THE EVIL DAYS.
It was not long before the portent which the terrified crowd had watched
from the walls of Jerusalem found, or at least began to find, its
fulfilment, for, indeed, many days were to pass before the wretched people
had drained the cup of suffering to the dregs.
First there was the actual arrival of the army, the rumour of whose
approach had struck such terror into Jason. At its head came Antiochus in
person, fresh from his successful campaigns in Egypt and in his train
followed the renegade Menelaüs with a crowd of unscrupulous and profligate
adventurers. There was no attempt at resistance. The gates were thrown
open by the King’s adherents in the city. But if the citizens had hoped to
soften the tyrant’s heart by their submissive attitude they were miserably
disappointed. For days the streets of the city ran red with blood. The
prominent members of the patriotic party were the first to perish. Then
came all the private enemies of the returning renegades; and then a far
greater multitude who were singled out for destruction by the possession
of anything that excited the cupidity of the conquerors. Lastly, as ever
happens at such times, the massacre that is suggested by hatred or greed
was followed by the massacre that is the result of the merest wantonness.
But there were victims more unhappy than those who thus perished by the
sword of the heathen. The money found on the persons and in the houses of
the victims did not satisfy the cupidity of their murderers. There were
thousands who had indeed nothing of their own to lose, but who were in
themselves a valuable property. These were sent off in droves to be sold,
till the slave-markets of the Eastern Mediterranean were glutted with the
Jewish youth.
Still worse in the eyes of all pious Jews than the massacre or the
captivity was the profanation of the Temple. The innermost shrine, the
Holy of Holies, which the high priest himself was permitted by the Law to
enter but once only in the year, was thrown open to the unhallowed gaze of
a debauched heathen. With a horror that passes description the people saw
the renegade Menelaüs, bound to be the guardian of the sanctity of the
place, actually drawing aside the veil with his own hand, and conducting
the King into the awful enclosure. They saw the most sacred treasures,
gifts of the piety of many generations, treasures to which the revenue of
the Persian kings, and even of the victorious Alexander himself had
contributed, become the spoil of the sacrilegious intruders. The golden
altar of incense and the table of the shew-bread were taken by the King,
while the seven-branched candlestick of gold fell, as was commonly
believed, to the high priest himself. They saw it, and it almost
overturned their faith that no visible sign of the Divine wrath followed
an impiety so terrible.
So Antiochus came and went, leaving behind him as his deputy, Philip, the
Phrygian, “in manners more barbarous than he who set him there.” The time
that followed was one of grievous depression and sadness. Life went on, as
it will even amidst the gloomiest circumstances, but all the joy and
brightness were crushed out of it.
Micah’s sister, the Hannah whom we have seen talking to him on the wall,
gave birth to a son shortly after the departure of Antiochus. No feast was
held on occasion of the rite that made the little one a member of the
family of Abraham. When the forty days of purification were past, the
mother was not taken to present her offspring in the Temple. The Temple,
the haunt of pagans and apostates, was no place for faithful sons and
daughters of Abraham. A visit to its courts could hardly be the seal of
purification when it needed purifying so sorely itself.
An occasion that should by right have been still more joyful was allowed
to pass with the absence of festivity. A younger sister of Hannah, Ruth by
name, had long before been promised to Seraiah, a friend and relative of
her husband. Time after time the marriage had been postponed, under the
pressure of evil times; and when at last it was performed, not even then
without sore misgivings and anticipations of evil among all the elders of
the family, the celebration was of the quietest kind. Not a guest beyond
the few friends who attended on the bridegroom was invited; and it was in
dead silence, not with the usual shouts of merriment and gay procession of
torches, that the bride was taken to her husband’s home.
And yet, as we shall see, even for these evils there was a compensating
good.
