wall, and hemmed them in on every side; they brought down their high and fenced walls to the ground; they slaughtered the slaughterers, they spared not the people; they burned the temple in defiance of the commands, the threats, and the resistance of their general. With it the last hope of all the Jews was extinguished. They raised at the sight a universal but an expiring cry of sorrow and despair. Ten thousand were there slain, and six thousand victims were enveloped in its blaze. The whole city, full of the famished dying and of the murdered dead, presented no picture but that of despair -no scene but of horror. The aqueducts and the citysewers were crowded as the last refuge of the hopeless. Two thousand were found dead there, and many were dragged from thence and slain. The Roman soldiers put all indiscriminately to death, and ceased not till they became faint and weary and overpowered with the work of destruction. But they only sheathed the sword to light the torch. They set fire to the city in various places. The flames spread every where, and were checked but for a moment by the red streamlets in every street. Jerusalem became heaps, and the Mountain of the house as the high places of the forest. Within the circuit of eight miles, in the space of five months-foes and famine, pillage and pestilence, within-a triple wall around, and besieged every moment from withouteleven hundred thousand human beings perished-though the tale of each of them was a tragedy. Was there ever so concentrated a mass of misery? Could any prophecy be more faithfully and awfully fulfilled? The prospect of his own crucifixion, when Jesus was on the way to Calvary, was not more clearly before him, and seemed to affect him less, than the fate of Jerusalem. How full of tenderness, and fraught with truth, was the sympathetic response of the condoling sufferer to the wailings and lamentations of the women who followed him, when he turned unto them, and beheld the city, which some of them might yet see wrapped in flames and drenched in blood, and said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming, in the which they will say, Blessed are the barren, and the womb that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us, and to the hills, Cover us. For if they do these things in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?" No impostor ever betrayed such feelings as a man, nor predicted events so unlikely, astonishing, and true, as an attestation of a divine commission. Jesus revealed the very judgments of God; for such the instrument by whom it was accomplished interpreted the capture and destruction of Jerusalem, acknowledging that his own power would otherwise have been ineffectual. When eulogized for the victory, Titus disclaimed the praise, affirming, that he was only the instrument of executing the sentence of the divine justice. And their own historian asserts, in conformity with every declaration of Scripture upon the subject, that the iniquities of the Jews were as unparalleled as their punishment. All these prophecies, of which we have been reviewing the accomplishment, were delivered in a time of perfect peace, when the Jews retained their own laws, and enjoyed the protection, as they were subject to the authority, of the Roman empire, then in the zenith of its power. The wonder excited in the minds of his disciples at the strength and stability of the temple drew forth from Jesus the announcement of its speedy and utter ruin. He foretold the appearance of false Christs and pretended prophets; the wars and rumours of wars; the famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, and fearful sights that were to ensue; the persecution of his disciples; the apostacy of many; the propagation of the gospel; the sign that should warn his disciples to fly from approaching ruin; the encompassing and enclosing of Jerusalem; the grievous affliction of the tender sex; the unequalled miseries of all; the entire destruction of the city; the shortening of their sufferings, that still some might be saved; and that all this dread crowd of events, which might well have occupied the progress of ages, was to pass away within the limits of a single generation. None but He who discerns futurity could have foretold and described all these things: and their complete and literal fulfilment shows them to be indubitably the revelation of God. But the prophecies also mark minuter facts, if possible more unlikely to have happened. Jerusalem was to be ploughed over as a field; to be laid even with the ground; of the temple one stone was not to be left upon another; the Jews were to be few in number; to be led captive into all nations: to be sold for slaves, and none would buy them. And each of these predictions was strictly verified. Titus commanded the whole city and temple to be razed from the foundation. The soldiers were not then disobedient to their general. Avarice combined with duty and with resentment: the altar, the temple, the walls, and the city were overthrown from the base, in search of the treasures which the Jews, beset on every hand by plunderers, had concealed and buried during the siege. Three towers and the remnant of a wall alone stood, the monument and memorial of Jerusalem; and the city was afterward ploughed over by Terentius Rufus. In the siege, and in the previous and subsequent destruction of the cities and villages of Judea, according to the specified enumeration of Josephus, about one million three hundred thousand suffered death; ninety-seven thousand were led into captivity. They were sold for slaves, and were so despised and disesteemed, that many remained unpurchased. And their conquerors were so prodigal of their lives, that, in honour of the birthday of Domitian, two thousand five hundred of them were placed, in savage sport, to contend with wild beasts, and otherwise to be put to death.