nto Egypt. 22. And the king sent men to Egypt.(322)
23. And they took forth Urijah thence and brought him to the king,
and slew him with the sword, and cast his corpse into the graves
of the sons of the people. 24. But the hand of Ahikam, the son of
Shaphan, was with Jeremiah so as not to give him into the hand of
the people to put him to death.

The one shall be taken and the other left! We are not told why, after the
verdict of the princes and the people, Ahikam's intervention was needed.
Yet the people were always fickle, and the king who is not mentioned in
connection with Jeremiah's case, but as we see from Urijah's watched
cruelly from the background, was not the man to be turned by a popular
verdict from taking vengeance on the Prophet who had attacked him. Ahikam,
however, had influence at court, and proved friendly to Jeremiah on other
occasions.(323)

All this was _in the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim_. Before we
follow Jeremiah himself through the rest of that malignant and disastrous
reign, during which the steadfastness that his personality had achieved
was again to be shaken, we must understand the progress of the great
events which directed his own conduct and gradually determined the fate of
his people.

In 625 B.C. the successor of Asshurbanipal upon the tottering throne of
Assyria had found himself compelled to acknowledge Nabopolassar the
Chaldean as nominally viceroy, but virtually king, of Babylon.(324) The
able chief of a vigorous race, Nabopolassar bided his time for a vaster
sovereignty, and steadily this came to him. The Medes, twice baffled in
their attempts on Nineveh,(325) made terms with him for a united assault
on the Assyrian capital and for the division of its empire. To that
assault Nineveh fell in 612 or 606,(326) and with her fall Assyria
disappeared from among the Northern Powers. Whatever part of the derelict
empire the Medes may have secured, Mesopotamia remained with the Chaldeans
who doubtless claimed as well all its provinces south of the Euphrates.
But, as we have seen, Necoh of Egypt had already overrun these and battle
between him and the Chaldeans became imminent. Their armies met in 605-4
at Carchemish on The River. Necoh was defeated by Nebuchadrezzar, son of
Nabopolassar, and driven south to his own land. Egypt had failed; and the
northern caldrons, as Jeremiah from the first predicted, again boiled with
the fate of Judah and her neighbours. _