[Sidenote: [68-70 A.D.]]
Josephus escaped from the general massacre at Jotapata with much
difficulty. His life was threatened not only by the Roman soldiers who
found him shut up in a cave and wished to have his life, but also by
the forty other inmates of the cave who did not approve of Josephus’
desire to surrender. Josephus had recourse to the pious subterfuge
of a divine vision ordering him to surrender to the Romans. But his
companions in misery treated him as a contemptible coward, and he was
forced to prove his physical valour by holding them all at bay. He
finally suggested that they draw lots and kill each other successively.
By some strange circumstance, which Josephus does not explain, the Jews
in the cave bravely met death at the hands of one another until only
two survived, of whom Josephus was one. Josephus easily persuaded this
man to resign the privilege of martyrdom and join him in surrendering
to the Romans. Josephus is our only authority for the story and he
does not shine in particular brilliance even according to his own
explanation. Dean Milman heaps contempt upon him for the hypocrisy
and trickery of his attitude in this matter, but in the first place
it would have been a profitless folly to yield to the fanaticism of
his comrades, and in the second place his death would have deprived
us of his invaluable history. And even Milman, while confessing
the inconsistency of Josephus’ character, admits the glory of his
generalship in spite of his lack of previous military instruction,
confesses that he held the Roman arms in check for two months on the
very frontier of an “insignificant province,” and takes the siege of
Jotapata as a type of “the nature of the conflict of the Jews with the
Roman supremacy, against which, in the wide circle of the empire, they
were the last desperate combatants for freedom.” Josephus was treated
as a traitor by the Jews, even as Thucydides had been exiled by the
Greeks, but he strove hard to mitigate the horrible extremes to which
Roman cruelty was driven by the superb courage of the doomed nation.
Jotapata having fallen, the Roman arms speedily overran the country.
The Samaritans, despised by the Jews, entrenched themselves on Mount
Gerizim, where they were massacred to the number of eleven thousand and
six hundred. The city of Cæsarea was surrendered by the Greeks who had
massacred the Jews in the city. Tiberias also opened its gates to the
Romans. Tarichea resisted, and received only butchery as the reward of
its heroism. Many of the inhabitants fled to the Lake of Galilee in
light fishing boats, and yet when they were pursued by the heavy barks
of the Romans, they had the courage to attack the Romans with stones.
“Feeble warfare,” as Milman says, “which only irritated the pursuers:
for if thrown from a distance they did no damage, only splashing the
water over the soldiers or falling harmless from their iron cuirasses;
if those who threw them approached nearer, they could be hit in their
turn by Roman arrows. All the shores were occupied by hostile soldiers,
and they were pursued into every inlet and creek; some were transfixed
with spears from the high banks of the vessels, some were boarded and
put to the sword, the boats of others were crushed or swamped, and the
people drowned. If their heads rose as they were swimming, they were
hit with an arrow, or by the prow of the bark; if they clung to the
side of the enemy’s vessel, their hands and heads were hewn off. The
few survivors were driven to the shore, where they met with no more
mercy. Either before they landed, or in the act of landing, they were
cut down or pierced through. The blue waters of the whole lake were
tinged with blood, and its clear surface exhaled for several days a
fœtid steam. The shores were strewn with wrecks of boats and swollen
bodies that lay rotting in the sun, and infected the air, till the
conquerors themselves shrank from the effects of their own barbarities.
Here we must add to our bloody catalogue the loss of six thousand
lives.”
Those who had remained in the town and surrendered peaceably,
trusting in Roman honesty, had even more bitter fate. After long and
cold-blooded deliberation, Vespasian had twelve hundred of the aged
and weak put to death; six thousand of the strongest were sent to help
dig the ditch which Nero was trying to cut through the Isthmus of
Corinth; more than thirty thousand others were sold as slaves. This
deed of Vespasian, as Milman says, “tarnished his fame forever.” The
harshness, however, led to the instant surrender of all the rest of
Galilee except the towns of Gamala, Giscala, and Itabyrium. Gamala
held out four months, and its fate was as curious as it was terrible.
Josephus describes the town as clinging to the side of a mountain with
the houses very thick and close to one another. The Romans made a
breach in the walls and gradually forced the Jews up to the top of the
town, where they made a sudden rally and charged fiercely down upon
the Romans, who being able neither to resist the impetus of the Jews
nor to press back the Romans in their rear, took refuge in the houses.
