444 Transactions. — Miscellaneous . 



killed so many that the rest had to return to the high healthy 

 table-land of Moab to save their lives. This is the simple 

 account given in an Egyptian inscription deciphered about 

 twenty years ago. With our modern knowledge we can tell 

 exactly what occurred. The natural home of the plague, 

 from which it is never absent, and from which it always starts 

 on its devastating rounds, is the swampy region along the 

 lower Tigris and Euphrates. A contingent from the locality, 

 no doubt, carried the disease to Lachish, but at first it 

 attracted no special notice. When, however, it found itself 

 in so congenial a region as the swampy delta of the Nile it 

 spread with great rapidity, and compelled the raising of the 

 siege. The plague is always very fatal in Egypt. Lowe, in 

 his work on that country, says that in 1837 it carried off in 

 a few weeks, in Cairo, a number of people greater than the 

 whole male population of the city, so we can quite understand 

 how Sennacherib's army suffered. 



Herodotus, however — who is generally supposed to have 

 written about 2,300 years ago, but whose book, in the form in 

 which we have it, is certainly not of much earlier date than 

 100 b.c. — attnbutes the disaster to rats, vast swarms of which, 

 he says, invaded the Assyrian camps and rendered the troops 

 powerless by devouring their bowstrings and the leathern 

 handles of their shields. His account, like the Egyptian one, 

 attributes the disaster to the intervention of the Egyptian 

 gods ; and he adds that the rat was thenceforth regarded as a 

 sacred animal in Egypt. The disaster is also mentioned in 

 the Bible, though, of course, in a distorted and exaggerated 

 manner, as if it had, occurred when Sennacherib was besieging 

 Jerusalem, which was not the case. Indirectly, however, it 

 no doubt did affect the Jews. Hezekiah was clearly a partisan 

 of Egypt, and it is quite intelligible that when Sennacherib 

 broke up his camp at Lachish and advanced into Egypt he 

 left a small force behind him to hold the Jews in check and 

 keep them from interrupting his communications, and that 

 when the main army had to retire this force was also with- 

 drawn, and so the Jews were relieved from the anxiety which 

 its presence had caused them. 



The Assyrian account, found in Sennacherib's palace at 

 Nineveh, and now in the British Museum, says nothing about 

 the pestilence, and attributes the return of the army to l-ebel- 

 lious risings at home ; in fact, it mixes up this affair with the 

 previous war, in which Hezekiah is said to have joined with 

 other neighbouring kings in rebelling against Sennacherib, 

 and to have been punished by being deprived of a number of 

 towns and compelled to hand over to Sennacherib not only a 

 large amount of money and valuables, but also his wives, his 

 concubines, and his singing-men and singing- women. In fact, 



