If you will take a look at the map you will see, perhaps, why it was that these names of battle-places occur again and again. Twice already we have had great battles at Megiddo. Three times Carehemish {105} seems to have been the turning-point in a campaign. If we understand the geography, the way the land lies, the rivers, mountains, plains and forests, we see the reason. In the first place, an army coming up northward from Egypt would find a few strong cities perhaps, such as Gaza and Ascalon, in the south, but after these were passed it would come to a plain country which gave the inhabitants no great opportunity of making a strong defence till it came to the river Kishon, on which is the city of Megiddo. There begins a wooded and mountainous country excellent for defence by a less strong force against a stronger. Then, if that line of defence was broken through, the natural way--for it was the way that both traders and fighters went--would be north eastward up through Damascus and so on till you came to the Euphrates, a great river, in itself a formidable defence, and there stood the city of Carehemish. That explains why these two, Megiddo and Carehemish, were the places of the great battles. [Sidenote: Nebuchadnezzar] I suppose that the greatest of them all, in its effect on our story, was the third Carehemish battle which, in the year 605 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, fought against the king of Egypt. For the victory of Babylon was so decisive that from this time forward, for a long while, there seems to have been very little question about which power was the greatest in the world. It was Babylon. While Assyria and Babylon had been fighting together, Pharaoh Necho, as we have seen, had taken advantage of their trouble and had conquered the Jews and some allied forces at Megiddo, and as a consequence of that victory Judah had once again become subject to Egypt. Yet again, then, when Nebuchadnezzar {106} won his great battle at Carchemish, the Jews were on the side of the loser. Even after Carchemish, they seem to have inclined to the Egyptian, rather than to the Babylonian alliance, perhaps because Egypt was the nearer neighbour. And they retained that characteristic, which we have seen all through the story, of being a stubborn people, with a spirit not easy to subdue. In 597 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar found them giving trouble, and punished them by taking many of the inhabitants, including the king and Ezekiel the prophet, to Babylon.