The houses were so lightly built that they collapsed under the weight
of the crowded soldiers and the whole town came tumbling down the
cliff-side like a pack of cards. The Romans suffered a great panic with
heavy loss and the Jews drove them out of the town, Vespasian himself
being saved with great difficulty from slaughter. Gradually, however,
the city was overcome and a bloody massacre followed. Hundreds threw
themselves over the precipices with their wives and children. Hundreds
of others the Romans flung over the cliffs. Nine thousand corpses
marked the vain courage of the people of Gamala. Itabyrium had fallen
in the meanwhile and Giscala was abandoned by its commander John of
Giscala, who took his troops and his ambition into Jerusalem, though
hotly pursued by Titus.
“But Jerusalem,” says Milman, “was ill-preparing herself to assume the
part which became the metropolis of the nation, in this slow contest;
and better had it been for her, if John of Giscala had perished in
the trenches of his native town, or been cut off in his flight by the
pursuing cavalry. His fame had gone before him to Jerusalem, perhaps
not a little enhanced by the defection of his rival Josephus. The
multitude poured out to meet him, as well to do him honour, as to
receive authentic tidings of the disasters in Galilee. They assumed
a lofty demeanour, declared that for Giscala, and such insignificant
villages, it was not worth risking the blood of brave men--they had
reserved all theirs to be shed in the defence of the capital. Yet
to many their retreat was too manifestly a flight, and from the
dreadful details of massacre and captivity, they foreboded the fate
which awaited themselves. John, however, represented the Roman force
as greatly enfeebled, and their engines worn out before Jotapata
and Gamala; and urged, that if they were so long in subduing the
towns of Galilee, they would inevitably be repulsed with shame from
Jerusalem. John was a man of the most insinuating address, and the most
plausible and fluent eloquence. The war and the peace factions not only
distracted the public councils, but in every family, among the dearest
and most intimate friends, this vital question created stern and bloody
divisions. Every one assembled a band of adherents, or joined himself
to some organised party. The youth were everywhere unanimous in their
ardour for war; the older in vain endeavoured to allay the frenzy by
calmer and more prudent reasoning. First individuals, afterwards bands
of desperate men, began to spread over the whole country, spoiling
either by open robbery, or under pretence of chastising those who were
traitors to the cause of their country. The unoffending and peaceful
who saw their houses burning, and their families plundered, thought
they could have nothing worse to apprehend from the conquest of the
Romans than from the lawless violence of their own countrymen.”
There is no space here to tell in detail the horrors of the civil
war that ensued within Jerusalem. The cruelties inflicted by the
Romans themselves hardly rivalled the infamous treacheries, murders,
and indignities even to corpses, which the Jews heaped upon their
own people. The Roman Empire itself, however, was also undergoing
the throes of a civil war, in which the Jews thought they saw
the dissolution of the empire and the golden opportunity for the
independence of their own country. But the ship of Roman state
weathered this tempest as so many another, and by the spring of the
year 70 A.D. Titus commenced the siege of the city in earnest. At this
time Jerusalem was crowded with something like a million persons who
had come in for the Passover, but the aggregate number of fighting men
seems to have been less than twenty-four thousand, while the forces of
Titus are estimated at about eighty thousand. The Jews expected succour
from their kinsmen of Parthia as well as from other quarters of the
empire, but before these arrived, if they were ever sent at all, the
forces of Titus appeared before the city. Taking six hundred horse with
him Titus advanced at once to reconnoitre, but as no one appeared to
oppose his progress he incautiously approached so near the wall that he
was suddenly surrounded by a multitude of men who rushed out from one
of the gates behind him. Bareheaded and without his breastplate as he
was, yet he forced his way through this multitude and escaped unharmed
to the Roman camp, although many of his followers were slain.
[Sidenote: [70 A.D.]]
Attempts were made at once to take the walls by storm, but these
assaults were repulsed by the defenders, the Roman army retired to its
entrenchments, and a regular siege began. Battering-rams were brought
into play against the walls, while catapults and ballistæ were plied
incessantly against the defenders on the walls, and were responded to
with similar weapons by them. In the use of these weapons, however, the
Jews were very unskilful, while the bolts and stones thrown from the
Roman camp did effective work both on the walls and inside them. The
enormous thickness of the outer walls resisted the battering-rams for
some days, but they gave way at last and the defenders retired within
their second line. This second wall was carried five days later and
Titus was thus made master of the lower city.
