while it raises its
left paw against him, he plunges his dagger into the body of
the beast.

Nebuchadrezzar, thus defied by three enemies, was at a loss to decide
upon which to make his first attack. Ezekiel, whose place of exile put
him in a favourable position for learning what was passing, shows him to
us as he "stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways,
to use divination: he shook the arrows to and fro, he consulted the
teraphim, he looked in the liver." Judah formed as it were the bridge
by which the Egyptians could safely enter Syria, and if Nebuchadrezzar
could succeed in occupying it before their arrival, he could at once
break up the coalition into three separate parts incapable of rejoining
one another--Ammon in the desert to the east, Tyre and Sidon on the
seaboard, and Pharaoh beyond his isthmus to the south-west. He therefore
established himself in a central position at Eiblah on the Orontes, from
whence he could observe the progress of the operations, and hasten
with his reserve force to a threatened point in the case of unforeseen
difficulties; having done this, he despatched the two divisions of
his army against his two principal adversaries. One of these divisions
crossed the Lebanon, seized its fortresses, and, leaving a record of its
victories on the rocks of the Wady Brissa, made its way southwards along
the coast to blockade Tyre.*

* The account of this Phoenician campaign is contained in
one of the inscriptions discovered and commented on by
Pognon. Winckler, the only one to my knowledge who has tried
to give a precise chronological position to the events
recorded in the inscription, places them at the very
beginning of the reign, after the victory of Carchemish,
about the time when Nebuchadrezzar heard that his father had
just died. I think that this date is not justified by the
study of the inscription, for the king speaks therein of the
great works that he had accomplished, the restoration of the
temples, the rebuilding of the walls of Babylon, and the
digging of canals, all of which take us to the middle or the
end of his reign. We are therefore left to choose between
one of two dates, namely, that of 590-587, during the Jewish
war, and that from the King's thirty-seventh year to 568
B.C., during the war against Amasis which will be treated
below. I have chosen the first, becaus