Even now we have not exhausted the historic difficulties which surround the repentance of Manasseh. During his reign Jeremiah received his call, and while still a young boy began his work. Neither he, nor Zephaniah, nor Habakkuk drop the slightest hint that the wicked, idolatrous king had ever turned over a new leaf. Jeremiah's silence is specially difficult to account for. He, too, records Jehovah's final and irrevocable decree, that He would give up Judah to death, to exile, and to famine, to the sword to slay, to the dogs to tear, to the fowls of the heaven and the beasts of the earth to devour and to destroy.[654] And the cause of the pitiless doom pronounced by a Judge weary of repenting is "because of Manasseh, the son of Hezekiah, King of Judah, for that which he did in Jerusalem."[655] The judgment was not long delayed. It was the vast movement of the Scythians in Media and Western Asia, and the rumours of it, which gave to Manasseh and Amon such respite as they had; and even this respite was full of misery and fear.[656] FOOTNOTES: [624] One legend says that Hephzibah was a daughter of Isaiah. Not so Josephus (_Antt._, X. iii. 1). [625] See Gen. xli. 51. His name may have referred to the new union between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. Comp. 2 Chron. xxx. 6, xxxi. 1. [626] Chron. xxxiv. 1-3. [627] See Zeph. i. 8. Comp. 2 Chron. xxiv. 17; Isa. xxviii. 14; Jer. v. 5, etc. [628] Mic. vii. 1-20. [629] LXX., τῇ Βαά̈λ. The feminine, however, does not imply that Baal was here worshipped as a female deity, but is probably due to the fact that later Jews always avoided using the _names_ of idols (from a misapprehension or too literal view of Exod. xxiii. 13), and therefore called Baal _Bosheth_ ("shame"), which is feminine. Hence the names Mephibosheth, Jerubbesheth, Ishbosheth. In Suidas (_s.v._ Μανασσῆς) he is charged with having set up in the Temple "a four-faced image of Zeus." [630] For בָּתִּים, in 2 Kings xxiii. 7, the LXX. read χεττίμ (?). Grätz, (_Gesch. d. Juden._, ii. 277) suggests בְּנָדִים, "broidered robes." Ezek. xvi. 16. See Herod., i. 199; Strabo, xvi. 1058; Luc., _De Deâ. Syr._, § 6; Libanius, _Opp._, xi. 456, 557; _Ep. of Jeremy_, 43; Döllinger, _Judenthum u. Heidenthum_, i. 431; Rawlinson, _Phœnicia_, 431. [631] Chron. xxxiii. 3; 2 Kings xxiii. 5. Movers, _Rel. d. Phöniz._, i. 65 "In all the books of the Old Testament written before the Assyrian period no trace of star-worship is to be to found." 2 Kings xvii. 16. [632] Jer. vii. 18, viii. 2, xix. 13; Zeph. i, 5. [633] See Deut. iv. 19, xvii. 3. [634] 2 Kings xxiii. 11, 12. [635] See Jer. vii, 31, 32, xix. 2-6, xxxii. 35; Psalm cvi. 37, 38. [636] Ewald infers from Isa. lvii. 5-9; Jer. ii. 5-13, that he actually _sought_ for all foreign kinds of worship, in order to introduce them. [637] 1 Sam. iii. 11; Jer. xix. 3. [638] Comp. Isa. xxxiv. 11; Lam. ii. 8.