Famine now added to the war within and without the city its ghastly
terrors. Never has a more thrilling picture of human misery been
painted than that of Josephus.[a]
JOSEPHUS’ ACCOUNT OF THE FAMINE
It was now a miserable case, and a sight that would justly bring
tears into our eyes, how men stood as to their food, while the more
powerful had more than enough, and the weaker were lamenting (for want
of it). But the famine was too hard for all other passions, and it is
destructive to nothing so much as to modesty; for what was otherwise
worthy of reverence was in this case despised; insomuch that children
pulled the very morsels that their fathers were eating out of their
very mouths, and what was still more to be pitied, so did the mothers
do as to their infants; and when those that were most dear were
perishing under their hands, they were not ashamed to take from them
the very last drops that might preserve their lives; and while they ate
after this manner, yet were they not concealed in so doing; but the
seditious everywhere came upon them immediately, and snatched away from
them what they had gotten from others; for when they saw any house shut
up, this was to them a signal that the people within had gotten some
food; whereupon they broke open the doors, and ran in, and took pieces
of what they were eating, almost up out of their very throats, and this
by force: the old men, who held their food fast, were beaten; and if
the women hid what they had within their hands, their hair was torn for
so doing; nor was there any commiseration shown either to the aged or
to infants, but they lifted up children from the ground as they hung
upon the morsels they had gotten, and shook them down upon the floor;
but still were they more barbarously cruel to those that had prevented
their coming in, and had actually swallowed down what they were going
to seize upon, as if they had been unjustly defrauded of their right.
They also invented terrible methods of torment to discover where any
food was, and they were these: to stop up the passages of the privy
parts of the miserable wretches, and a man was forced to bear what
it is terrible even to hear, in order to make him confess that he
had but one loaf of bread, or that he might discover a handful of
barley-meal that was concealed; and this was done when these tormentors
were not themselves hungry; for the thing had been less barbarous had
necessity forced them to it; but this was done to keep their madness in
exercise, and as making preparation of provisions for themselves for
the following days. These men went also to meet those that had crept
out of the city by night, as far as the Roman guards, to gather some
plants and herbs that grew wild; and when those people thought they had
got clear of the enemy, these snatched from them what they had brought
with them, even while they had frequently entreated them, and that by
calling upon the tremendous name of God, to give them back some part
of what they had brought; though these would not give them the least
crumb; and they were to be well contented that they were only spoiled,
and not slain at the same time.
It is therefore impossible to go distinctly over every instance of
these men’s iniquity. I shall therefore speak my mind here at once
briefly: That neither did any other city ever suffer such miseries,
nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness
than this was, from the beginning of the world. Finally, they brought
the Hebrew nation into contempt, that they might themselves appear
comparatively less impious with regard to strangers. They confessed
what was true, that they were the slaves, the scum, and the spurious
and abortive offspring of our nation, while they overthrew the city
themselves, and forced the Romans, whether they would or no, to gain
a melancholy reputation, by acting gloriously against them, and did
almost draw that fire upon the temple, which they seemed to think came
too slowly; and, indeed, when they saw that temple burning from the
upper city, they were neither troubled at it, nor did they shed any
tears on that account, while yet these passions were discovered among
the Romans themselves: which circumstances we shall speak of hereafter
in their proper place, when we come to treat of such matters.
So now Titus’ banks were advanced a great way, notwithstanding his
soldiers had been very much distressed from the wall. He then sent a
party of horsemen, and ordered they should lay ambushes for those that
went out into the valleys to gather food. Some of these were indeed
fighting men, who were not contented with what they got by rapine;
but the greater part of them were poor people, who were deterred from
deserting by the concern they were under for their own relations:
for they could not hope to escape away, together with their wives
and children, without the knowledge of the seditious; nor could they
think of leaving these relations to be slain by the robbers on their
account; nay, the severity of the famine made them bold in thus going
out: so nothing remained but that, when they were concealed from the
robbers, they should be taken by the enemy; and when they were going
to be taken, they were forced to defend themselves, for fear of being
punished: as after they had fought, they thought it too late to make
any supplications for mercy: so they were first whipped, and then
tormented with all sorts of tortures before they died, and were then
crucified before the wall of the city. This miserable procedure made
Titus greatly to pity them, while they caught every day five hundred
Jews; nay, some days they caught more; yet did it not appear to be safe
for him to let those that were taken by force go their way; and to set
a guard over so many, he saw would be to make such as guarded them
useless to him.
The main reason why he did not forbid that cruelty was this, that he
hoped the Jews might perhaps yield at that sight, out of fear lest they
might themselves afterwards be liable to the same cruel treatment. So
the soldiers, out of the wrath and hatred they bore the Jews, nailed
those they caught, one after one way, and another after another, to the
crosses, by way of jest; when their multitude was so great, that room
was wanting for the crosses, and crosses wanting for the bodies.
