It is to Habakkuk, in prophecies written very shortly after the death of Josiah, that we must look for the impression of terror caused by the Chaldees.
Nabopolassar,[690] sent by the successor of Assurbanipal to quell a Chaldæan revolt, seized the viceroyalty of Babylon, and joined Cyaxares in the overthrow of Nineveh. From that time Babylon became greater and more terrible than Nineveh, whose power it inherited. Habakkuk (ii. 1-19) paints the rapacity, the selfishness, the inflated ambition, the cruelty, the drunkenness, the idolatry of the Chaldæans. He calls them (i. 5-11) a rough and restless nation, frightful and terrible, whose horsemen were swifter than leopards, fiercer than evening wolves, flying to gorge on prey like the vultures, mocking at kings and princes, and flinging dust over strongholds. Nor has he the least comfort in looking on their resistless fury, except the deeply significant oracle--an oracle which contains the secret of their ultimate doom--
"Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright in him: But the righteous man shall live by his fidelity."
The prophet places absolute reliance on the general principle that "pride and violence dig their own grave."[691]
[665] Kamphausen (_Die Chronologie der hebräischer Könige_) makes Josiah succeed to the throne in 638.
[666] Otherwise his genealogy would not be mentioned for four generations (Hitzig).
[667] Zeph. i. 1. Jeremiah also was highly connected. He was a priest and his father Hilkiah may be the high priest who found the book; "for his uncle Shallum, father of his cousin Hanameel, was the husband of Huldah the prophetess" (2 Kings xxii. 14; Jer. xxxii. 7). The fact that Jeremiah's property was at Anathoth, where lived the descendants of Ithamar (1 Kings ii. 26), whereas Hilkiah was of the family of Eleazar (1 Chron. vi. 4-13), does not seem fatal to the view that his father was the high priest.
[668] Zeph. ii. 4-7.
[669] Zeph. ii. 12-15.
[670] Jer. ii. 1-35. Considering the very great part played by Jeremiah for nearly half a century of the last history of Judah, the non-mention of his name in the Book of Kings is a circumstance far from easy to explain.
[671] Jer. iv. 6, A. V., "retire, stay not." Comp. Isa. x. 24-31.
[672] Jer. iv. 7-27.
[673] Jer. v. 15-17.
[674] Jer. vi. 1, 22, 23, 24.
[675] The almond tree (_shâqâd_) "seems to be awake (_shâqâd_), whatsoever trees are still sleeping in the torpor of winter" (Tristram _Nat. Hist. of the Bible_, 332; Jer. i. 11-14).
[676] The name Kimmerii (on the Assyrian inscriptions Gimirrai) is connected with Gomer. The Persians call them Sakai or Scyths. The nomad Scyths had driven the Kimmerii from the Dniester while Psammetichus was King of Egypt. For allusions to this see Jer. vi. 22 _seq._, viii. 16, ix. 10. The first notice of them is in an inscription of Esarhaddon, B.C. 677, who says that he defeated "Tiushpa, _the Gimirrai, a roving warrior_, whose own country was remote." Zephaniah and Jeremiah were certainly thinking of the Scythians (Eichhorn, Hitzig, Ewald; and more recently Kuenen, _Onderzoek_, ii. 123; Wellhausen, _Skizzen_, 150). In B.C. 626 they could not have consciously had the Chaldæans in view, though, twenty-three years later, Jeremiah may have had.
[677] See Ezek. xxxviii., xxxix.
[678] Ezek. xxxviii. 2. So Gesenius, Hävernick, etc., and R.V.
[679] The form in the Vulgate and the Alexandrian MS. of the LXX. is Mosech; in the Assyrian inscription, Muski. As far back as 1120 Tiglath-Pileser I. had overrun Tubal (the Tublai, Tabareni) and Moschi, between the Black Sea and the Taurus. They were neither Aryans nor Semites. In Gen. x. 2; 1 Chron. i. 5, Gog, Magog, Meshech, and Gomer are sons of Japheth. They are referred to in Rev. xx. 8.
[680] Herod., i. 74, 103-106, iv. 1-22, vii. 64; Pliny, _H. N._, v. 16; Jos., _Antt._, I. vi. 1; Syncellus, _Chronogl._, i. 405.