s alike--were
thoroughly under the control of their chief, and advanced in a compact
and irresistible mass "like the Nile: like a river its volume rolls
onward. It said: I arise, I inundate the earth, I will drown cities
and people! Charge, horses! Chariots, fly forward at a gallop! Let the
warriors march, the Ethiopian and the Libyan under the shelter of his
buckler, the fellah bending the bow!"*

* Jer. xlvi. 7-9, where the prophet describes, not the army
which marched against Josiah, but that which was beaten at
Carchemish. With a difference of date of only three or four
years, the constituent elements of the army were certainly
the same, so that the description of one would apply to the
other.

As soon as Josiah heard the news, he called together his troops
and prepared to resist the attack. Necho affected not to take his
demonstrations seriously, and sent a disdainful message recommending him
to remain neutral: "What have I to do with thee, thou King of Judah? I
come not against thee this day, but against the house wherewith I have
war: and God hath commanded me to make haste: forbear thee from meddling
with God who is with me, that He destroy thee not!"*

* The message of Necho to Josiah is known to us from 2
Chron. xxxv. 20-22.

Having despatched the message, probably at the moment of entering the
Shephelah, he continued in a northerly direction, nothing doubting that
his warning had met a friendly reception; but however low Nineveh had
fallen, Josiah could not feel that he was loosed from the oaths which
bound him to her, and, trusting in the help of Jahveh, he threw himself
resolutely into the struggle. The Egyptian generals were well acquainted
with the route as far as the farther borders of Philistia, having
passed along it a few years previously, at the time of the campaign of
Psammetichus; but they had no experience of the country beyond Ashdod,
and were solely dependent for guidance on the information of merchants
or the triumphant records of the old Theban Pharaohs. These monuments
followed the traditional road which had led their ancestors from Gaza
to Megiddo, from Megiddo to Qodshu, from Qodshu to Carchemish, and they
were reckoning on passing through the valley of the Jordan, and then
that of the Orontes, without encountering any resistance, when, at the
entrance to the gorges of Carmel, they were met by the advance guard of
the Judaean army.

Josiah, not