from the arms of Psamtik of Egypt, who had since 639
been besieging Ashdod; and he holds that this hypothesis explains the
absence of any record of violence by the Scythians on their southern
campaign, except at Ashkelon. This precarious hypothesis apart, we have
the facts that no Biblical chronicler records any invasion of Judah and
Benjamin by the Scythians, and yet that the early Oracles of Jeremiah,
generally attributed to the alarms which the advance of such barbarian
hordes would excite in Judah, do closely fit the Scythians (with a few
exceptions that may be due to the prophet's adaptation in 604 of his
earlier Oracles to the new _enemy_ out of the north, the Chaldeans).

There, are, however, modern writers who claim that the Oracles in question
were originally composed not in view of the Scythian, but of the Chaldean
invasion of Palestine. So George Douglas (_The Book of Jeremiah_, London,
Hodder & Stoughton, 1903), who, while assigning Jeremiah's call to 627,
relegates the two visions and all the Oracles in the first part of the
book to the years following Jehoiakim's accession to the Jewish throne in
608; cp. Winckler, _Geschichte Israels_, I. pp. 112 f. and F. Wilke
(_Alttestamentliche studien R. Kittel zum 60 Geburtstag dargebracht_,
1913), quoted by John Skinner, _Prophecy and Religion_, pp. 42 f. n. 2.
This would be an easy solution but for the insuperable objections to it
that the Oracles in question far more closely fit the Scythian, than the
Chaldean, invasion; and that Jer. I. 2, as distinctly covers prophecies of
Jeremiah in the days of Josiah as v. 3 does his prophesying under
Jehoiakim.

POSTSCRIPT.

The date of Nineveh's fall has hitherto been accepted as 607-606 B.C. But
in July of this year (1923) Mr. C. J. Gadd described to the British
Academy a Babylonian tablet, which dates the fall in the fourteenth year
of Nabopolassar's reign in Babylon. This year was 612 B.C., if it be right
to reckon the reign from 626-25 B.C.; but as remarked above, p. 175,
Nabopolassar became in that year officially not king but only viceroy.
Dependent as I was on a newspaper summary of Mr. Gadd's lecture I could
therefore do no more than offer for the fall of Nineveh the alternative
dates, 612 and 606; see above p. 175 and compare p. 162.

Appendix II.

NECOH'S CAMPAIGN (PP. 162, 163).

In addition to the accounts in the Books of Kings and Chronicles of
Pharaoh Necoh's a