Pharaoh-Nechoh, after bringing Phoenicia and Syria under his rule, and penetrating as far as Carchemish, returned to Southern Syria, and learned what had occurred at Jerusalem in his absence. He sent orders to Jehoahaz to attend the court which he was holding at Riblah, and Jehoahaz fell into the trap Ezekiel 19:4.

Riblah still retains its name. It is situated on the Orontes, in the Coele-Syrian valley, near the point where the valley opens into a wide and fertile plain. Neco seems to have been the first to perceive its importance. Afterward Nebuchadnezzar made it his headquarters during his sieges of Jerusalem and Tyre 2 Kings 25:21; Jeremiah 39:5; Jeremiah 52:9-10, Jeremiah 52:26.

Nechoh put him in bands - But what was the cause of his putting him in bands? It is conjectured, and not without reason, that Jehoahaz, otherwise called Shallum, raised an army, met Nechoh in his return from Carchemish, fought, was beaten, taken prisoner, put in chains; and taken into Egypt, where he died; 2 Kings 23:34, and Jeremiah 22:11, Jeremiah 22:12. Riblah or Diblath, the place of this battle, was probably a town in Syria, in the land or district of Hamath.

And Pharaohnechoh put him in bands at Riblah in the land of Hamath,.... Places in Syria; Hamath was formerly a kingdom in Syria, and Riblah is said by Jerom (c) to be Antioch of Syria, near to which was the fountain of Daphne; and in the Targums of Jonathan and Jerusalem on Numbers 34:11. Daphne is put for Riblah; and Josephus (d) says Antioch was by Daphne of Syria; and in the Apocrypha:"Which when Onias knew of a surety, he reproved him, and withdrew himself into a sanctuary at Daphne, that lieth by Antiochia.'' (2 Maccabees 4:33)Daphne is said to be by Antioch; with which place Pompey was greatly delighted, because of the pleasantness of it, and the abundance of waters about it (e): hither, it is probable, Jehoahaz went with an army to avenge his father's death on the king of Egypt, or to assist the king of Babylon, or both; and here Pharaoh met with him, and took him, and bound him; he seems to be of a martial spirit, from Ezekiel 19:3.

that he might not reign in Jerusalem; whither afterwards the king of Egypt came, and took it; and so Herodotus (f) says that after he had conquered the Syrians at Migdol, he took Cadytis, a great city of Syria, which seems to be Jerusalem, the holy city:

and put the land to a tribute of one hundred talents of silver, and a talent of gold; the land of Judah; and one hundred talents, according to Bunting (g), amounted to 37,500 pounds of our money; and a talent of gold, according to Brerewood (h), was 4,500 pounds; but Bishop Cumberland (i) makes it 5,067 pounds, three shillings, and ten pence; a talent of gold could not be so large in Homer's time, since he speaks of seven of them given at once in a way of hospitality (k).

(c) Comment. in Ezekiel 47.fol. 261. C. (d) Antiqu. l. 17. c. 2. sect. 3.((e) Rufi Fest. Breviar. Eutrop. Hist. Rom. l. 6. (f) Ut supra. (Chronic. Secil. 18. p. 568.) (g) Ut supra, (Travels, &c.) p. 288. (h) De Ponder & Pret. Vet. Num. c. 4. (i) Scripture Weights and Measures, ch. 4. p. 21. (k) Odyss. 9. ver. 258. & Odyss. 24. ver. 321.

"Pharaoh Necho put him in fetters (ויּאסרהוּ) at Riblah in the land of Hamath, when he had become king at Jerusalem." In 2 Chronicles 36:3 we have, instead of this, "the king of Egypt deposed him (יסירהוּ) at Jerusalem." The Masoretes have substituted as Keri ממּלך, "away from being king," or "that he might be no longer king," in the place of בּמלך, and Thenius and Bertheau prefer the former, because the lxx have τοὺ μὴ βασιλεύειν not in our text only, but in the Chronicles also; but they ought not to have appealed to the Chronicles, inasmuch as the lxx have not rendered the Hebrew text there, but have simply repeated the words from the text of the book of Kings. The Keri is nothing more than an emendation explaining the sense, which the lxx have also followed. The two texts are not contradictory, but simply complete each other: for, as Clericus has correctly observed, "Jehoahaz would of course be removed from Jerusalem before he was cast into chains; and there was nothing to prevent his being dethroned at Jerusalem before he was taken to Riblah."