Micah, though he had affected to make light of the foreboding of evil
which he had heard from his sister, had really been impressed by it—so
much impressed, indeed, that he had left the city for a little country
house at the northern end of the Lake of Galilee, that belonged to him. He
had invited his relatives to accompany him, but they had declined. Their
place, they said, was at home, among their poorer brethren, where they
might do something to help and strengthen. All that Micah could do was to
commend them to the protection of the Greek party in the city, with whom,
in spite of his fast increasing disgust at their proceedings, he had not
yet broken.
He had now returned, and he lost no time in finding his way to his
sister’s house. The ravages made by fire and sword were only too plainly
visible as he walked along. Houses that he had known from his childhood,
in which he had often been a guest, were now but blackened walls; others
were shapeless ruins. Again and again he saw on fragments of stone and
plaster hideous blotches which he knew to be of blood; and as he saw these
things he cursed aloud the hands which had wrought these horrors, not
without the bitterest self-reproach that his own hand might have grasped
them in friendship.
It was a great relief to find that his sister’s house had been spared any
outrage. But when he demanded admittance in the usual way, by kicking the
door, it became evident that there had been a reign of terror, and that
the inmates of the dwelling were not sure that it was yet over. The door
was not thrown open in the usual free fashion of Jewish hospitality, but
he became aware by a slight movement of one of the closed lattices that he
was being inspected from above. The inspection was apparently
satisfactory, for in another minute there was a sound of undrawing bolts
and unfastening chains, and the inhospitable door was at last open.
Hannah, sadly aged in look her brother thought, met him in the hall, and
greeted him with a silent embrace. After a pause, in which she seemed to
be struggling with her tears, she said—
“Welcome, dear Micah; while you and my husband and my children are left to
me I feel that I cannot be unhappy. And perhaps you,” she added, with a
wistful look in his face, “will draw nearer to us now. But come and see my
dear ones.”
She led the way to a room at the back of the house, looking out into a
little garden shaded by a wide-branching fig-tree. Hannah noiselessly drew
aside the curtain that served for a door, and the two stood by common
consent and watched the scene that met their eyes. Azariah, the father of
the family, was sitting with his back turned to them, holding on his knees
a copy of the Law. On two stools at his feet sat his daughters, each
holding in one hand a tablet covered with wax, and in the other a _stylus_
or sharp-pointed iron pen. He was slowly dictating to them the words,
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one Lord,” and the little creatures
were laboriously forming, not without many pauses for thought, the
scarcely familiar letters.
“Now read it, my children,” said Azariah, when the task was finished; and
one after another the sweet, childish voices repeated the well-known
words. Micah, as he listened, felt himself strangely touched. Presently he
heard his sister murmur to herself, “In Thy Law will I meditate day and
night,” and glancing at her face saw it illumined with a joy which he
could scarcely have believed those wasted features capable of expressing.
“’Tis well, Miriam; ’tis well, Judith,” said Azariah to the little girls,
and putting his hands upon their heads, as they stood before him, for they
had risen to repeat the holy words, he repeated, “The God of Abraham and
Sarah bless you.” And then, for they were mere children after all, and not
above childish rewards, gave each a ripe fig from a basket which stood on
a table by his side.
The lesson being over, Hannah advanced, and her brother followed. Azariah
turned and greeted the new comer not unkindly, but with a certain reserve,
for he could not forget that his visitor was a Menander as well as a
Micah, and that he had been the friend of the traitorous Jason, and the
yet more traitorous Menelaüs. The children, after their first feeling of
alarm, for a strange face was seldom seen in that home, and when Miriam,
the elder, had recognized her uncle, showed no reserve in their welcome.
They clung about his neck, and kissed him. They insisted on his coming to
see their pets—Miriam’s turtle-doves, and Judith’s dormice, and the little
gazelle fawn which they owned in common. “They have not heard a word
against me,” thought Micah to himself; and this affectionate loyalty
touched him to the heart. From his sister he might, perhaps, have expected
it, but that the stern Azariah, a narrow-minded bigot, without a kindly
thought for any that did not walk in his way, as he had been accustomed to
think of him—that Azariah himself should have dealt with him so
mercifully, was a surprise as it was also a reproach.
