new king of Judah of his dependence on Jehovah the God of Israel, whose laws and religion of course, we may presume, were likewise re-established in Judea by the same foreign authority; for it would have been absurd in the Egyptian monarch to have changed the name of his royal vassal to another name more particularly testifying a belief in Jehovah, the true God of Israel, if he did not mean thereby to keep the Jewish king in constant remembrance of the national profession of law and religion by the sacred name of the great Author of them!
The same remarkable change in the name of a future king of Judah was made also by another foreign and heathen conqueror afterwards, in honor of the eternal Jehovah; so that it was manifestly the Providence of God which inclined these two great enemies of the Jewish State, though they were also mortal enemies to each other, (I mean Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar) to pursue exactly the same method in restoring "the sceptre of Judah" to "the house of David," and in declaring the establishment of the national law and religion, by putting a respectful memorial of the sacred name of Jehovah upon the new-raised monarchs!
In the beginning of Jehoiakim's reign, though Judea and all Syria were then under the Egyptian empire, the prophet Jeremiah, in his 27th chapter foretold the universal empire of "Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon," even before that great warrior was king of Babylon, his father Nabopollasar, who was also called Nebuchodonosor, being still alive. The prophet was directed to make bonds and yokes, and put them upon his own neck, and to send them afterwards to the kings of several neighboring nations, with a most awful message from God concerning the rising power of the Babylonian monarch:—"And now" (said the prophet, in the name of the Lord, or Jehovah, of hosts, the God of Israel, see ver. 4.) "have I given all these
lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant;" &c.—"and all nations" (many of whom are expressly mentioned in the third verse) " shall serve him, and his son, and his son's son, until the very time
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