and then was carried off in chains to Egypt, while Necho set up Eliakim,
or Jehoiakim, another brother, in his stead. Jehoiakim was idolatrous,
cruel, and violent; he persecuted the prophets, and did everything
to draw on himself the punishment of Heaven. Necho, making another
invasion, was defeated by the great Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, and
hunted back by him into Egypt. On his way Nebuchadnezzar seized
Jerusalem, in the year 606, and carried off some of the treasures of the
Temple, and many of the royal family, to Babylon, among them the four
holy children, but he let Jehoiakim continue to reign as his vassal.
Jeremiah prophesied that the time of captivity and desolation should
last seventy years from this time, but the worst was not yet come.
Jehoiakim was bent on trusting for help to the Egyptians, who had made
him king, and treated Jeremiah as a traitor for counselling him to be
loyal to the Assyrians; he threw Jeremiah into prison, and when Baruch
read the roll of his prophecies in the Temple, he caused it to be cut to
pieces and destroyed. At last he rebelled, relying on help from
Egypt, but it did not come, for Necho was dying; and in the year 598,
Nebuchadnezzar himself came up against Jerusalem, and besieged it.
Jehoiakim died in the midst of the war, and his equally wicked son,
Jehoiachin, Coniah, or Jeconiah, was soon forced to come out, and
surrender to Nebuchadnezzar, who dishonoured his father's corpse, and
carried him away to Babylon, with the chief treasures of the Temple, and
a great multitude of warriors and mechanics. Among them was the prophet
Ezekiel, who, on the banks of the Chebar, saw mighty visions of the
chariot of God borne up by the Cherubim; and while he rebuked the
present Jews for their crimes, promised restoration, and beheld the new
and more perfect Building of God measured out by the angel. A marble
cylinder with most of this prophecy engraven on it in Assyrian
characters, has lately been found in the ruins near the Tigris.