Josephus ascribed the act of Josiah, in hurling himself against an army that was not attacking him, to fate. The fate was that Josiah, having exterminated the wizards and fortune-tellers, repaired to the only dangerous one among them, because she pretended to be a "prophetess," inspired by Jahveh. Her assurances led him to believe himself invulnerable, personally, and that in his life-time Jerusalem would not suffer the woes she predicted. Josiah, "of the house of David," seems to have thought that his zeal in destroying the shrines which his ancestor Solomon had introduced, mainly Egyptian, would be so grandly consummated if he could destroy a Pharaoh, that he insisted on a combat. Pharaoh-Necho sent an embassy to say that he was not his enemy, but on his way to fight the Assyrian: "God commanded me to hasten; forbear thou from opposing God, who is with me, that he destroy thee not." Here, however, was the fanatic's opportunity for an Armageddon: Pharaoh had appealed to what Solomon would have regarded as their common deity, but which to Josiah meant a chance to pit Jahveh against the God of Egypt. On Jahveh's invisible forces he must have depended for victory. So perished Josiah, and with him the independence of his country. Solomon, the Prince of Peace, had made the house of Pharaoh the ally of his country. Josiah carries his people back under Egyptian bondage. Solomon had built the metropolitan Temple, whose shrines, symbols, works of art, represented a catholicity to all races and religions,--peace on earth, good will to man. Josiah, panic-stricken about a holy book purporting to have been found in the Temple, concerning which the king by his counsellors consulted a female fortune-teller, makes a holocaust of all that Solomon had built up. CHAPTER VI. SOLOMON IN THE HEXATEUCH. "And when they brought out the money that was brought into the house of Jahveh, Hilkiah the priest found the book of the law of Jahveh given by Moses. And Hilkiah answered and said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of Jahveh." (2 Chron. xxxiv. 14, 15.) The Chronicler adds to the earlier account (2 Kings xxii. 8) the words "given by Moses," which looks as if the authenticity of the book (Deuteronomy) had not been without question. The finding of the Book is set forth in a sort of picture, wherein are grouped the priest, the theologian, the phantom prophet, the deity, the temple, and the contribution-box. Every part of the ecclesiastical machine is present.