While this tragedy was enacting, and the air was rent with the cruel yells of that death struggle, Jehoshaphat and his people moved on in tranquil pilgrimage to the cheerful sound of the songs of Zion. At last they reached an eminence, perhaps the long, low summit of some ridge overlooking the plateau of Jeruel. When they had gained this watchtower of the wilderness, the ghastly scene burst upon their gaze. Jehovah had kept His word: they had found their enemy. They “looked upon the multitude,” all those hordes of heathen tribes that had filled them with terror and dismay. They were harmless enough now: the Jews saw nothing but “dead bodies fallen to the earth”; and in that Aceldama lay all the multitude of profane invaders who had dared to violate the sanctity of the Promised Land: “There were none that escaped.” So had Israel looked back after crossing the Red Sea and seen the corpses of the Egyptians washed up on the shore.(380) So when the angel of Jehovah smote Sennacherib,— “Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown, That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.” There is no touch of pity for the wretched victims of their own sins. Greeks of every city and tribe could feel the pathos of the tragic end of the Athenian expedition against Syracuse; but the Jews had no ruth for the kindred tribes that dwelt along their frontier, and the age of the chronicler had not yet learnt that Jehovah had either tenderness or compassion for the enemies of Israel. The spectators of this carnage—we cannot call them victors—did not neglect to profit to the utmost by their great opportunity. They spent three days in stripping the dead bodies; and as Orientals delight in jewelled weapons and costly garments, and their chiefs take the field with barbaric ostentation of wealth, the spoil was both valuable and abundant: “riches, and raiment,(381) and precious jewels, ... more than they could carry away.” In collecting the spoil, the Jews had become dispersed through all the wide area over which the fighting between the confederates must have extended; but on the fourth day they gathered together again in a neighbouring valley and gave solemn thanks for their deliverance: “There they blessed Jehovah; therefore the name of that place was called the valley of Berachah unto this day.” West of Tekoa,(382) not too far from the scene of carnage, a ruin and a wady still bear the name “Bereikut”; and doubtless in the chronicler’s time the valley was called Berachah, and local tradition furnished our author with this explanation of the origin of the name.