Lecture VI.

TO THE END AND AFTER. 597-? B.C.

The few remaining years of the Jewish kingdom ran rapidly down and their
story is soon told.

When Nebuchadrezzar deported King Jehoiachin in 597, he set up in his
place his uncle Mattaniah, a son of Josiah by that Hamutal, who was also
the mother of the miserable Jehoahaz.(469) The name of the new king
Nebuchadrezzar changed to Sedekiah, _Righteousness_ or _Truth of
Jehovah_,(470) intending thus to bind the Jew by the name of his own God
to the oath of allegiance which he had exacted from him. When Ezekiel
afterwards denounced Sedekiah on his revolt it was for _despising the
Lord's oath and breaking the Lord's covenant_(471)--a signal instance of
the sanctity attached in the ancient world to an oath sworn by one nation
to another, even though it was to the humiliation of the swearer.(472) So
far as we see, Sedekiah was of a temper(473) to have been content with the
peace, which the observance of his oath would have secured to him. But he
was a weak man, master no more of himself than of his throne,(474)
distracted between a half-superstitious respect for the one high influence
left to him in Jeremiah and the opposite pressure, first from a set of
upstarts who had succeeded to the estates and the posts about court of
their banished betters, and second, from those prophets whose personal
insignificance can have been the only reason of their escape from
deportation. It is one of the notable ironies of history that, while
Nebuchadrezzar had planned to render Judah powerless to rebel again, by
withdrawing from her all the wisest and most skilful and soldierly of her
population, he should have left to her her fanatics!

There remained in Jerusalem the elements--sincerely patriotic but rash and
in politics inexperienced--of a "war-party," restless to revolt from
Babylon and blindly confident of the strength of their walls and of their
men to resist the arms of the great Empire. Of their nation they and their
fellows alone had been spared the judgment of the Lord and prided
themselves on being the Remnant to which Isaiah had promised survival and
security on their own land: for they said to the Exiles, _Get ye far from
the Lord, for unto us is this land given in possession._(475) Through the
early uneventful years of Sedekiah, this stupid and self-righteous party
found time to gather strength, and in his fourth year must have been
stirred towards action by the arrival in