ts, thus forming, as
it were, a small independent town, which had to be besieged and captured
after a passage had been cut through the outer lines of defence.

* Jones and G. Rawlinson credit Nineveh with a population of
not more than 175,000.

Cyaxares might well have lost heart in the face of so many difficulties,
but his cupidity, inflamed by reports of the almost fabulous wealth of
the city, impelled him to attack it with extraordinary determination:
the spoils of Susa, Babylon, and Thebes, in fact, of the whole of
Western Asia and Ethiopia, were, he felt, almost within his reach,
and would inevitably fall into his hands provided his courage and
perseverance did not fail him. After shutting up the remnant of the
Assyrian army inside Nineveh he laid patient siege to the city, and the
fame of his victories being noised abroad on all sides, it awoke among
the subject races that longing for revenge which at one time appeared to
have been sent to sleep for ever. It almost seemed as though the moment
was approaching when the city of blood should bleed in its turn, when
its kings should at length undergo the fate which they had so long
imposed on other monarchs. Nahum the Elkoshite,* a Hebrew born in the
Assyrian province of Samaria, but at that time an exile in Judah, lifted
up his voice, and the echo of his words still resounds in our ears,
telling us of the joy and hope felt by Judah, and with Judah, by the
whole of Asia, at the prospect. Speaking as the prophet of Jahveh,
it was to Jahveh that he attributed the impending downfall of the
oppressor: "Jahveh is a jealous God and avengeth; Jahveh avengeth and
is full of wrath; Jahveh taketh vengeance on His adversaries, and He
reserveth wrath for His enemies. Jahveh is slow to anger and great in
power, and will by no means clear the guilty; Jahveh hath His way in the
whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of His feet. He
rebuketh the sea and maketh it dry, and drieth up all the rivers: Bashan
languisheth, and Carmel, and the flower of Lebanon languisheth."* And,
"Behold upon the mountains the feet of him that bringeth good tidings."
Then he goes on to unfold before the eyes of his hearers a picture of
Nineveh, humiliated and in the last extremity.

* Elkosh is identified by Eusebius with Elkese, which St.
Jerome declares to have been in Galileo, the modern el-
Kauzeh, two and a half hours' walk south of Tibnin. The
prophecy