Page:David Baron – The History of the Ten "Lost" Tribes.djvu/25

 Jerusalem, and joined in the celebration of the great Passover in the eighteenth year of that zealous and promising young king.

These were the component elements of which the southern kingdom of "Judah" was made up, when it, too, reached the stage, when, on account of its idolatries and apostasy from the living God, "there was no more remedy" (or "healing"—2 Chron. xxxvi. 16). It consisted, as we have seen, of Judah, Benjamin, Levi, and many out of all the other Ten Tribes of Israel, "in abundance."

Jerusalem was finally taken in B.C. 588, by Nebuchadnezzar—just 133 years after the capture of Samaria by the Assyrians. Meanwhile the Babylonian Empire succeeded the Assyrian. But although dynasties had changed, and Babylon, which had sometimes, even under the Assyrian régime, been one of the capitals of the Empire, now took the place of Nineveh, the region over which Nebuchadnezzar now bore rule, was the very same over which Shalmaneser and Sargon reigned before him, only somewhat extended.

The exact location of the exiles of the southern kingdom we are not told, beyond the Scripture statements that all the three parties of captives carried off by Nebuchadnezzar (that in the first invasion in the reign of Jehoiakim, B.C. 606; and in the second, in the reign of Jehoiachin, B.C. 599; and in the final overthrow of Jerusalem, in the reign of Zedekiah, B.C. 588), were taken "to Babylon" (2 Kings xxiv. and xxv.; Daniel i.).

Now Babylon stands not only for the city, but also for the whole land, in which the territories of the Assyrian Empire, and the colonies of exiles from the northern kingdom of "Israel" were included. Thus, for instance,