He stopped with them for the rest of the day, and after the evening meal,
when the little ones had gone to bed, after making their uncle promise
that he would soon come and see them again, the three had much serious
talk together.
Micah had, of course, the family history to hear, for, stranger as he had
been to them for some years past, he knew scarcely anything about it. He
learnt now for the first time that a little boy had been born who, had he
lived, would have been about two years younger than Judith. The mother had
much to say about his beauty and goodness, and his rare promise of
intelligence. Micah was touched all the more because he could not forgive
himself for the alienation which had prevented him from saying a word of
comfort to his sister in the hour of her bereavement. “It was, indeed, a
terrible loss,” and he rose from his seat and kissed her. He felt that
this little proof of his love would be better than many words.
“Nay,” she said, with a cheerfulness that almost startled him—“nay; you
must not say that we have lost our dear little Joshua. I know that I have
a son still, though he is not here. I confess that it was very hard to
part with him. But he is quite safe in Abraham’s bosom, safer and better
off,” she added, with a sad smile, “than he would be here; and some day I
shall see him, and show him to you, dear Micah, and we shall be happy
together.”
After this the little party had much talk about the state of things in the
present, and the prospects of the future. Again Micah was astonished to
see the cheerfulness and courage which his sister and her husband kept up
in the midst of circumstances which must have been most disheartening.
“Ah!” said Azariah, when the conversation turned upon the desolation of
the Temple, and the loss of all the ceremonial of worship, the daily
sacrifice, and the great festivals of the year—“Ah! there are consolations
even here. Perhaps we thought too much of these things in the old time. We
were taken up with the outside, with the show and the splendour, the
vessels of gold, and the clouds of incense smoke as they curled about the
pillars and the roof, and we forgot what they meant. But now that the
outside things are taken from us, we can give our hearts to that which is
within. We have our gatherings still, though the Temple doors are shut.
Every Sabbath-day we meet, and the Law and the Prophets are read in our
ears—aye, and there are those who can expound them, and speak words that
comfort and strengthen us. I, myself, have felt the Spirit move me once or
twice to exhort and cheer the brethren. No, brother! believe me, it is not
wholly loss that we cannot assemble any more in our beautiful house. Our
fathers learnt much when they sat mourning by the waters of Babylon, and
we also are learning much in this our second captivity.”
This sounded strange to the young man, who, indeed, had dulled his
understanding of spiritual things by his follies and excesses. Still he
could not help feeling deeply impressed by the evident earnestness of the
speaker. But he felt that he could say nothing. A trifler and unbeliever
like himself could only remain silent in the presence of thoughts and
feelings so much higher than anything to which he could reach.
After a short pause Azariah went on—“The Lord has not seen fit to renew
among us the spirit of prophecy, and we know not certainly of the things
that are coming upon the earth. Yet a man, though he be no prophet, may
read the signs of the times. Believe me, there are days to come more full
of evil and darkness even than those that we have seen. My heart sometimes
fails me when I think of this dear woman,” and as he spoke he laid his
hand upon his wife’s shoulder, “and of the little ones whom God has given
us. It will be a hard time for men to battle through—but for women and
children——.” And his voice faltered.
Hannah turned to him with her brave, cheerful smile—“‘As thy days, so
shall thy strength be.’ The great prophet said it, did he not, to all his
people—to the weak ones as well as to the strong?”
Shortly after Micah took his leave. As he walked through the deserted
streets he thought much of the words which he had heard that night, and
still more of the cheerfulness and courage, ten times more eloquent than
all words, which he had witnessed.
“Is all this a delusion?” he asked himself. “Six months ago, perhaps even
six hours ago, I should have had little doubt in saying so. But now—well,
if it is a delusion, it is strangely like a reality. Anyhow its effects
are real enough. Dear Hannah! always the best and kindest of sisters, but
a timid creature, whom I used to amuse myself by frightening. But now—she
is as bold as a lioness. Well, I can only hope that the truths which I
have been learning, if they are truths, will stand me in as good stead
when the need comes.”