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Multitudes, multitudes; whether prediction or exclamation with wonder, it is doubled to intimate the mighty, numerous armies contending one against another, and thrashing each other, overthrowing numberless men between the conquered and conqueror. So each kingdom was overthrown successively. The Assyrian overthrown by Arbaces and Pul-belochus, conspiring against Sardanapalus, where the multitudes were so great that the blood of the slain is by Diodorus Siculus reported to have coloured the water of a river, and the number of the conspirators’ army before Nineveh is said to be four hundred thousand. After this we meet Sennacherib’s mighty hosts against Egypt and the Philistines, to neither of which could he march but either through part of Judea or very near to it, and after this he hath one hundred and eighty-five thousand slain in one night before Jerusalem; beside Necho’s army marching toward Carchemish, and Nebuchadnezzar’s army in pursuit of the routed Egyptian, and the armies of Alexander the Great, and after these the armies of the Seleucid and the Lagidee.
In the valley of decision; where God, having by wise providence gathered them, did by just determination of the victory decide their quarrels, and by the conqueror punished the conquered for their sins against God and his people.
The day of the Lord; the day of vengeance and righteous recompences upon enemies,
is near: if it begin in the punishment of Nineveh and the Assyrian kingdom, by the cutting off Sennacherib’s army, it was in Joel’s time, not above sixty-four years, supposing Joel prophesied in Jeroboam the Second’s time; and probably not quite twenty years to this day of the Lord if Joel prophesied this in Hezekiah’s time, or after the captivating of the ten tribes by Shalmaneser, which was A.M. 3283, and Sennacherib’s overthrow was 3294, eleven years after the deportation, as Archbishop Usher in his Annals.