But this vassalage bore heavily on the arrogant soul of Jehoiakim, and he seized the first occasion to rebel, especially as Necho promised him protection.  This rebellion was suicidal and fatal, since Babylon was the stronger power.  Nebuchadnezzar, after the three years of forced submission, appeared before the gates of Jerusalem with an irresistible army.  There was no resistance, as resistance was folly.  Jehoiakim was put in chains, and avoided being carried captive to Babylon only by the most abject submission to the conqueror.  All that was valuable in the Temple and the palaces was seized as spoil.  Jerusalem was spared for a while; and in the mean time Jehoiakim died, and so intensely was he hated and despised that no dirge was sung over his remains, while his dishonored body was thrown outside the walls of his capital like that of a dead ass, as Jeremiah had foretold.

On his death, B.C. 598, after a reign of eight years, his son Jehoiachin, at the age of eighteen, ascended his nominal throne.  He also, like his father, followed the lead of the heathen party.  The bitterness of the Babylonian rule, united with the intrigues of Egypt, led to a fresh revolt, and Jerusalem was invested by a powerful Chaldean army.

Jeremiah now appears again upon the stage, but only to reaffirm the calamities which impended over his nation,—­all of which he traced to the decay of religion and morality.  The mission and the work of the Jews were to keep alive the worship of the One God amid universal idolatry.  Outside of this, they were nothing as a nation.  They numbered only four or five millions of people, and lived in a country not much larger than one of the northern counties of England and smaller than the state of New Hampshire or Vermont; they gave no impulse to art or science.  Yet as the guardians of the central theme of the only true religion and of the sacred literature of the Bible, their history is an important link in the world’s history.  Take away the only thing which made them an object of divine favor, and they were of no more account than Hittites, or Moabites, or Philistines.  The chosen people had become idolatrous like the surrounding nations, hopelessly degenerate and wicked, and they were to receive a dreadful chastisement as the only way by which they would return to the One God, and thus act their appointed part in the great drama of humanity.  Jeremiah predicted this chastisement.  The chosen people were to suffer a seventy years’ captivity, and then city and Temple were to be destroyed.  But Jeremiah, sad as he was over the fate of his nation, and terribly severe as he was in his denunciations of the national sins, knew that his people would repent by the river of Babylon, and be finally restored to their old inheritance.  Yet nothing could avert their punishment.