62. B.C. 698 to 588

B.C. 698 to 588

Chapter VIII

Timeline View:

1. Manasseh, the son of Hezekiah, was but twelve years old when his is father died. Wicked counsellors corrupted his youth. They imbued his mind with the worst principles of religion and government, and brought him up in a settled dislike to the wholesome reformations of his father, which he seemed to have made it the business of his life to subvert. Whatever God declared to be most repugnant to him—whatever good men the most abhor—were the very objects of his depraved choice and appetite. He not only built altars for all the heavenly bodies, but set up an idol in the very sanctuary of God, which no one had hitherto dared to profane; he devoted his children to Moloch, by making them pass through the fire in the valley of Hinnom; and the people, depraved by his example, became in all respects far worse than the Canaanites, who had been rooted out to make room for them. The righteous few, who still remained faithful to the truth, were grievously persecuted; and injustice and crime were at this time so rampant, that innocent blood flowed abundantly in Jerusalem. Even the prophets, whom God sent to warn the apostate king, were not spared; and it is believed that the great prophet Isaiah was by his order sawn asunder.

2. The threatened doom was at length inflicted. By the twenty-second year of his reign, Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, had repaired the losses which the death of Sennacherib had occasioned. Having invaded Palestine, be removed the remnant which lingered upon the mountains of Israel, and dispatched his generals against Jerusalem. The city was taken and Manasseh was sent in chains to Babylon, which the Assyrians had recovered, where he was thrown into a dungeon. There he had leisure for thought; and the remembrance of what he had been, of what he had lost, and how he had lost it, filled him with poignant sorrow. At length his heart was softened; be wept, and turned repentingly to the Lord, from whom he had revolted. God heard the moaning of the prisoner, and had pity upon him, and forgave him, and inclined the heart of the successor of Esarhaddon to restore him to his kingdom. The remainder of his reign was good, and he found ample employment in undoing all that be had before clone. His reign of fifty-five years was the longest which occurred in either Judah or Israel.

3. Amon, his son, succeeded at the age of twenty-two years. But although brought up in the best days of his father, he followed the example of the worst. He was slain in a conspiracy by his own servants, after a short reign of two years.

4. Josiah was only eight years old when the people, after having punished the murderers of his father, made him king. His guardianship devolved upon the high-priest, who bestowed upon him an education worthy of a king. Josiah began very early to manifest the good dispositions and excellent character which distinguished his reign. As early as the age of twelve he interested himself in seeing Jerusalem purged of the idolatries which his father had in his short reign introduced. Afterwards he conducted this expurgation in person, not only in his own dominions, but throughout the territories which had belonged to Ephraim, Manasseh, Zebulun, and Naphtali. On this occasion he executed the sentence against the altar at Bethel, denounced to the first Jeroboam 350 years before, when Josiah had been appointed to this work by name.

5. In the eighteenth year of his reign, the Temple was put in complete order and repair. In the course of these labors, the original book of the law, as written by the hand of Moses and deposited beside the ark, was discovered by Hilkiah the high-priest. From this venerable copy the prophesies of Moses, foretelling the desolation of the land and the ruin of the Temple, were read to the king. With intense concern Josiah rent his clothes, and sent to the prophetess Huldah to ask how these things were to be understood. She confirmed the denunciation, and said that the threatened evils were near at hand; but she added that the good king himself should be removed from this world before they came. The same year the king celebrated a great passover, such as had not been in any former reign. In short, no king surpassed, or perhaps equaled, Josiah in well-directed zeal for the Lord, and in efforts to extirpate idolatry and restore the true religion.

6. In the year 606 b.c., Nineveh was besieged by the Medes and Babylonians, who had revolted from Assyria. Taking advantage of these affairs, the king of Egypt marched an army to possess himself of Carchemish, an important pass of the Euphrates. He marched through Palestine. But Josiah, as a tributary to the Assyrians, felt himself bound to oppose his passage. He was defeated, and mortally wounded in a battle at Megiddo, and soon after died at Jerusalem, sincerely lamented by all his people, and bewailed by the prophet Jeremiah. He left three sons, Eliakim, Jehoahaz or Shallum, and Zedekiah.