But so far were the seditious from repenting at this sad sight, that,
on the contrary, they made the rest of the multitude believe otherwise;
for they brought the relations of those that had deserted upon the
wall, with such of the populace as were very eager to go over upon the
security offered them, and showed them what miseries those underwent
who fled to the Romans; and told them that those who were caught were
supplicants to them, and not such as were taken prisoners. This sight
kept many of those within the city who were so eager to desert, till
the truth was known; yet did some of them run away immediately as unto
certain punishment, esteeming death from their enemies to be a quiet
departure, if compared with that by famine.
So Titus commanded that the hands of many of those that were caught
should be cut off, that they might not be thought deserters, and might
be credited on account of the calamity they were under, and sent them
in to John and Simon, with this exhortation, that they would now at
length leave off (their madness), and not force him to destroy the
city, whereby they would have those advantages of repentance, even
in their utmost distress, that they would preserve their own lives,
and so fine a city of their own, and that temple which was their
peculiar pride. He then went round about the banks that were cast
up, and hastened them, in order to show that his words should in no
long time be followed by his deeds. In answer to which, the seditious
cast reproaches upon Cæsar himself, and upon his father also, and
cried out with a loud voice, that they contemned death, and did well
in preferring it before slavery; that they would do all the mischief
to the Romans they could while they had breath in them; and that for
their own city, since they were, as he said, to be destroyed, they had
no concern about it, and that the world itself was a better temple to
God than this. That yet this temple would be preserved by him that
inhabited therein, whom they still had for their assistant in this war,
and did therefore laugh at all his threatenings, which would come to
nothing; because the conclusion of the whole depended upon God only.
These words were mixed with reproaches, and with them they made a
mighty clamour.
So all hope of escaping was now cut off from the Jews, together with
their liberty of going out of the city. Then did the famine widen its
progress, and devoured the people by whole houses and families; the
upper rooms were full of women and children that were dying by famine;
and the lanes of the city were full of the dead bodies of the aged; the
children also and the young men wandered about the market-places like
shadows, all swelled with the famine, and fell down dead wheresoever
their misery seized them. As for burying them, those that were sick
themselves were not able to do it; and those that were hearty and
well, were deterred from doing it by the great multitude of those dead
bodies, and by the uncertainty there was how soon they should die
themselves; for many died as they were burying others, and many went to
their coffins before that fatal hour was come!
Nor was there any lamentation made under these calamities, nor were
heard any mournful complaints; but the famine confounded all natural
passions; for those who were just going to die, looked upon those that
were gone to their rest before them with dry eyes and open mouths.
A deep silence also, and a kind of deadly night, had seized upon
the city; while yet the robbers were still more terrible than these
miseries were themselves; for they brake open those houses which
were no other than graves of dead bodies, and plundered them of what
they had; and carrying off the coverings of their bodies, went out
laughing, and tried the points of their swords on their dead bodies;
and, in order to prove what mettle they were made of, they thrust some
of those through that still lay alive upon the ground; but for those
that entreated them to lend them their right hand, and their sword to
despatch them, they were too proud to grant their requests, and left
them to be consumed by the famine. Now every one of these died with
their eyes fixed upon the temple, and left the seditious alive behind
them. Now the seditious at first gave orders that the dead should be
buried out of the public treasury, as not enduring the stench of their
dead bodies. But afterwards, when they could not do that, they had them
cast down from the walls into the valleys beneath.
However, when Titus, in going his rounds along those valleys, saw them
full of dead bodies, and the thick putrefaction running about them, he
gave a groan, and, spreading out his hands to heaven, called God to
witness that this was not his doing.
Some of the deserters, having no other way, leaped down from the wall
immediately, while others of them went out of the city with stones, as
if they would fight them; but thereupon, they fled away to the Romans:
but here a worse fate accompanied these than what they had found within
the city; and they met with a quicker despatch from the too great
abundance they had among the Romans, than they could have done from the
famine among the Jews; for when they came first to the Romans, they
were puffed up by the famine, and swelled like men in a dropsy; after
which they all on the sudden over-filled those bodies that were before
empty, and so burst asunder, excepting such only as were skilful enough
to restrain their appetites, and, by degrees, took in their food into
bodies unaccustomed thereto.
Yet did another plague seize upon those that were thus preserved; for
there was found among the Syrian deserters a certain person who was
caught gathering pieces of gold out of the excrements of the Jews’
bellies,--for the deserters used to swallow such pieces of gold, when
they came out,--and for these did the seditious search them all, for
there was a great quantity of gold in the city, insomuch that as much
was now sold (in the Roman camp) for twelve Attic drachmæ as was sold
before for twenty-five; but when this contrivance was discovered in
one instance, the fame of it filled their several camps, that the
deserters came to them full of gold. So the multitude of the Arabians,
with the Syrians, cut up those that came as supplicants, and searched
their bellies. Nor does it seem to me that any misery befell the Jews
that was more terrible than this, since in one night’s time about two
thousand of these deserters were thus dissected.
