the history of the conquest there is no mention of Joshua having
encountered any Egyptian force. The tablets contain many appeals to the
king of Egypt for help against the inroads of the Hebrews, but no help
seems ever to have been sent. Is not this just such a state of things as
might have been anticipated as the result of the disaster of the Exodus? In
many points, as shown under various articles, the progress of the conquest
is remarkably illustrated by the tablets. The value of modern discoveries in
their relation to Old Testament history has been thus well described:
“The difficulty of establishing the charge of lack of historical credibility, as
against the testimony of the Old Testament, has of late years greatly
increased. The outcome of recent excavations and explorations is altogether
against it. As long as these books contained, in the main, the only known
accounts of the events they mention, there was some plausibility in the
theory that perhaps these accounts were written rather to teach moral
lessons than to preserve an exact knowledge of events. It was easy to say
in those times men had not the historic sense. But the recent discoveries
touch the events recorded in the Bible at very many different points in
many different generations, mentioning the same persons, countries,
peoples, events that are mentioned in the Bible, and showing beyond
question that these were strictly historic. The point is not that the
discoveries confirm the correctness of the Biblical statements, though that
is commonly the case, but that the discoveries show that the peoples of
those ages had the historic sense, and, specifically, that the Biblical
narratives they touch are narratives of actual occurrences.”
- JOSIAH healed by Jehovah, or Jehovah will support. The son of Amon,
and his successor on the throne of Judah (2 Kings 22:1; 2 Chronicles 34:1).
His history is contained in 2 Kings 22, 23. He stands foremost among all
the kings of the line of David for unswerving loyalty to Jehovah (23:25).
He “did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, and walked in all the
way of David his father.” He ascended the throne at the early age of eight
years, and it appears that not till eight years afterwards did he begin “to
seek after the God of David his father.” At that age he devoted himself to
God. He distinguished himself by beginning a war of extermination against
the prevailing idolatry, which had practically been the state religion for
some seventy years (2 Chronicles 34:3; comp. Jeremiah 25:3, 11, 29).
In the eighteenth year of his reign he proceeded to repair and beautify the
temple, which by time and violence had become sorely dilapidated (2