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now all the horrors of starvation were experienced. A measure of
wheat was sold for a talent. Great numbers of the people would
steal out at night, to appease their hunger by devouring herbs and
wild plants growing outside the city walls, though they were often
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detected, and punished with torture and death. Some would gnaw
the leather on their shields and sandals. The most inhuman tortures
were inflicted by those in power to force from the want-stricken
people the last scanty supplies which they might have concealed.
And these cruelties were not infrequently practiced by men who
were themselves well fed, and who were merely desirous of laying
up a store of provision for the future.
Thousands perished from famine and pestilence. Natural affec-
tion seemed to have been utterly destroyed. Children would be seen
snatching the food from the mouths of their aged parents. The ques-
tion of the prophet, “Can a woman forget her sucking child?” [Isaiah
49:15.] received the answer within the walls of that doomed city,
“The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children;
they were their meat in the destruction of the daughter of my people.”
[Lamentations 4:10.]
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The Roman leaders endeavored to strike terror to the Jews, and
thus cause them to surrender. Those prisoners who resisted when
taken, were scourged, tortured, and crucified before the wall of
the city. Hundreds were daily put to death in this ma
dreadful work continued until, along the valley of Jehoshaphat and
at Calvary, crosses were erected in so great numbers that there was
scarcely room to move among them. So terribly was fulfilled the
profane prayer uttered forty years before, “His blood be on us, and
on our children.” [Matthew 27:25.]
Titus would willingly have put an end to the fearful scene, and
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thus have spared Jerusalem the full measure of her doom. He was
filled with horror as he saw the bodies of the dead lying in heaps
in the valleys. Like one entranced, he looked from the crest of
Olivet upon the magnificent temple, and gave command that not
one stone of it be touched. Before attempting to gain possession
of this stronghold, he made an earnest appeal to the Jewish leaders
not to force him to defile the sacred place with blood. If they would
come forth and fight in any other place, no Roman should violate the
sanctity of the temple. Josephus himself, in a most eloquent appeal,
entreated them to surrender, to save themselves, their city, and their
place of worship. But his words were answered with bitter curses.
Darts were hurled at him, their last human mediator, as he stood
pleading with them. The Jews had rejected the entreaties of the Son
of God, and now expostulation and entreaty only made them more
determined to resist to the last. In vain were the efforts of Titus to
save the temple; One greater than he had declared that not one stone
was to be left upon another.
The blind obstinacy of the Jewish leaders, and the detestable
crimes perpetrated within the besieged city, excited the horror and
indignation of the Romans, and Titus at last decided to take the
temple by storm. He determined, however, that if possible it should
be saved from destruction. But his commands were disregarded.
After he had retired at night to his tent, the Jews, sallying from the
temple, attacked the soldiers without. In the struggle, a firebrand was
flung by a soldier through an opening in the porch, and immediately
the chambers about the holy house were in a blaze. Titus rushed to
[35]
the place, followed by his generals and legionaries, and commanded
the soldiers to quench the flames. His words were unheeded. In their
Destruction of Jerusalem
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fury the soldiers hurled blazing brands into the chambers adjoining
the temple, and then with their swords they slaughtered in great
numbers those who had found shelter there. Blood flowed down
the temple steps like water. Thousands upon thousands of Jews
perished. Above the sound of battle were heard voices shouting,
“Ichabod!”—the glory is departed.
The fire had not reached the holy house itself when Titus entered,
and, beholding its unsurpassed splendor, he was impelled to a last
effort for its preservation. But in his very presence, a soldier thrust a
lighted torch between the hinges of the door, and in an instant the
flames burst out within the sanctuary. As the red glare revealed the
walls of the holy places, glittering with gold, a frenzy seized the
soldiers. Goaded on by a desire for plunder, and filled with rage by
the resistance of the Jews, they were beyond control.
The lofty and massive structures that had crowned Mount Moriah
were in flames. The temple towers sent up columns of fire and smoke.
As the lurid tide rolled on, devouring everything before it, the whole
summit of the hill blazed like a volcano. Mingled with the roar of
the fire, the shouts of the soldiers, and the crash of falling buildings,
were heard the frantic, heart-rending cries of old and young, priests
and rulers. The very mountains seemed to give back the echo. The
awful glare of the conflagration lighted up the surrounding country,
and the people gathered upon the hills, and gazed in terror upon the
scene.
After the destruction of the temple, the whole city soon fell into
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the hands of the Romans. The leaders of the Jews forsook their
impregnable towers, and Titus found them solitary. He gazed upon
them with amazement, and declared that God had given them into
his hands; for no engines, however powerful, could have prevailed
against those stupendous battlements. Both the city and the temple
were razed to their foundations, and the ground upon which the holy
house had stood was “plowed as a field.” More than a million of
the people were slaughtered; the survivors were carried away as
captives, sold as slaves, dragged to Rome to grace the conqueror’s
triumph, thrown to wild beasts in the amphitheaters, or scattered as
homeless wanderers throughout the earth.
The Jews had forged their own fetters; they had loaded for them-
selves the cloud of vengeance. In the utter destruction that befell
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them as a nation, and in all the woes that followed them in their
dispersion, they were but reaping the harvest which their own hands
had sown. Their sufferings are often represented as a punishment
visited upon them by the direct decree of God. This is a device by
which the great deceiver seeks to conceal his own work. By stubborn
rejection of divine love and mercy, the Jews had caused the protec-
tion of God to be withdrawn from them, and Satan was permitted to