who had gone before him did he hold firm as an article of faith the conviction that the kingdom would not be utterly annihilated; all his speeches of solemn warning closed with the announcement that a remnant should return and form the kernel of a new commonwealth to be fashioned after Jehovah’s own heart.  For him, in contrast to Amos, the great crisis had a positive character; in contrast to Hosea, he did not expect a temporary suspension of the theocracy, to be followed by its complete reconstruction, but in the pious and God-fearing individuals who were still to be met with in this Sodom of iniquity, he saw the threads, thin indeed yet sufficient, which formed the links between the Israel of the present and its better future.  Over against the vain confidence of the multitude Isaiah had hitherto brought into prominence the darker obverse of his religious belief, but now he confronted their present depression with its bright reverse; faint-heartedness was still more alien to his nature than temerity.  In the name of Jehovah he bade King Hezekiah be of good courage, and urged that he should by no means surrender.  The Assyrians would not be able to take the city, not even to shoot an arrow into it nor to bring up their siege train against it.  “I know thy sitting, thy going, and thy standing,” is Jehovah’s language to the Assyrian, “and also thy rage against me.  And I will put my ring in thy nose, and my bridle in thy lips, and I will turn thee back by the way by which thou camest.”  And thus it proved in the issue.  By a still unexplained catastrophe, the main army of Sennacherib was annihilated on the frontier between Egypt and Palestine, and Jerusalem thereby freed from all danger.  The Assyrian king had to save himself by a hurried retreat to Nineveh; Isaiah was triumphant.  A more magnificent close of a period of influential public life can hardly be imagined.

***** What Sennacherib himself relates of his expedition against his rebellious vassals in Palestine (George Smith, Assyrian Eponym Canon, p. 67, 68, 131-136) runs parallel with 2 Kings xviii. 14-16, but not with the rest of the Bible narrative.  These three verses are peculiar, and their source is different from that of the context.  After having captured various Phoenician cities, and received tribute from a number of kings, his first measure is forcibly to restore the Assyrian governor who had been expelled from Ascalon, and next he turns his arms against Ekron.  This city had put in irons its own king, Padi (who remained loyal to the suzerain), and handed him over to Hezekiah, who appears as the soul of the rebellion in these quarters.  The Egyptians, who as usual have a hand in the matter, advance with an army for the relief of the beleaguered city, but are defeated near Eltheke in the immediate neighbourhood; Ekron is taken, remorselessly chastised, and forced to take Padi back again as its king.  For Hezekiah in the meantime has delivered up his prisoner, and, terrified