But as for John, when he could no longer plunder the people, he betook
himself to sacrilege, and melted down many of the sacred utensils which
had been given to the temple, as also many of those vessels which were
necessary for such as ministered about holy things, the caldrons,
the dishes, and the tables; nay, he did not abstain from those
pouring-vessels that were sent them by Augustus and his wife; for the
Roman emperors did ever both honour and adorn this temple. Whereas this
man, who was a Jew, seized upon what were the donations of foreigners,
and said to those that were with him that it was proper for them to
use divine things while they were fighting for the Divinity, without
fear, and that such whose warfare is for the temple, should live of the
temple; on which account he emptied the vessels of that sacred wine and
oil, which the priests kept to be poured on the burnt-offerings, and
which lay in the inner court of the temple, and distributed it among
the multitude, who, in their anointing themselves and drinking, used
(each of them) above an hin of them. And here I cannot but speak my
mind, and what the concern I am under dictates to me, and it is this:
I suppose, that had the Romans made any longer delay in coming against
these villains, the city would either have been swallowed up by the
ground opening upon them, or been overflowed by water, or else been
destroyed by such thunder as the country of Sodom perished by, for it
had brought forth a generation of men much more atheistical than were
those that suffered such punishments, for by their madness it was that
all the people came to be destroyed.
And, indeed, why do I relate these particular calamities?--while
Manneus, the son of Lazarus, came running to Titus at this very time,
and told him that there had been carried out through that one gate,
which was entrusted to his care, no fewer than a hundred and fifteen
thousand eight hundred and eighty dead bodies, in the interval between
the fourteenth day of the month Xanthicus (Nisan), when the Romans
pitched their camp by the city, and the first day of the month Panemus
(Tammuz). This was itself a prodigious multitude; and though this man
was not himself set as a governor at that gate, yet was he appointed
to pay the public stipend for carrying these bodies out, and so was
obliged of necessity to number them, while the rest were buried by
their relations, though all their burial was but this, to bring them
away, and cast them out of the city. After this man there ran away to
Titus many of the eminent citizens, and told him the entire number of
the poor that were dead; and that no fewer than six hundred thousand
were thrown out at the gates, though still the number of the rest
could not be discovered; and they told him further, that when they
were no longer able to carry out the dead bodies of the poor, they
laid their corpses on heaps in very large houses, and shut them up
therein; as also that a medimnus of wheat was sold for a talent; and
that when, a while afterwards, it was not possible to gather herbs,
by reason the city was all walled about, some persons were driven to
that terrible distress as to search the common sewers and old dunghills
of cattle, and to eat the dung which they got there; and what they of
old could not endure so much as to see, they now used for food. When
the Romans barely heard all this, they commiserated their case; while
the seditious, who saw it also, did not repent, but suffered the same
distress to come upon themselves; for they were blinded by that fate
which was already coming upon the city, and upon themselves also.
Now of those that perished by famine in the city, the number was
prodigious, and the miseries they underwent were unspeakable; for if so
much as the shadow of any kind of food did anywhere appear, a war was
commenced presently; and the dearest friends fell a fighting one with
another about it, snatching from each other the most miserable supports
of life. Nor would men believe that those who were dying had no food;
but the robbers would search them when they were expiring, lest any
one should have concealed food in their bosoms, and counterfeited
dying: nay, these robbers gaped for want, and ran about stumbling and
staggering along like mad dogs, and reeling against the doors of the
houses like drunken men; they would also, in the great distress they
were in, rush into the very same houses two or three times in one
and the same day. Moreover, their hunger was so intolerable, that it
obliged them to chew everything, while they gathered such things as the
most sordid animals would not touch, and endured to eat them; nor did
they at length abstain from girdles and shoes; and the very leather
which belonged to their shields they pulled off and gnawed; the very
wisps of old hay became food to some; and some gathered up fibres, and
sold a very small weight of them for four Attic drachmæ. But why do
I describe the shameless impudence that the famine brought on men in
their eating inanimate things, while I am going to relate a matter of
fact, the like to which no history relates, either among the Greeks or
Barbarians! It is horrible to speak of it, and incredible when heard. I
had indeed willingly omitted this calamity of ours, that I might not
seem to deliver what is so portentous to posterity, but that I have
innumerable witnesses to it in my own age; and besides, my country
would have had little reason to thank me for suppressing the miseries
that she underwent at this time.
