were no larger than the mud-cabins of the modern village, it was not a great architectural undertaking to build a little chamber for the prophet; and the enumeration of the simple furniture of that chamber—the bed (perhaps only a straw mat), the table, the stool, and the lamp—seems to indicate that it was only a little hut that was intended. Another point may be noted: how came it that Elisha so constantly passed by Shunem? The answer seems simple; he lived habitually on Carmel, but he was a native of Abel Meholah, "the Meadow of Circles," a place now called 'Ain Helweh, in the Jordan Valley, to which the direct road led past Shunem down the Valley of Jezreel.
Before we leave the Plain of Esdraelon, which is also called the Plain of Megiddo—and because of its typical character as the field of great battles, is used in the Apocalypse as the scene of the great final struggle, Ar-Mageddon--let us glance at the fruitless effort of Josiah, king of Judah, to stop the march of Pharaoh Necho. It was in the last days of the Jewish monarchy, when the northern kingdom had been already destroyed, that Palestine was first exposed to the disastrous fate which involved her in so long a series of troubles from this time forward—that of being the debatable ground between Egypt and the further East; first under the Pharaohs and the rulers of Babylon; then under the Ptolemies and Seleucidae. "In the days of Josiah, Pharaoh Necho, king of Egypt, went up against the king of Assyria to the river Euphrates" (2 Kings xxiii. 29), possibly landing his army at Accho (says Dean Stanley), more probably, as the expression seems to indicate, following the track of his predecessor Psammetichus, and advancing up the maritime plain till he turned into the plain of Esdraelon, thence to penetrate into the passes of the Lebanon. King Josiah, in self-defence, and perhaps as an ally of the Assyrian king, went against him. Josiah would march by the watershed
