Judah, though attacked and summoned to submit, by his successor, Sennacherib (or more correctly Sanherib), remained independent some time longer. The King of Judah was at this time Hezekiah, a man thoroughly imbued with the principles of the Jehovistic party, and therefore much lauded by the historians. The prophet of the day was Isaiah, one of the most eminent of those who have filled the prophetic office. Isaiah warmly encouraged Hezekiah to resist the designs of conquest cherished by Sanherib, and promised a successful issue. The messengers of the Assyrian monarch had insultingly reproached Jehovah with his inability to deliver the land, alleging that none of the gods of the territories which he had conquered had availed them anything. But a signal confutation of this profane belief in large armies as against deities was about to be given, and that in a manner which gave an equally signal triumph to Jehovah, the god of the Jews, and Ptah, the god of the Egyptians. Sanherib was engaged in an expedition against Egypt, which was governed at this time by a priest-king, resembling Hezekiah in the piety of his character. This priest was in bad odor with his army, who refused to assist him against the invaders. During his trouble on this account, the god whom he served appeared to him in his sleep and promised that he should suffer nothing, for he would send him his divine assistance, just as Jehovah promised deliverance through the mouth of Isaiah. He therefore went with some followers to Pelusium, and when there, a number of field-mice, pouring in upon the Assyrians, devoured their quivers, their bows, and the handles of their shields, so that on the next day they fled defenseless, and many were killed. Herodotus tells us that in his day there was still to be seen the statue of the king in the temple of Ptah, a mouse in his hand, and this inscription: "Whoever looks on me, let him revere the gods" (Herod., ii. 141). In the Hebrew version of this catastrophe, the field-mice are converted into the angel of the Lord, and the destruction of the weapons into the slaughter by that angel of 185,000 men. Sanherib, it is added, returned to Nineveh, where he was assassinated by his two sons (2 Kings xix. 35-37). But Sanherib himself, in a deciphered inscription, declares that he had beaten the Egyptians, subjected Judea, carried off many of its inhabit-
