He was young, ambitious, greedy of fame and military glory, and longed to use the weapon that his predecessors had for some fifteen years past been carefully whetting; his emissaries, arriving at Jerusalem at the moment when the popular excitement was at its height, had little difficulty in overcoming Zede-kiah's scruples. Edoni, Moab, and the Philistines, who had all taken their share in the conferences of the rebel party, hesitated at the last moment, and refused to sever their relations with Babylon. Tyre and the Ammonites alone persisted in their determination, and allied themselves with Egypt on the same terms as Judah. [Illustration: 423.jpg STELE OF NEBUCHADREZZAR] Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Pognon. The figures have been carefully defaced with the hammer, but the outline of the king can still be discerned on the left; he seizes the rampant lion by the right paw, and while it raises its left paw against him, he plunges his dagger into the body of the beast. Nebuchadrezzar, thus defied by three enemies, was at a loss to decide upon which to make his first attack. Ezekiel, whose place of exile put him in a favourable position for learning what was passing, shows him to us as he "stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination: he shook the arrows to and fro, he consulted the teraphim, he looked in the liver." Judah formed as it were the bridge by which the Egyptians could safely enter Syria, and if Nebuchadrezzar could succeed in occupying it before their arrival, he could at once break up the coalition into three separate parts incapable of rejoining one another--Ammon in the desert to the east, Tyre and Sidon on the seaboard, and Pharaoh beyond his isthmus to the south-west. He therefore established himself in a central position at Eiblah on the Orontes, from whence he could observe the progress of the operations, and hasten with his reserve force to a threatened point in the case of unforeseen difficulties; having done this, he despatched the two divisions of his army against his two principal adversaries. One of these divisions crossed the Lebanon, seized its fortresses, and, leaving a record of its victories on the rocks of the Wady Brissa, made its way southwards along the coast to blockade Tyre.*