We are not told in what way Necho succeeded in getting Jehoahaz into his power, so as to put him in chains at Riblah. The assumption of J. D. Michaelis and others, that his elder brother Eliakim, being dissatisfied with the choice of Jehoahaz as king, had recourse to Necho at Riblah, in the hope of getting possession of his father's kingdom through his instrumentality, is precluded by the face that Jehoahaz would certainly not have been so foolish as to appear before the enemy of his country at a mere summons from Pharaoh, who was at Riblah, and allow him to depose him, when he was perfectly safe in Jerusalem, where the will of the people had raised him to the throne. If Necho wanted to interfere with the internal affairs of the kingdom of Judah, it would never have done for him to proceed beyond Palestine to Syria after the victory at Megiddo, without having first deposed Jehoahaz, who had been raised to the throne at Jerusalem without any regard to his will. The course of events was therefore probably the following: After the victory at Megiddo, Necho intended to continue his march to the Euphrates; but on hearing that Jehoahaz had ascended the throne, and possibly also in consequence of complaints which Eliakim had made to him on that account, he ordered a division of his army to march against Jerusalem, and while the main army was marching slowly to Riblah, he had Jerusalem taken, king Jehoahaz dethroned, the land laid under tribute, Eliakim appointed king as his vassal, and the deposed Jehoahaz brought to his headquarters at Riblah, then put into chains and transported to Egypt; so that the statement in 2 Chronicles 36:3, "he deposed him at Jerusalem," is to be taken quite literally, even if Necho did not come to Jerusalem in propri person, but simply effected this through the medium of one of his generals.

