. In the celebrated royal tomb, discovered by Belzoni, in the valley of Beban el Malook, near Thebes, the name of Necho has been distinctly decyphered. A painting, on the same walls, exhibited a procession of captives, some of whom, from their physiognomy and complexion, were clearly distinguished as Jews. The conqueror deposed and imprisoned Jehoahaz, after a reign of three months; exacted a heavy fine from the kingdom, and placed Eliakim (Jehoiakim) on the throne. From this period the kingdom of Judea fell into a state of alternate vassalage to the two conflicting powers of Egypt and Assyria. The shadows of kings, who were raised to the throne, were dismissed at the breath of their liege lord. It is a deplorable period of misrule and imbecility. Without ability to defend them, these unhappy kings had only the power of entailing all the miseries of siege and conquest on their people, by rebellions which had none of the dignity, while they had all the melancholy consequences of a desperate struggle for independence.

In the fourth year of Jehoiakim, (B. C. 603,) the mightiest monarch who had wielded the Assyrian power, Nebuchadnezzar, was associated in the empire with his father, and assumed the command of the armies of Nineveh. The prophetic eye of Jeremiah foresaw the approaching tempest, and endeavoured to avert it by the only means which remained in the impoverished and enfeebled state of the kingdom, timely submission. Long had he struggled, but in vain, to restore the strength of