of Shamgar and Jael or even of Saul’s early reign, when “there was neither shield nor spear seen among forty thousand in Israel.” These references to buildings, especially fortresses, to military stores and the vast numbers of Jewish and Israelite armies, form a distinct class amongst the additions made by the chronicler to the material taken from the book of Kings. They are found in the narratives of the reigns of David, Rehoboam, Jehoshaphat, Uzziah, Jotham, Manasseh, in fact in the reigns of nearly all the good kings; Manasseh’s building was done after he had turned from his evil ways.(346) Hezekiah and Josiah were too much occupied with sacred festivals on the one hand and hostile invaders on the other to have much leisure for building, and it would not have been in keeping with Solomon’s character as the prince of peace to have laid stress on his arsenals and armies. Otherwise the chronicler, living at a time when the warlike resources of Judah were of the slightest, was naturally interested in these reminiscences of departed glory; and the Jewish provincials would take a pride in relating these pieces of antiquarian information about their native towns, much as the servants of old manor-houses delight to point out the wing which was added by some famous Cavalier or by some Jacobite squire. Asa’s warlike preparations were possibly intended, like those of the Triple Alliance, to enable him to maintain peace; but if so, their sequel did not illustrate the maxim, “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” The rumour of his vast armaments reached a powerful monarch: “Zerah the Ethiopian.”(347) The vagueness of this description is doubtless due to the remoteness of the chronicler from the times he is describing. Zerah has sometimes been identified with Shishak’s successor, Osorkon I., the second king of the twenty-second Egyptian dynasty. Zerah felt that Asa’s great army was a standing menace to the surrounding princes, and undertook the task of destroying this new military power: “He came out against them.” Numerous as Asa’s forces were, they still left him dependent upon Jehovah, for the enemy were even more numerous and better equipped. Zerah led to a battle an army of a million men, supported by three hundred war chariots. With this enormous host he came to Mareshah, at the foot of the Judæan highlands, in a direction south-west of Jerusalem. In spite of the inferiority of his army, Asa came out to meet him; “and they set the battle in array in the valley of Zephathah at Mareshah.” Like Abijah, Asa felt that, with his Divine Ally, he need not be afraid of the odds against him even when they could be counted by hundreds of thousands. Trusting in Jehovah, he had taken the field against the enemy; and now at the decisive moment he made a confident appeal for help: “Jehovah, there is none beside Thee to help between the mighty and him that hath no strength.” Five hundred and eighty thousand men seemed nothing compared to the host