7. Jehoahaz or Shallum, the second of these sons, was elected king by the people. We know not the cause of this preference, which was very little justified by his conduct during the three months of his reign, in which he manifested a disposition to imitate the worst of his predecessors. At the end of the three months, Necho returned triumphant from the Euphrates, and came to Jerusalem to reap the fruits of his victory at Megiddo. He laid on the city a heavy tribute, and deposed Jehoahaz, and carried him away captive into Egypt, where he died. Necho bestowed the crown on Josiah’s eldest son, Eliakim, whose name he changed to Jehoiakim, in token of subjection.

8. Jehoiakim was twenty-five years old when he ascended the throne as the vassal of Egypt. He trod in the steps of his idolatrous predecessors, and the people imitated his example. The Babylonians wished to succeed to the western empire of the Assyrians, and not to destroy it. Nabopolassar, the king of Babylon, while besieging Nineveh, beheld, therefore, with displeasure the disturbances west of the Euphrates, and sent his son Nebuchadnezzar to reduce the provinces to obedience. In this he succeeded, and Jehoiakim, among the rest, became his vassal, and continued such for three years. During this time Nineveh was taken, and Nabopolassar, dying soon after, was succeeded by his son Nebuchadnezzar. While the attention of the new monarch was otherwise engaged, Jehoiakim had the temerity to revolt from him. To this be was probably incited by the king of Egypt, who undertook a second expedition against Carchemish, which Nebuchadnezzar had recovered. He was defeated by the Babylonian, and stripped of all his possessions between the Euphrates and the Nile. Nebuchadnezzar then. besieged and took Jerusalem; and among other spoil, carried away a portion of the sacred vessels of the Temple, which he lodged in the temple of Belus at Babylon. Certain of the royal family and of the nobles were also taken away as hostages for the fidelity of the king and people. Among these were the prophet Daniel and his companions. Upon the whole, Nebuchadnezzar behaved more leniently than might have been expected, owing, probably, to a desire of maintaining Judah, if possible, as a frontier state between himself and Egypt. He did not even depose Jehoiakim, who, uncorrected by adversity, proved the same remorseless tyrant, regardless of God and man. It does not appear that he again revolted, but after some years his conduct appeared so displeasing to the king of Babylon, who was then in the north of Syria, that he sent a number of local auxiliaries against him. They took him prisoner and carried him to Nebuchadnezzar, who put him in fetters, and designed to take him to Babylon. But he first proceeded with him to Jerusalem, where he died.

9. On Nebuchadnezzar’s arrival at Jerusalem, he was little pleased to find that, without consulting him, the people had in the meantime raised to the throne Jehoiachin (or Jeconiah or Coniah), the son of Jehoiakim. This prince, in the brief interval of three months, had found time to evince the most depraved dispositions. He surrendered to Nebuchadnezzar, and was taken to Babylon, where he spent the rest of his days. Nebuchadnezzar made Zedekiah, the third son of Josiah, king; but left him a much impoverished kingdom. All the portable wealth that could be found in the palace or the Temple, was seized and sent off to Babylon: and, along with the deposed king, were taken away all the persons of rote, and all the skilful craftsmen of the kingdom.

10. In appointing Zedekiah to the throne, Nebuchadnezzar exacted from him a very solemn oath of allegiance. Accordingly, when in the fourth year of his reign, the kings of Edom, Moab, Ammon, and Tyre, invited him to join them in a confederacy to shake off the Babylonian yoke, he would not listen to their proposals. But Zedekiah set an example of iniquity to his people, which they willingly followed. They were rapidly ripening for the destruction which had been so long foretold; and which was brought about by means of the revolt of Zedekiah from the king of Babylon, in the ninth year of his reign. This step was taken in reliance upon Pharaoh Hophra, king of Egypt, in spite of the earnest remonstrances of Jeremiah, who repeatedly and in the face of cruel treatment, warned both the king and people, that their only hope of safety and quiet lay in their adhesion to Nebuchadnezzar.

