The essence of these oracles is their clear confidence in the fall of Niniveh. From 652, when Egypt revolted from Assyria, and, Assurbanipal notwithstanding, began to push northward, men must have felt, throughout all Western Asia, that the great empire upon the Tigris was beginning to totter. This feeling was strengthened by the Scythian invasion, and after 625 it became a moral certainty that Niniveh would fall[165]—which happened in 607—6. These are the feelings, 625 to 608, which Zephaniah’s oracles reflect. We can hardly over-estimate what they meant. Not a man was then alive who had ever known anything else than the greatness and the glory of Assyria. It was two hundred and thirty years since Israel first felt the weight of her arms.[166] It was more than a hundred since her hosts had swept through Palestine,[167] and for at least fifty her supremacy had been accepted by Judah. Now the colossus began to totter. As she had menaced, so she was menaced. The ruins with which for nigh three centuries she had strewn Western Asia—to these were to be reduced her own impregnable and ancient glory. It was the close of an epoch. FOOTNOTES: [140] See above, pp. 41 ff. [141] Some, however, think the prophet is speaking in prospect of the Chaldean invasion of a few years later. This is not so likely, because he pictures the overthrow of Niniveh as subsequent to the invasion of Philistia, while the Chaldeans accomplished the latter only after Niniveh had fallen. [142] According to Herodotus. [143] Ver. 7, LXX. [144] The measure, as said above, is elegiac: alternate lines long with a rising, and short with a falling, cadence. There is a play upon the names, at least on the first and last—“Gazzah” or “‘Azzah ‘Azubah”—which in English we might reproduce by the use of Spenser’s word for “dreary”: _For Gaza ghastful shall be._ “‘Eḳron te’aḳer.” LXX. Ἀκκαρων ἐκριζωθήσεταὶ (B), ἐκριφήσεται (A). In the second line we have a slighter assonance, ‘Ashkĕlōn lishĕmamah. In the third the verb is יְגָרְשׁוּהָ; Bacher (_Z.A.T.W._, 1891, 185 ff.) points out that גֵּרַשׁ is not used of cities, but of their populations or of individual men, and suggests (from Abulwalid) יירשוה, _shall possess her_, as “a plausible emendation.” Schwally (_ibid._, 260) prefers to alter to יְשָׁרְשׁוּהָ, with the remark that this is not only a good parallel to תעקר, but suits the LXX. ἐκριφήσεται.—On the expression _by noon_ see Davidson, _N. H. and Z._, Appendix, Note 2, where he quotes a parallel expression, in the Senjerli inscription, of Asarhaddon: that he took Memphis by midday or in half a day (Schrader). This suits the use of the phrase in Jer. xv. 8, where it is parallel to _suddenly_.