oke the word,
just as the stroke was to fall:
"Woe to her that is filthy and polluted, to the oppressing city! She
obeyed not the voice; she received not correction; she trusted not in
the Lord; she drew not near to her God." Zeph. 3:1, 2.
Prophecies uttered against the mighty city had declared:
"He will make an utter end of the place thereof." "The palace shall be
dissolved ["molten," margin]." "She is empty, and void, and waste."
Nahum 1:8; 2:6, 10. "How is she become a desolation, a place for beasts
to lie down in!" Zeph. 2:15.
The Medes and the Babylonians overthrew Nineveh. The king immolated
himself in his burning ("molten") palace. Nineveh became a desolation.
Describing a battle that took place there in the seventh century of our
era, between the Romans and the Persians, the historian Gibbon bears
testimony to the fact that it has indeed become "empty, and void, and
waste:"
"Eastward of the Tigris, at the end of the bridge of Mosul, the
great Nineveh had formerly been erected: the city, and even the
ruins of the city, had long since disappeared; the vacant place
afforded a spacious field for the operations of the two
armies."--_"The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire," chap. 46, par. 24._
And to this day, the site of Nineveh is pointed out across the river
from Mosul, only mounds of ruins, these almost obliterated by the
drifting sands of centuries. The word spoken is fulfilled, though at the
time it was spoken it little seemed to proud and prosperous Nineveh that
such a fate could ever be hers.
"Before me rise the walls
Of the Titanic city,--brazen gates,
Towers, temples, palaces enormous piled,--
Imperial Nineveh, the earthly queen!
In all her golden pomp I see her now,
Her swarming streets, her splendid festivals.
* * * * *
"Again I look,--and lo!...
Her walls are gone, her palaces are dust,--
The desert is around her, and within
Like shadows have the mighty passed away."
From Nineveh's mounds we seem to hear a voice that says: "All flesh is
as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass
withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: but the word of the Lord
endureth forever." 1 Peter 1:24, 25.
The Burden of Tyre
[Illustration: TYRE BY THE SEA
"They shall destroy the walls of Tyrus, and break down her towers." Eze.
26:4.]
Tyre w
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