9. Pharaoh, the Opponent of Sennacherib. — It is not at all certain that the name used for so many centuries for the supreme ruler of Egypt was ever again correct- ly used by itself 'to designate a particular king of Egypt. The Pharaoh of whom we read in the reign of Heze- kiah as the rival of the Assyrian Sennacherib (2 Kings xviii, 21 ; Isa. xxxvi, 9), is, indeed, simply called Pha- raoh, but this title is not given him by the sacred his- torian, but by the Assyrian general Rabshakeb. Pha- raoh is still, indeed, used as the generic title of Egyp- tian royalty (Isa. xix, 11), when no individual king- is intended, but when particular kings are meant the Scriptures join to Pharaoh a second title, as Pharaoh- Necho, Pharaoh-Hophra. This may have been Jose- phus's reason for his statement (Ant. viii, 6, 2) that after the father-in-law of Solomon no king of Egypt used this name. The Jewish historian was too well acquainted with Scripture not to have known of the title in connection with a second name, and he therefore meant probably that it was never again used by itself as the title of Egyptian royalty. The king of whom we are now speaking reigned in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah, i. e. about B.C. 713, and was the contempo- rary of Tirhakah king of Ethiopia, and of Sennacherib king of Assyria. This latter synchronism depends, however, on the correctness of the present Hebrew text, which some suppose to have been corrupted, and that it was Sargon and not Sennacherib who invaded Judtea in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah (Joum. <>f Sacr. Lit. Oct. 1858; Jan." 1863). The comparison of Pharaoh in the above passages to a broken reed is re- markable, as the common hieroglyphics for "king," re- stricted to Egyptian sovereigns, Su-ten, strictly a title of the ruler of Upper Egypt, commence with a bent reed, which is an ideographic symbolical sign proper to this word, and is sometimes used alone without any phonetic complement. This Pharaoh can only be the Sethos whom Herodotus mentions as the opponent of Sennacherib, and who may reasonably be supposed to be the Zet of Manetho, the last king of his twenty-third dynasty. Tirhakah, as an Ethiopian, whether then ruling in Egypt or not, is, like So, apparently not called Pharaoh. See Tirhakah.
10. Pharaoh-Necho. — He was king of Egypt during the reigns of Josiah, Jehoahaz, and Jehoiakim, kings of Judah (2 Kings xxiii, 29-34). We do not read of him in Scripture until the last year of Josiah's reign, B.C. 609. How long before this he may have been king of Egypt the Bible gives us no help in ascertaining. It mentions him as still reigning in the fourth year of
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king Jehoiakim, i. e. B.C. 606 (Jer. xlvi, 2), and from 2 Kings xxiv, 7 it seems probable that he continued to reign for a considerable time after this. In the Bible his name is written Neko, 133, and Nekoh, !"I35, and in hieroglyphics Neku. This king was of the Sa'itic twenty-sixth dynasty, of which Manetho makes him either the fifth ruler (Africanus) or the sixth (Eusebi- us). Herodotus calls him Nekus, and assigns to him a reign of sixteen years, which is confirmed by the mon- uments. According to this historian, he was the son of 1'samnietichus I; this the monuments do not corrobo- rate. Dr. Brugsch says that he married Xit-Akcrt, Nitocris, daughter of Psammetichus I and queen She- puntepet, who appears, like her mother, to have been the heiress of an Egyptian royal line, and supposes that he was the son of Psammetichus by another wife (see Hist. (VEyypte. p. 252 ; comp. 248). If he married Nito- cris, he may have been called by Herodotus by mistake the son of Psammetichus.
The father of Necho had already distinguished him- self by the siege and capture from the Assyrians of the strong town of Ashdod, which had been taken from the Egyptians in the reign of Sargon (Herod, ii, 157; Isa. xx, 1). In the decline of the Assyrian empire Egypt ventured once more beyond her eastern confines, and indulged in the hope of universal domination. Necho in the commencement of his reign prepared to carry out to completion his father's ambitious designs, and it was in this endeavor that he came into contact with the kingdom of Judah, and so finds a place in Scripture history. Claiming an oracle from the true God, he ad- vanced an Egyptian army against the town of Carche- mish on the Euphrates, then apparently under the do- minion of the king of Assyria (2 Chron. xxxv, 21; 2 Kings xxiii, 29). There seems to be no doubt that Necho's claim to this oracle was sincere, and that he real- ly thought himself commissioned to go to war with Assy- ria. How far this may indicate a true knowledge of God on Necho's part it is difficult to determine. Yet it can scarcely be understood as more than a conviction that the war was predestined, for it ended in the destruction of Necho's army and the curtailment of his empire. Jo- siah, however, influenced perhaps by an alliance with Assyria, or dreading the rising ambition of Egypt, dis- puted the march of Pharaoh's army. In vain the lat- ter, evidently most unwilling to come into collision with Josiah, entreated him not to oppose him, and pleaded the oracle of him whom he would appear, in common with Josiah, to have recognised as the true God. At Megiddo (now Lejjiin). a town not far from the coast-line of Palestine, so frequently the passage of great armies in the old wars of Asia, Josiah encountered the armies of Egypt, and his death on this occasion formed the sub- ject of lamentations among his people long after it took place. Without pausing upon his march, or returning back to attack Jerusalem, Pharaoh seems to have passed on with all haste to accomplish his original design of capturing Carchemish, which commanded one of the ordinary fords of the Euphrates, and thus of meeting and conquering the king of Assyria in his own domin- ions. In this great expedition he was entirely success- ful. He took Carchemish, and retained possession of the countries between Egypt and the Euphrates until the rising power of Babylon under the great Nebuchad- nezzar met and overthrew the Egyptian army four years afterwards at Carchemish, and forced them back into their own land. Returning from the Euphrates, he treated Judsea as a conquered country, and exercised over it the same absolute authority which the Babylo- nians ilid immediately after him. Sending for Jehoa- haz to Riblah in the land of Hamath, on the Orontes,a favorite camping-ground for the great armies of that period (Robinson, hit,!. Res. iii. 545\ he placed him there in bonds for a time after a brief reign of three months. This he seems to have done because he was not con- sulted in the choice of a king. On his farther march