The Assyrian flood, then, was about to break, and the oracles close with the hopeless prospect of the whole land submerged beneath it. 4. A FRAGMENT FROM THE PLAGUE. In the above exposition we have omitted two very curious verses, 9 and 10, which are held by some critics to interrupt the current of the chapter, and to reflect an entirely different kind of calamity from that which it predicts. I do not think these critics right, for reasons I am about to give; but the verses are so remarkable that it is most convenient to treat them by themselves apart from the rest of the chapter. Here they are, with the verse immediately in front of them. _I am loathing the pride of Jacob, and his palaces I hate. And I will give up a city and its fulness_ to ...(perhaps _siege_ or _pestilence_?). _And it shall come to pass, if there be left ten men in one house, and they die,_[336] ... _that his cousin_[337] _and the man to burn him shall lift him to bring the body_[338] _out of the house, and they shall say to one who is in the recesses of the house_,[339] _Are there any more with thee? And he shall say, Not one ... and they shall say, Hush!_ (_for one must not make mention of the name of Jehovah_). This grim fragment is obscure in its relation to the context. But the death of even so large a household as ten--the funeral left to a distant relation--the disposal of the bodies by burning instead of the burial customary among the Hebrews[340]--sufficiently reflect the kind of calamity. It is a weird little bit of memory, the recollection of an eye-witness, from one of those great pestilences which, during the first half of the eighth century, happened not seldom in Western Asia.[341] But what does it do here? Wellhausen says that there is nothing to lead up to the incident; that before it the chapter speaks, not of pestilence, but only of political destruction by an enemy. This is not accurate. The phrase immediately preceding may mean either _I will shut up a city and its fulness_, in which case a siege is meant, and a siege was the possibility both of famine and pestilence; or _I will give up the city and its fulness_..., in which case a word or two may have been dropped, as words have undoubtedly been dropped at the end of the next verse, and one ought perhaps to add _to the pestilence_.[342] The latter alternative is the more probable, and this may be one of the passages, already alluded to,[343] in which the want of connection with the preceding verses is to be explained, not upon the favourite theory that there has been a violent intrusion into the text, but upon the too much neglected hypothesis that some words have been lost.