t irresistible. All the little nations which had stood in their
way had been swallowed up.

Moreover, the prophets Amos and Hosea had plainly foretold that some
such calamity would be sent upon Israelites by Jehovah on account of
their sins. But very few of them believed these brave and lonely
preachers of the truth. "Jehovah send the Assyrians against us! Why,
that is absurd! We are Jehovah's people, and he is our God. What has
he to do with the Assyrians? He may chastise us, but not by sending
foreign armies to conquer us. What would he do if we should be
conquered? He would have no nation to worship him." So they reasoned.

=Jehovah too weak to protect his people?=--When, therefore, the
Assyrians actually did come marching down from the Euphrates River,
hundreds of thousands of them with their gleaming armor and their
multitudes of horses and war chariots, and besieged and captured the
city of Samaria, leaving it a ruin, most of the Hebrews, north and
south, were sick with fear and bewilderment. For them with their false
notions it could mean only one thing: their God, Jehovah, was too
weak to protect his people against the greater gods of Nineveh. The
Assyrians said to them:

="Let not thy God in whom thou trusteth deceive thee, saying,
Jerusalem shall not be given into the hand of the king of
Assyria. Behold, thou hast heard what the kings of Assyria
have done to all lands, by destroying them utterly: and shalt
thou be delivered? Have the gods of the nations delivered
them?... Where is the king of Hamath, and the king of Arpad,
and the king of the city of Sepharvaim?"=

Against such taunts as these, the Hebrews, with their mistaken
beliefs, could bring no answer.

THE CRAZE FOR FOREIGN GODS

With their faith in Jehovah breaking down there was a great running
here and there after other gods and strange religions. Instead of
trusting quietly in Jehovah's watchful care many of the people
resorted in their terror to soothsayers and mediums, to "wizards that
chirp and mutter." Jerusalem seems to have become almost as full of
them as the cities of the Philistines, which had always been famous
for their fortune-tellers and necromancers.

=Alliances with other nations.=--Another favorite way of seeking
safety was through alliances with other nations and their gods.
According to the beliefs of that age, when two nations made an
alliance their gods were included in it. To overcome the A