drew down upon the land the severe vengeance of Nebuchad- 

 nezzar, '' the servant " (Jer. xxv. 9 ; xxvii. 6; xliii. 10), chosen 

 by the Lord to punish the rebellious people. 



It has been necessary to trace briefly the events which led. 

 to the fall of the northern kingdom in order to show that 

 the causes which brought about the fall of the southern 

 kingdom were not new ones, but only the outcome of old 

 rivalry between Egypt and the dominant state of the Tigro- 

 Euphrates valley. 



The fall of Samaria was contemporaneous with the founda- 

 tion of the Sargonide dynasty, the most glorious of all the 

 houses of Assur. This dynasty lasted a little less than a 

 century (B.C. 721 to B.C. 625), and. was, indeed, the ^^ golden 

 age of Assyria.^' The wars of Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal 

 had crushed the power of Egypt. And Elam, a dangerous 

 Eastern rival, Armenia, and even distant Lydia were sub- 

 missive to the rule of the kings of Nineveh. The short but 

 severe struggle of Merodach-baladan against Sargon and 

 Sennacherib had ended in the conquest and annexation of 

 Babylonia; and the house of Assur was, indeed, at the zenitli 

 of its power. Yet at this very time, shortly after the capture 



of Thebes, the Nia- ^X^'\ ^{f- !][. DP Ni-a of the Assyrian 



inscriptions (W. A. I., vol. v., pi. 1), and the No of the 

 Scriptures, the prophet Nahum was pouring forth his bitter 

 denunciations against "" the bloody city " : " Art thou better 

 than populous No, that was situate among the rivers, that had 

 the waters round about it, whose rampart was the great river ?^^* 

 " Yet she was carried away, she went into captivity.^' f We 

 may, guided by these passages, place the prophecy of Nahum 

 as being uttered during the reign of Assurbanipal (B.C. 

 668 — 625), the Sardanapalus of the Greeks. The writer of 

 this book must have been a spectator of the two great events 

 of the latter part of the seventh century before the Christian 

 era, and passages in his book which show that he knew the 

 general features of Nineveh, if not from personal experience, 

 at least from contemporary evidence. In one passage, f "The 

 chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall jostle one against 

 another in the broad ways" (Nahum ii. 4), we have clearly a 

 reference to the streets and squares for which the city was 

 famed, and from which it derived the name Ar RelwhotJi, 

 rrarryW (Genesis X. 11), § "the city of broad streets." 



* Nahum iii. 8. t Ibid., iii. 10. J Ihicl., ii. 4. 



§ The Assyrian inscriptions show that the reading of this passage (Gen. x. 

 VOL. XVIII. I 