* But the miseries of their race were not then at a close. There was a curse on the land, that hath scathed it, a judgment on the people that hath scattered them throughout the world. Many prophecies respecting them yet remain to be considered, and much of their history is yet untold. The prophecies are as clear as the facts are visible. * Tacitus, who flourished about thirty years after the destruction of Jerusalem, speaks of the strength of the fortifications of that city, the immense riches and strength of the temple, the factions that raged during the siege, as well as of the prodigies that preceded its fall. And he particularly mentions the large army brought by Vespasian to subdue Judea, “a fact which shows the magnitude and importance of the expedition." Philostratus particularly relates that Titus declared, after the capture of Jerusalem, that he was not worthy of the crown of victory, as he had only lent his hand to the execution of a work, in which God was pleased to manifest his anger. Dion Cassius records the conquest of Judea by Titus and Vespasian, the obstinate and bloody resistance of the Jews during the siege, the destruction of the temple by fire. It is recorded by Maimonides, and in the Jewish Talmud (as cited by Basnage and Lardner) that Terentius Rufus, an officer in the Roman army, tore up, with a ploughshare, the foundations of the temple. The triumphal arch of Titus, commemorative of the destruction of Jerusalem, and with figures of Roman soldiers, bearing on their shoulders the holy vessels of the temple, is still to be seen at Rome. CHAPTER IV. PROPHECIES CONCERNING THE JEWS. WHILE Moses, as a divine legislator, promised to the Israelites that their prosperity, and happiness, and peace would all keep pace with their obedience, he threatened them with a gradation of punishments, rising in proportion to their impenitence and iniquity;-and neither in blessings nor in chastisements hath the Ruler among the nations dealt in like manner with any people. But their wickedness and consequent calamities greatly preponderated, and are yet prolonged. The retrospect of the history of the Jews, since their dispersion, could not, at the present day, be drawn in truer terms than in the unpropitious auguries of their prophet above three thousand two hundred years ago. In the most ancient of all records, we read the lively representation of the present condition of the most singular people upon earth. Moses professed to look through the glass of ages: the revolution of many centuries has brought the object immediately before us-we may scrutinize the features of futurity as they then appeared to his prophetic gaze,-and we may determine between the probabilities whether they were conjectures of a mortal, who "knows not what a day may bring forth," or the revelation of that Being, "in whose sight a thousand years are but as yesterday." "I will scatter you among the heathen and draw out a sword after you,—and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste; and upon them that are left of you I will send a faintness into their hearts, in the land of their enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them and they shall flee as fleeing from a sword—and they shall fall when none pursueth-and ye shall have no power to stand before your enemies-and ye shall perish among the heathen;-and the land of your enemies shall eat you up-and they that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquity in your enemies' land; and also, in the iniquities of their fathers, shall they pine away with them, and yet for all that, when they be in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them to destroy them utterly.* And the Lord shall scatter you among the nations, and ye shall be left few in number among the heathen whither the Lord will lead you.† The Lord shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies-thou shalt go out one way against them, and flee seven ways before themand shall be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth. The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart,-and thou shalt grope at noonday as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways, and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee. Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given to another people. There shall be no might in thine hand. The fruit of thy land and all thy labour shall a nation which thou knowest not eat up, and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed alway-so that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see. The Lord shall bring thee unto a nation which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, and thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a by-word among all the nations whither the Lord shall lead thee. Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness and with gladness of heart for the abundance of all things, therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the Lord shall send against thee, in hunger and in thirst—and in nakedness, and in want of all things-and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee.-And the Lord will make thy plagues wonderful, and the plague of thy seed, even great plagues and of long continuance. All these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee, and overtake thee, and they shall be upon thee for a sign and for a wonder, and upon thy seed for ever,-and it shall come to pass, that as the Lord rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you-so the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy and to bring you to naught, and ye shall be plucked from off the land whither thou goest to possess it, and the Lord will scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other-and among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest; but the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind-and thy life shall hang in *Lev. xxvi. 33, 36, 37, 38, 39, 44. Deut. xxviii. 25, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 37-45, 46. † Deut. iv. 27. |