(Note: Ewald (Gesch. iii. p. 720) also observes, that "Necho himself may have been in Jerusalem at the time for the purpose of installing his vassal:" this, he says, "is indicated by the brief words in 2 Kings 23:33-34, and nothing can be found to say against it in other historical sources;" though he assumes that Jehoahaz had allowed himself to be enticed by Necho to go to Riblah into the Egyptian camp, where he was craftily put into chains, and soon carried off as a prisoner to Egypt. - We should have a confirmation of the taking of Jerusalem by Necho in the account given by Herodotus (ii.:159): μετὰ δὲ τήν μάχην (i.e., after the battle at Megiddo) Κάδυτιν πόλιν τῆς Συρίης ἐοῦσαν μεγάλην εἶλε, if any evidence could be brought to establish the opinion that by Κάδυτις we are to understand Jerusalem. But although what Herodotus says (iii. 5) concerning Κάδυτις does not apply to any other city of Palestine so well as to Jerusalem, the use of the name Κάδυτις for Jerusalem has not yet been sufficiently explained, since it cannot come from קדושה, the holy city, because the ש of this word does not pass into t in any Semitic dialect, and the explanation recently attempted by Bttcher (N. ex. Krit. Aehrenlese, ii. pp. 119ff.) from the Aramaean חדיתא, the renewed city (new-town), is based upon many very questionable conjectures. At the same time so much is certain, that the view which Hitzig has revived (de Cadyti urbe Herod. Gott. 1829, p. 11, and Urgeschichte der Philister, pp. 96ff.), and which is now the prevalent one, viz., that Κάδυτις is Gaza, is exposed to some well-founded objections, even after what Stark (Gaza, pp. 218ff.) has adduced in its favour. The description which Herodotus gives (iii. 5) of the land-road to Egypt: ἀπὸ Φοινίκης μέχρι οὔρων τῶν Καδύτιος πόλιος ἥ ἐστι Σύρων τῶν Παλαιστινῶν καλεομένων· ἀπὸ δὲ Καδύτιος, ἐούσης πόλιος (ὡς ἐμοὶ δοκέει) Σαρδίων ου ̓ πολλῷ ἐλάσσονος, ἀπὸ ταύτης τὰ ἐμπόρια τὰ ἐπὶ θαλάσσης μέχρι Ἰηνύσου πόλιός ἐστι τοῦ Ἀραβίου· does not apply to Gaza, because there were no commercial towns on the sea-coast between the district of Gaza and the town of Yenysus (the present Khan Ynas); but between the district of Jerusalem and the town of Yenysus there were the Philistian cities Ashkelon and Gaza, which Herodotus might call τὰ ἐμπόρια τοὺ Ἀραβίου, whereas the comparison made between the size of Kadytis and that of Sardes points rather to Jerusalem than to Gaza. Still less can the datum in Jeremiah 47:1, "before Pharaoh smote Gaza," be adduced in support of Gaza. If we bear in mind that Jeremiah's prophecy (2 Kings 47) was not uttered before the fourth year of Jehoiakim's reign, and therefore that Pharaoh had not smitten Gaza at that time, supposing that this Pharaoh was really Necho, it cannot have been till after his defeat at Carchemish that Necho took Gaza on his return home. Ewald, Hitzig, and Graf assume that this was the case; but, as M. v. Niebuhr has correctly observed, it has "every military probability" against it, and even the incredibility that "a routed Oriental army in its retreat, which it evidently accomplished in one continuous march, notwithstanding the fact that on its line of march there were the strongest positions, on the Orontes, Lebanon, etc., at which it might have halted, should have taken the city upon its flight." And, lastly, the name Κάδυτις does not answer to the name Gaza, even through the latter was spelt Gazatu in early Egyptian (Brugsch, Geograph. Inschr. ii. p. 32) since the u (y) of the second syllable still remains unexplained.)

Riblah has been preserved in the miserable village of Rible, from ten to twelve hours to the S.S.W. of Hums (Emesa) by the river el Ahsy (Orontes), in a large fruitful plain of the northern portion of the Bekaa, which was very well adapted to serve as the camping ground of Necho's army as well as of that of Nebuchadnezzar (2 Kings 25:6, 2 Kings 25:20-21), not only because it furnished the most abundant supply of food and fodder, but also on account of its situation on the great caravan-road from Palestine by Damascus, Emesa, and Hamath to Thapsacus and Carchemish on the Euphrates (cf. Rob. Bibl. Res. pp. 542-546 and 641).

In the payment imposed upon the land by Necho, one talent of gold (c. 25,000 thalers: 3750) does not seem to bear any correct proportion to 100 talents of silver (c. 250,000 thalers, or 37,500), and consequently the lxx have 100 talents of gold, the Syr. and Arab. 10 talents; and Thenius supposes this to have been the original reading, and explains the reading in the text from the dropping out of a y ( equals 10), though without reflecting that as a rule the number 10 would require the plural כּכּרים.

And Pharaohnechoh put him in bands {u} at Riblah in the land of Hamath, that he might not reign in Jerusalem; and put the land to a tribute of an hundred talents of silver, and a talent of gold.

(u) Which was Antiochia in Syria, also called Hamath.

23:33 In bands - Either, because he presumed to take the kingdom without his consent: or because he renewed the war against Pharaoh.

that...: or, because he reigned

put the...: Heb. set a fine upon the land

23:31-37 After Josiah was laid in his grave, one trouble came on another, till, in twenty-two years, Jerusalem was destroyed. The wicked perished in great numbers, the remnant were purified, and Josiah's reformation had raised up some to join the few who were the precious seed of their future church and nation. A little time, and slender abilities, often suffice to undo the good which pious men have, for a course of years, been labouring to effect. But, blessed be God, the good work which he begins by his regenerating Spirit, cannot be done away, but withstands all changes and temptations.