_Also ye, O Kushites, are the slain of My sword.[160]_
The elegiac measure is now renewed[161] in an oracle against Assyria, the climax and front of heathendom (vv. 13-15). It must have been written before 608: there is no reason to doubt that it is Zephaniah’s.
_And may He stretch out His hand against the North, And destroy Asshur; And may He turn Niniveh to desolation, Dry as the desert. And herds shall couch in her midst. Every beast of....[162] Yea, pelican and bittern[163] shall roost on the capitals; The owl shall hoot in the window, The raven on the doorstep._
. . . . .[164]
_Such is the City, the Jubilant, She that sitteth at ease, She that saith in her heart, I am And there is none else! How hath she become desolation! A lair of beasts. Every one passing by her hisses, Shakes his hand._
The essence of these oracles is their clear confidence in the fall of Niniveh. From 652, when Egypt revolted from Assyria, and, Assurbanipal notwithstanding, began to push northward, men must have felt, throughout all Western Asia, that the great empire upon the Tigris was beginning to totter. This feeling was strengthened by the Scythian invasion, and after 625 it became a moral certainty that Niniveh would fall[165]—which happened in 607—6. These are the feelings, 625 to 608, which Zephaniah’s oracles reflect. We can hardly over-estimate what they meant. Not a man was then alive who had ever known anything else than the greatness and the glory of Assyria. It was two hundred and thirty years since Israel first felt the weight of her arms.[166] It was more than a hundred since her hosts had swept through Palestine,[167] and for at least fifty her supremacy had been accepted by Judah. Now the colossus began to totter. As she had menaced, so she was menaced. The ruins with which for nigh three centuries she had strewn Western Asia—to these were to be reduced her own impregnable and ancient glory. It was the close of an epoch.