There was a certain woman that dwelt beyond Jordan, her name was Mary;
her father was Eleazar, of the village Bethezub, which signifies “the
House of Hyssop.” She was eminent for her family and her wealth, and
had fled away to Jerusalem with the rest of the multitude, and was with
them besieged therein at this time. The other effects of this woman had
been already seized upon; such, I mean, as she had brought with her out
of Peræa, and removed to the city. What she had treasured up besides,
as also what food she had contrived to save, had been also carried off
by the rapacious guards, who came every day running into her house for
that purpose. This put the poor woman into a very great passion, and by
the frequent reproaches and imprecations she cast at these rapacious
villains, she had provoked them to anger against her; but none of them,
either out of the indignation she had raised against herself, or out
of the commiseration of her case, would take away her life; and if she
found any food, she perceived her labours were for others, and not
for herself; and it was now become impossible for her any way to find
any more food, while the famine pierced through her very bowels and
marrow, when also her passion was fired to a degree beyond the famine
itself; nor did she consult with anything but with her passion and the
necessity she was in.
She then attempted a most unnatural thing; and snatching up her son,
who was a child sucking at her breast, she said: “O thou miserable
infant! for whom shall I preserve thee in this war, this famine, and
this sedition? As to the war with the Romans, if they preserve our
lives, we must be slaves! This famine also will destroy us, even before
that slavery comes upon us;--yet are these seditious rogues more
terrible than both the other. Come on; be thou my food, and be thou a
fury to these seditious varlets and a byword to the world, which is all
that is now wanting to complete the calamities of us Jews.”
As soon as she had said this she slew her son; and then roasted him,
and ate the one half of him, and kept the other half by her concealed.
Upon this the seditious came in presently, and smelling the horrid
scent of this food, they threatened her, that they would cut her throat
immediately if she did not show them what food she had gotten ready.
She replied, that she had saved a very fine portion of it for them; and
withal uncovered what was left of her son. Hereupon they were seized
with a horror and amazement of mind, and stood astonished at the sight;
when she said to them:
“This is mine own son; and what hath been done was mine own doing!
Come, eat of this food; for I have eaten of it myself! Do not you
pretend to be either more tender than a woman, or more compassionate
than a mother; but if you be so scrupulous, and do abominate this my
sacrifice, as I have eaten the one half, let the rest be reserved for
me also.”
After which, those men went out trembling, being never so much
affrighted at anything as they were at this, and with some difficulty
they left the rest of that meat to the mother. Upon which the whole
city was full of this horrid action immediately; and while everybody
laid this miserable case before their own eyes, they trembled, as if
this unheard-of action had been done by themselves. So those that were
thus distressed by the famine were very desirous to die; and those
already dead were esteemed happy, because they had not lived long
enough either to hear or to see such miseries.
This sad instance was quickly told to the Romans, some of whom could
not believe it, and others pitied the distress which the Jews were
under; but there were many of them who were hereby induced to a more
bitter hatred than ordinary against our nation;--but for Cæsar, he
excused himself before God as to this matter, and said, that he had
proposed peace and liberty to the Jews, as well as an oblivion of all
their former insolent practices; but that they, instead of concord,
had chosen sedition; instead of peace, war; and before satiety and
abundance, a famine. That they had begun with their own hands to burn
down that temple, which we have preserved hitherto; and that therefore
they deserved to eat such food as this was. That, however, this
horrid action of eating one’s own child, ought to be covered with the
overthrow of their very country itself; and men ought not to leave such
a city upon the habitable earth to be seen by the sun, wherein mothers
are thus fed, although such food be fitter for the fathers than for
the mothers to eat of, since it is they that continue still in a state
of war against us, after they have undergone such miseries as these.
And at the same time that he said this, he reflected on the desperate
condition these men must be in; nor could he expect that such men could
be recovered to sobriety of mind after they had endured those very
sufferings for the avoiding whereof it only was probable they might
have repented.[c]
THE CLOSE OF JEWISH HISTORY
In spite of such gaunt famine, however, the war went on and the
resistance continued. Soon the battering-rams made a breach in the wall
of Antonia, and Titus called upon his soldiers to mount the breach,
but only one soldier, Sibanus, and eleven others responded, and these
were overwhelmed at once. Two nights later, however, twenty-four
soldiers crept into the breach, and Antonia was taken. Titus at once
made offers of clemency and many accepted his offer of mercy, but the
rest fled to Zion and the temple. He then called a council of war to
decide whether the temple should be saved; many of his generals were in
favour of destroying it, but nevertheless Titus ordered the flames to
be extinguished, fixing the next day for the final assault. But even
Roman discipline could not control the infuriated soldiers and one of
them threw a blazing torch into the gilded lattice of the porch. “The
flames sprang up at once. The Jews uttered one simultaneous shriek and
grasped their swords with a furious determination of revenging and
perishing in the ruins of the temple. Titus rushed down with the utmost
speed: he shouted, he made signs to his soldiers to quench the fire:
his voice was drowned and his signs unnoticed in the blind confusion.
