"Thou shalt not die by the sword; Thou shalt die in peace: With the burnings of thy fathers, the former kings that were before thee, So shall they make a burning for thee; And they shall lament thee, saying, Alas lord! For it is I that have spoken the word--it is the utterance of Jehovah." King and people were not proof against the combined terrors of the prophetic rebukes and the besieging enemy. Jeremiah regained his influence, and Jerusalem gave an earnest of the sincerity of her repentance by entering into a covenant for the emancipation of all Hebrew slaves. Deuteronomy had re-enacted the ancient law that their bondage should terminate at the end of six years,[138] but this had not been observed: "Your fathers hearkened not unto Me, neither inclined their ear."[139] A large proportion of those then in slavery must have served more than six years;[140] and partly because of the difficulty of discrimination at such a crisis, partly by way of atonement, the Jews undertook to liberate all their slaves. This solemn reparation was made because the limitation of servitude was part of the national Torah, "the covenant that Jehovah made with their fathers in the day that He brought them forth out of the land of Egypt"--_i.e._ the Deuteronomic Code. Hence it implied the renewed recognition of Deuteronomy, and the restoration of the ecclesiastical order established by Josiah's reforms.