Elijah was commissioned to call Elisha to be his successor; and Elisha in his turn made frequent resort to Mount Carmel. When the Shunamite woman came to him there, her journey lay across the plain, and he could see her approaching (2 Kings iv. 24). Shunem, now called _Sulem_, stands on the southern slope of _Neby Duhy_ (Little Hermon), and is only a mud hamlet, with cactus hedges and a spring. West of the houses there is a beautiful garden, cool and shady, of lemon trees, watered by a little rivulet, and in the village is a fountain and trough. Westward the view extends as far as Carmel, 15 miles away. Thus the whole extent of the ride of the Shunamite woman, under the burning noon-tide sun of harvest-time, is visible. Conder remarks that if the houses of that time were no larger than the mud-cabins of the modern village, it was not a great architectural undertaking to build a little chamber for the prophet; and the enumeration of the simple furniture of that chamber--the bed (perhaps only a straw mat), the table, the stool, and the lamp--seems to indicate that it was only a little hut that was intended. Another point may be noted: how came it that Elisha so constantly passed by Shunem? The answer seems simple; he lived habitually on Carmel, but he was a native of Abel Meholah, “the Meadow of Circles,” a place now called _’Ain Helweh_, in the Jordan Valley, to which the direct road led past Shunem down the Valley of Jezreel. Before we leave the Plain of Esdraelon, which is also called the Plain of Megiddo--and because of its typical character as the field of great battles, is used in the Apocalypse as the scene of the great final struggle, _Ar-Mageddon-_--let us glance at the fruitless effort of Josiah, king of Judah, to stop the march of Pharaoh Necho. It was in the last days of the Jewish monarchy, when the northern kingdom had been already destroyed, that Palestine was first exposed to the disastrous fate which involved her in so long a series of troubles from this time forward--that of being the debatable ground between Egypt and the further East; first under the Pharaohs and the rulers of Babylon; then under the Ptolemies and Seleucidae. “In the days of Josiah, Pharaoh Necho, king of Egypt, went up against the king of Assyria to the river Euphrates” (2 Kings xxiii. 29), possibly landing his army at Accho (says Dean Stanley), more probably, as the expression seems to indicate, following the track of his predecessor Psammetichus, and advancing up the maritime plain till he turned into the plain of Esdraelon, thence to penetrate into the passes of the Lebanon. King Josiah, in self-defence, and perhaps as an ally of the Assyrian king, went against him. Josiah would march by the watershed road, northward from Jerusalem, and descend into the plain, perhaps by Dothan. The engagement took place in “the Valley of Megiddo” (2 Chron. xxxv. 22). The Egyptian archers in their long array, so well known from their