e was forced to become the vassal of the king
of Babylonia, and furnish a contingent to his army. But this vassalage
bore heavily on the arrogant soul of Jehoiakim, and he seized the first
occasion to rebel, especially as Necho promised him protection. This
rebellion was suicidal and fatal, since Babylon was the stronger power.
Nebuchadnezzar, after the three years of forced submission, appeared
before the gates of Jerusalem with an irresistible army. There was no
resistance, as resistance was folly. Jehoiakim was put in chains, and
avoided being carried captive to Babylon only by the most abject
submission to the conqueror. All that was valuable in the Temple and the
palaces was seized as spoil. Jerusalem was spared for a while; and in
the mean time Jehoiakim died, and so intensely was he hated and despised
that no dirge was sung over his remains, while his dishonored body was
thrown outside the walls of his capital like that of a dead ass, as
Jeremiah had foretold.

On his death, B.C. 598, after a reign of eight years, his son
Jehoiachin, at the age of eighteen, ascended his nominal throne. He
also, like his father, followed the lead of the heathen party. The
bitterness of the Babylonian rule, united with the intrigues of Egypt,
led to a fresh revolt, and Jerusalem was invested by a powerful
Chaldean army.

Jeremiah now appears again upon the stage, but only to reaffirm the
calamities which impended over his nation,--all of which he traced to
the decay of religion and morality. The mission and the work of the Jews
were to keep alive the worship of the One God amid universal idolatry.
Outside of this, they were nothing as a nation. They numbered only four
or five millions of people, and lived in a country not much larger than
one of the northern counties of England and smaller than the state of
New Hampshire or Vermont; they gave no impulse to art or science. Yet as
the guardians of the central theme of the only true religion and of the
sacred literature of the Bible, their history is an important link in
the world's history. Take away the only thing which made them an object
of divine favor, and they were of no more account than Hittites, or
Moabites, or Philistines. The chosen people had become idolatrous like
the surrounding nations, hopelessly degenerate and wicked, and they
were to receive a dreadful chastisement as the only way by which they
would return to the One God, and thus act their appointed part in the