Zechariah 12:11

Hadadrimmon This is generally supposed, on the authority of Jerome, to have been a city near Jezreel, called in his day Maximinianopolis, in the valley of Megiddo, and the place where Josiah was fatally wounded by Pharaoh-Necho, king of Egypt. Both accounts of Josiah's death state that it was "at," or "in the valley of" Megiddo, that his wound was received (2 Kings 23:29; 2 Chronicles 35:22), while the fuller account in the Book of Chronicles not only affirms the national character of the mourning for him at the time, "all Judah and Jerusalem mourned for Josiah," but informs us that the prophet Jeremiah, probably in some dirge composed for the occasion, "lamented for him," and that the anniversary of his death long continued to be observed as a day of national calamity. "All the singing men and the singing women spake of Josiah in their lamentations to this day, and (they) made them an ordinance in Israel; and behold they are written in the lamentations." "The grief of the people at the fall of their brave and pious king at the age of thirty-nine years was extraordinarily deep. It seemed as though a gloomy foreboding would take possession of their minds that his fall really involved that of the realm itself, of which he had been the last great prop. Long years after, the elegies composed on him by Jeremiah, and sung among the people, were still preserved, and were repeated with a sad pleasure on the days set apart for the commemoration of the royal hero." Ewald.