The explanation of this rapid fall of a people that had been so powerful seems to be that it was a power that depended entirely on its army, that the whole nation was occupied in war, and that there were no reserves, no population from which the armies could be recruited and made strong again, when once those already in the field began to be shaken. It was, as we should say, entirely a military state. To the peoples of Syria and Palestine we may suppose that it made little difference whether Assyrians or Babylonians were the great power in the east. However that may have been, they were still, like the horseshoe that a blacksmith is making, "between the hammer and the anvil." It was now, as it had been a thousand or more years before, between the hammer of Babylon and the anvil of Egypt that they lay.
Nor, as we may suppose, did this change of power in the east appear to make the position of Egypt very different. The Egyptian king may well have thought that it gave him the better opportunity for extending his own authority eastward and northward. We have seen how, in former years, Thothmes, and again Thothmes III., advanced victoriously as far as Carchemish, on the Euphrates. Each set up a column there as a monument to his victories. But neither got much farther.
And now again, in this later time, the Egyptian king pressed up victoriously, and again the Babylonians met him and gave him battle, at the very same point—Carehemish.
If you will take a look at the map you will see, perhaps, why it was that these names of battle-places occur again and again. Twice already we have had great battles at Megiddo. Three times Carehemish seems to have been the turning-point in a campaign. If we understand the geography, the way the land lies, the rivers, mountains, plains and forests, we see the reason. In the first place, an army coming up northward from Egypt would find a few strong cities perhaps, such as Gaza and Ascalon, in the south, but after these were passed it would come to a plain country which gave the inhabitants no great opportunity of making a strong defence till it came to the river Kishon, on which is the city of Megiddo. There begins a wooded and mountainous country excellent for defence by a less strong force against a stronger.
Then, if that line of defence was broken through, the natural way—for it was the way that both traders and fighters went—would be north eastward up through Damascus and so on till you came to the Euphrates, a great river, in itself a formidable defence, and there stood the city of Carehemish. That explains why these two, Megiddo and Carehemish, were the places of the great battles.
Nebuchadnezzar
I suppose that the greatest of them all, in its effect on our story, was the third Carehemish battle which, in the year 605 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, fought against the king of Egypt. For the victory of Babylon was so decisive that from this time forward, for a long while, there seems to have been very little question about which power was the greatest in the world. It was Babylon.
While Assyria and Babylon had been fighting together, Pharaoh Necho, as we have seen, had taken advantage of their trouble and had conquered the Jews and some allied forces at Megiddo, and as a consequence of that victory Judah had once again become subject to Egypt. Yet again, then, when Nebuchadnezzar won his great battle at Carchemish, the Jews were on the side of the loser. Even after Carchemish, they seem to have inclined to the Egyptian, rather than to the Babylonian alliance, perhaps because Egypt was the nearer neighbour. And they retained that characteristic, which we have seen all through the story, of being a stubborn people, with a spirit not easy to subdue. In 597 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar found them giving trouble, and punished them by taking many of the inhabitants, including the king and Ezekiel the prophet, to Babylon.
But even so, within ten years the Jews that were left in Jerusalem again tried to form alliances against Babylon, and this time the great eastern power seems to have resolved to make a final end of the business. Jerusalem was attacked by a siege, and so resolutely defended that it held out for nearly a year and a half; but in the end it had to yield. Its defending walls and many of its chief buildings were overthrown, and, most dreadful of all in the eyes of the Jews, their holy temple of Jehovah was destroyed by fire after being robbed of its valuable and sacred vessels.