before the Chaldaean of whom Jahveh made use, as of the Assyrian of old, to chastise the sins of Judah.  The struggle between the two factions constantly disturbed the public peace, and it needed little to cause the preaching of the prophets to degenerate into an incitement to revolt.  On a feast-day which occurred in the early months of Jehoiakim’s reign, Jeremiah took up his station on the pavement of the temple and loudly apostrophised the crowd of worshippers.  “Thus saith the Lord:  If ye will not hearken unto Me, to walk in My law, which I have set before you, to hearken to the words of My servants the prophets, whom I send unto you, even rising up early and sending them, but ye have not hearkened; then will I make this house like Shiloh, and will make this city a curse to all the nations of the earth.”  Such a speech, boldly addressed to an audience the majority of whom were already moved by hostile feelings, brought their animosity to a climax; the officiating priests, the prophets, and the pilgrims gathered round Jeremiah, crying, “Thou shalt surely die.”  The people thronged into the temple, the princes of Judah went up to the king’s house and to the house of the Lord, and sat in council in the entry of the new gate.  They decreed that Jeremiah, having spoken in the name of the Lord, did not merit death, and some of their number, recalling the precedent of Micaiah the Morasthite, who in his time had predicted the ruin of Jerusalem, added, “Did Hezekiah King of Judah and all Judah put him at all to death?” Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, one of those who had helped in restoring the law, took the prophet under his protection and prevented the crowd from injuring him, but some others were not able to escape the popular fury.  The prophet Uriah of Kirjath-jearim, who unweariedly prophesied against the city and country after the manner of Jeremiah, fled to Egypt, but in vain; Jehoiakim despatched Elnathan, the son of Achbor, “and certain men with him,” who brought him back to Judah, “slew him with the sword, and cast his dead body into the graves of the common people."* If popular feeling had reached such a pitch before the battle of Carchemish, to what height must it have risen when the news of Nebuchadrezzar’s victory had given the death-blow to the hopes of the Egyptian faction!  Jeremiah believed the moment ripe for forcibly arresting the popular imagination while it was swayed by the panic of anticipated invasion.  He dictated to his disciple Baruch the prophecies he had pronounced since the appearance of the Scythians under Josiah, and on the day of the solemn fast proclaimed throughout Judah during the winter of the fifth year of the reign, a few months after the defeat of the Egyptians, he caused the writing to be read to the assembled people at the entry of the new gate.**

     * Jer. xxvi., where the scene takes place at the beginning
     of Jehoiakim’s reign, i.e. under the Egyptian domination.