it vibrates only
in the tremulous East, from hamlet to hamlet and camp to camp across
incredible spaces. As one has finely said of a rumour of invasion:--

I saw the tents of Cushan in affliction,
The curtains of Midian's land were trembling.(104)

To the north lay the more fruitful Ephraim--more fruitful and more famous
in the past than her sister of Benjamin, but now in foreign hands, her own
people long gone into exile. It was natural that her fate should lie heavy
on the still free but threatened homes of Benjamin, whose northern windows
looked towards her; and that a heart like Jeremiah's should exercise
itself upon God's meaning by such a fate and the warning it carried for
the two surviving tribes.(105) Moreover, Shiloh lay there, Shiloh where
Eli and other priestly ancestors had served the Ark in a sanctuary now
ruined.(106)

It was, too, across Ephraim with its mixed population in touch with the
court and markets of Nineveh, that rumours of war usually reached Benjamin
and Judah:--

Hark! They signal from Dan,
Mount Ephraim echoes disaster.(107)

After a period of peace, and as Jeremiah was growing to manhood, such
rumours began to blow south again from the Euphrates. Some thirteen years
or so earlier, Asshurbanipal, the Sardanapalus of the Greeks, had
accomplished the last Assyrian conquest in Palestine, 641 B.C., and for an
interval the land was quiet. But towards 625 word came that the Medes were
threatening Nineveh, and, though they were repelled, in that year
Asshurbanipal died and Nabopolassar of Babylon threw off the Assyrian
yoke. Palestine felt the grasp of Nineveh relax. There was a stir in the
air and men began to dream. But quick upon hope fell fear. Hordes of a new
race whom--after the Greeks--we call Scythians, the Ashguzai of the Assyrian
monuments, had half a century before swarmed over or round the Caucasus,
and since then had been in touch, and even in some kind of alliance, with
the Assyrians. Soon after 624 they forced the Medes to relinquish the
siege of Nineveh. They were horsemen and archers, living in the saddle,
and carrying their supplies behind them in wagons. After (as it seems)
their effective appearance at Nineveh, they swept over the lands to the
south, as Herodotus tells us;(108) and riding by the Syrian coast were
only brought up by bribes on the border of Egypt.(109) This must have been
soon after the young prophet's call in 627-6. In short, the wor