Zedekiah (the son of Josiah), the last native monarch of Judah, then mounted the throne of David, to suffer one day a fate even more terrible than that which had befallen his two brothers and his nephew, who had successively reigned before him. Zedekiah sought help from Egypt, and, as it appeared at first, with success, as on the approach of Pharaoh's army, the Chaldeans, who were besieging Jerusalem, retired. If the heart of Jeremiah had shared in the joy which this gleam of returning hope had caused in Jerusalem, it must have been to him a task all the more bitter to quench that hope in utter darkness. Anguish must have been his when he thus declared the message of God! "Behold Pharaoh's army which is come forth to help you, shall return to Egypt into their own land; and the Chaldeans shall come again, and fight against this city, and take it, and burn it with fire." After uttering this terrible prophecy, Jeremiah made an attempt to quit Jerusalem, and return to his native land of Benjamin; but he was seized as a traitor by a captain of the ward, brought before the princes as one taken in the act of falling away to the Chaldeans, maltreated, and thrown into prison. For a time, the rigour of Jeremiah's captivity was softened by the king, who appears never to have doubted the innocence of the prophet. But Jeremiah's enemies were not satisfied with his imprisonment; they were determined to have his life, and to destroy him by a death of lingering suffering. Abusing the weakness of King Zedekiah, who delivered the prophet into their hands, the princes of Judah cast Jeremiah into a dungeon, or rather pit, in the court of the prison, which had mire at the bottom, in which their victim partially sank, and there his merciless foes seem to have left him to perish by inches from hunger and damp. Such would probably have been the fate of Jeremiah, but for the intervention of Ebedmelech, not one of his own countrymen, but an Ethiopian in the service of the king. This African went to Zedekiah, and roused him to make an effort to save his innocent subject from so cruel a death. "My lord the king," said Ebedmelech, "these men have done evil in all that they have done to the prophet, whom they have cast into the dungeon; and he is like to die for hunger in the place where he is."