11. In consequence of this revolt, the Babylonian king Judea with a great army, and, after taking most of the principal towns, sat down before Jerusalem. Early in the next year the Egyptians marched an army to the relief of their ally; but being intimidated by the alacrity with which the Babylonians raised the siege and advanced to give them battle, they returned home without risking an engagement. The return of the Chaldeans to the siege, destroyed all the hopes which the approach of the Egyptian succors had excited. The siege was now prosecuted with redoubled vigor; and at length Jerusalem was taken by storm at midnight, in the eleventh year of Zedekiah, and in the eighteenth month from the commencement of the siege. Dreadful was the carnage. The people, young and old, were slaughtered wherever they appeared; and even the temple was no refuge for them: the sacred courts streamed with blood. Zedekiah himself, with his family and some friends, contrived to escape from the city; but he was overtaken and captured in the plains of Jericho. He was sent in chains to Nebuchadnezzar, who had left the conclusion of the war to his generals, and was then at Riblah in Syria. After sternly reproving him for his ungrateful conduct, the conqueror ordered all the sons of Zedekiah to be slain before his eyes, and then his own eyes to be put out, thus making the slaughter of his children the last sight on which his tortured memory could dwell. He was afterwards sent in fetters of brass to Babylon, where he remained until his death.

12. Nebuchadnezzar appears to have felt that his purposes had not been fully executed by the army, or else he was urged by the Edomites and others to exceed his first intentions. He therefore sent Nebuzaradan, the captain of the guard, with a sufficient force, to complete the desolation of Judah and Jerusalem. He burned the city and the temple to the ground; he collected and sent to Babylon all the gold and silver which former spoilers had left; and he transported all the people who had been left behind in Jehoiachin’s captivity, save only the poor of the land, who were left to be vine-dressers and husbandmen. Four years after, Nebuzaradan again entered Judaea, and gleaned a few more of the miserable inhabitants, whom he sent off to Babylon.

13. Thus was the land left desolate; and thus ended the kingdom of Judah and the reign of David’s house, after it had endured 404 years, under twenty kings. It is remarkable that the king of Babylon made no attempt to colonize the country he had depopulated, as was done by the Assyrians in Israel; and thus, in the providence of God, the land was left vacant, to be re-occupied by the Jews after seventy years of captivity and punishment.

14. Sacred Writers—Zephaniah prophesied in the early part of Josiah’s reign; and his reprehension of the existing abuses would appear to have roused that excellent prince to undertake those reformations which honored his reign—About the middle of that reign Jeremiah began to prophesy, and he lived through the succeeding reigns to see the fulfillment of his own predictions of the captivity of Judah. He was a priest of Anathoth, a place about three miles north of Jerusalem. After the death of Josiah, he met with great opposition from the kings and courtiers, by which his spirit was much afflicted. After the destruction of Jerusalem, he went, reluctantly, to Egypt, with a remnant of the Jews. What afterwards happened to him is not known with certainty; but it is said that his countrymen in Egypt were so offended by his faithful remonstrances, that they stoned him to death. The prophesies and “lamentations” of Jeremiah, indicate a man deeply conscious of the evil clays on which he had fallen, and over which he mourned intensely—Habakkuk, who delivered his short prophesy in the reign of Jehoiakim, declared, with much sublimity of style and grandeur of imagery, the approaching calamities of the nation, and pointed out the consolations which the faithful might still claim—Ezekiel was of the sacerdotal race, and was one of the captives whom Nebuchadnezzar carried into Babylonia, along with king Jehoiachin. There, by the river Chebar, which falls into the Euphrates, he had visions of God, and delivered prophesies confirmatory of those which Jeremiah at the same time delivered in Judea—The short prophesy of Obadiah is almost wholly directed against the Edomites, and is supposed to have been delivered in the very few years which elapsed between the destruction of Jerusalem and the desolation of Edom by Nebuchadnezzar.