The legionaries either could not or would not hear: they rushed on,
trampling each other down in their furious haste, or stumbling over
the crumbling ruins, and perished with the enemy. Each exhorted the
other, and each hurled his blazing brand into the inner part of the
edifice, and then hastened to his work of carnage. The unarmed and
the defenceless people were slain in thousands; they lay heaped like
sacrifices round the altar; the steps of the temple ran with streams of
blood, which washed down the bodies which lay upon it.”
Titus himself entered the Holy of Holies before the flames had reached
the sanctuary, and with a last effort attempted to save it, but in his
very presence his soldiers fired the great door and the building was
soon wrapt in flames.
[Sidenote: [70-73 A.D.]]
Thus was Jerusalem destroyed. Josephus reckons that the number of
people who perished in this siege was one million one hundred thousand,
and while this is probably an exaggeration it is not impossible
that such a number may have perished, when we remember that a large
proportion of the male population of Judea had gathered in Jerusalem
for the Passover. Persecutions of the remaining Jews were soon begun at
Antioch, where several Jews were burnt and tortured. It is to Titus’
credit that these persecutions were checked and his soldiers rebuked:
“The country of the Jews is destroyed--thither they cannot return: it
would be hard to allow them no home to return to--leave them in peace.”
The booty taken at Jerusalem was so enormous as to cause an immense
depreciation in the value of gold and silver throughout Asia, and this
even though the treasures of the temple had been burned and destroyed.
The revolt lasted a little longer in the Dead Sea region. The castle
of Herodion soon fell; Macherus surrendered, but the men were slain,
the women and children sent to slavery. Masada held out till the year
73, when the garrison, seeing their case hopeless, killed their wives
and children, and then themselves after setting fire to the castle.
The Jews in other parts of the world suffered many disasters and made
a few efforts at revolt under Zealots, but gradually all resistance
was crushed out in blood, and the Jews having perished by the hundred
thousand, ceased to be a nation. As Munk said, “Almost all Judea became
a desert; the wolves and the hyenas entered the cities.”[a]
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE TOMB OF THE KINGS, JERUSALEM]
From that day forward the Jews have no important history. The
extremist party of the prophets and Zealots, which was likewise the
nationalist party, no longer existed; it had been drowned in blood.
As for the priests and rabbis, they had long since withdrawn from the
conflict, but it is due to them that the Jews, having completely lost
their national existence, have been able to subsist to this day as a
religious body. “Renouncing the hope of playing a political rôle,”
says Munk, “the Jews directed all their efforts towards a moral aim,
and devoted themselves wholly to consolidating their religious unity.”
Convinced at last that their mission as a body politic was at an end,
and that the sanctuary at Jerusalem, with its priests and sacrifices,
could no longer be the symbol about which the scattered remnants of the
Jewish nation were to gather, they laid down their arms, and sought
by peaceful ways and intellectual methods to strengthen themselves as
a religious body. For a while Palestine still remained the chief seat
of religious study, the rabbis settling in several cities of Galilee,
notably Sephoris and Tiberias. From the school of Tiberias, founded
about the year 180, came forth the famous rabbi, Yehudah, surnamed
the Holy, who collected the incomplete codes and traditional laws of
the schools of the Pharisees, and, in the first quarter of the third
century, fashioned them into an immense system of laws known under
the name of the _Mishnah_, or Second Law. This code is divided into
six parts, entitled _Sedarim_, orders. Each of the six is subdivided
into several treatises, each treatise into chapters. This code was
annotated, discussed, and amplified, first by the Palestinian and then
by the Babylonian school, and each school afterwards made a collection
of these annotations and discussions. The name of _Gemara_, Complement,
was given to these collections, which were much more voluminous than
the _Mishnah_ that serves for their text. The _Mishnah_ and the
_Gemara_ together form the _Talmud_, the Teaching.
The Zealots who had perished in the struggle for independence or in the
massacres that followed on their defeat, and the rabbis who laboured
in obscurity and silence, constituted but a comparatively small part
of the Jewish population, and we may well ask what became of the
innumerable slaves who flooded the empire after the fall of Jerusalem.
