Appendix II.

Necoh's Campaign (pp. 162, 163).

In addition to the accounts in the Books of Kings and Chronicles of Pharaoh Nĕcoh's advance into Asia in pursuance of his claim for a share of the crumbling Assyrian Empire there are two independent records: (1) Jeremiah XLVII. 1—and Pharaoh smote Gaza—a headline (with other particulars) wrongly prefixed by the Hebrew text, but not by the Greek, to an Oracle upon an invasion of Philistia not from the south but from the north (see above, pp. 13, 61); (2) by Herodotus, II. 159, who says that Nĕcoh (Nekôs) making war by land on the Syrians defeated them at Magdolos and after the battle took Kadŭtis, a great city of Syria. Magdolos is probably Megiddo, unless it stands for Megdel, which, as well as Rumman (= Hadad-rimmon, the scene of the mourning for Josiah, Zech. XII. 11) lies near Megiddo. If, as is usually held, Kadŭtis be Gaza, Herodotus has reversed the proper order of Nĕcoh's two actions; but Kadŭtis also suggests hak-Kôdēsh, the holy, an epithet of Jerusalem (Jerusalem, I. 270) which would suit Herodotus' order, for it was after Megiddo that Nĕcoh became master of Jerusalem and Judah. The suggestion, though worth mentioning, is doubtful; the epithet is late, exilic and post-exilic; and Herodotus' phrase took Kadŭtis is hardly equivalent to became paramount there as Nĕcoh became paramount in Jerusalem.