killed so many that the rest had to return to the high healthy table-land of Moab to save their lives. This is the simple account given in an Egyptian inscription deciphered about twenty years ago. With our modern knowledge we can tell exactly what occurred. The natural home of the plague, from which it is never absent, and from which it always starts on its devastating rounds, is the swampy region along the lower Tigris and Euphrates. A contingent from the locality, no doubt, carried the disease to Lachish, but at first it attracted no special notice. When, however, it found itself in so congenial a region as the swampy delta of the Nile it spread with great rapidity, and compelled the raising of the siege. The plague is always very fatal in Egypt. Lowe, in his work on that country, says that in 1837 it carried off in a few weeks, in Cairo, a number of people greater than the whole male population of the city, so we can quite understand how Sennacherib's army suffered.

Herodotus, however—who is generally supposed to have written about 2,300 years ago, but whose book, in the form in which we have it, is certainly not of much earlier date than 100 B.C.—attributes the disaster to rats, vast swarms of which, he says, invaded the Assyrian camps and rendered the troops powerless by devouring their bowstrings and the leathern handles of their shields. His account, like the Egyptian one, attributes the disaster to the intervention of the Egyptian gods; and he adds that the rat was thenceforth regarded as a sacred animal in Egypt. The disaster is also mentioned in the Bible, though, of course, in a distorted and exaggerated manner, as if it had occurred when Sennacherib was besieging Jerusalem, which was not the case. Indirectly, however, it no doubt did affect the Jews. Hezekiah was clearly a partisan of Egypt, and it is quite intelligible that when Sennacherib broke up his camp at Lachish and advanced into Egypt he left a small force behind him to hold the Jews in check and keep them from interrupting his communications, and that when the main army had to retire this force was also withdrawn, and so the Jews were relieved from the anxiety which its presence had caused them.

The Assyrian account, found in Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh, and now in the British Museum, says nothing about the pestilence, and attributes the return of the army to rebellious risings at home; in fact, it mixes up this affair with the previous war, in which Hezekiah is said to have joined with other neighbouring kings in rebelling against Sennacherib, and to have been punished by being deprived of a number of towns and compelled to hand over to Sennacherib not only a large amount of money and valuables, but also his wives, his concubines, and his singing-men and singing-women. In fact,