They did not all succumb to the arduous toils of the Coliseum. Under
Hadrian there was a fresh influx of Jewish slaves; Dion Cassius, who
speaks of five hundred and eighty thousand men killed in the course
of the war, says nothing of women or children. We cannot doubt that
they were sold, according to the common custom. Renan says that at the
yearly fair of the Terebinth, near Hebron, Jews could be bought at the
same price as horses. Once bought, they ran no further risk of death
from hunger or destitution, for a slave, even if bought at the price of
a horse, represented money’s worth, which it was not in his master’s
interest to lose. Among their co-religionists, slaves like themselves,
or freedmen, these unhappy beings found the pathetic brotherhood of the
poor, ingenious in expedients. All the little nameless trades offered
resources to this humiliated race, unscrupulous, skilful in exploiting
the vices of the ruling classes, armed with good reasons for not loving
the human race. Mingled with slaves of other races, they communicated
to them the fanaticism of their wrath and their hopes of revenge. This
revenge was afterwards relegated to a distant future; but at that
time, smarting under the memory of recent disaster, they dreamt of
it as complete and in the immediate future. Let the world come to an
end, since nothing could reform it; let it go down to the bottomless
pit, with all its defilements, and the agonies of the outcasts of
life, and oppressions without number, and inexpiable ills! The hour of
deliverance is near, and the accursed shall go to everlasting fire,
there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The fall of the Jewish
nation redounded to the advantage of Christian propaganda. From that
time forward we hear less and less of the Jews and more and more of the
Christians.
It is an inevitable consequence of military government that after every
conquest the conquered impose their ideas on the conquerors. When Rome
had subjugated Greece, she herself submitted to the dominion of the
Hellenistic spirit, which imposed on the Romans its own forms of art,
its literary culture, its mythology, and its philosophy. Rome, mistress
of Asia, was invaded by Asiatic luxury, the East opened upon the
West the floodgates of its superstitions, sensual, gloomy, frenzied,
or ascetic; nothing was talked of save mysteries, funeral feasts,
horoscopes, magic, purifications, Isis and Mithras, the passion of
Attys, gods dead and risen again. Egypt had deified the Pharaohs, Rome
deified the Cæsars. Finally, Judea, the last province conquered by the
Romans, was the last to impose its religious thought upon the world.
The obscure traditions of a despised people were destined to take the
place of the glorious memories of Greece and Rome. A monarchy required
a monarchial religion. The republic had vanished from the earth, it
could not be left in the heavens. The images of the gods still stood
in their temples, but since the time of Augustus the only god of the
empire had been the emperor. Since the conscience of the conquerors
of the world had not revolted from the apotheosis of tyrants, the
conquered were fully entitled to seek among their own ranks for a
worthier object. One nation alone had refused its incense to the
emperors. That nation was destined to provide a God for the coming
centuries. In the arrogant words of a Jew of our own times, this nation
said to the world, “Till thou art able to understand me, behold a man
of my race, make of him thy god.” Humanity had found its social ideal
in servitude; it was just that the gibbet of slaves should become the
symbol of the religion of the human race.
Thus in the great Christian synthesis, the worship of the God-man,
which sums up the whole of Greek anthropomorphism, took its place by
the side of Jewish monotheism. With the principle of universal order,
the source and reason of things, was associated, in the unity of the
Divine, the moral law in its loftiest form, the sacrifice of self
and redemption through suffering. But while other religions, when
introduced into the empire, had allowed the traditions and monuments
of Græco-Roman civilisation to remain, the monistic religion of the
Semitic race was destined to exclude all other religious forms and
wipe out the traces of them. Like the wind of the desert that destroys
everything in its path, the solitary God of Sinai was to sweep away
all the works of the past. Hence, some centuries later, Rutilius
Numatianus, the last of pagan poets, exclaimed, in the midst of the
ruins of civilisation and the empire, “Would to the gods that Judea had
never been conquered! The plague, extirpated there, hath spread abroad,
and a vanquished nation oppresses its conquerors.” Had this poet had
a little of the living faith of those he despised, had religion been
anything to him beyond a literary form, he would have recognised that
this conquest of the world by Jewish thought was but a just vengeance
for the hideous wars of Titus and Hadrian, and a striking proof of the
justice of the gods. The events of human history are neither effects
of capricious chance nor phases of necessary evolution, but moral
consequences of a great law of equilibrium and expiation which is the
nemesis of history.[e]
[Illustration: THE TOWER OF DAVID, JERUSALEM]