CHAPTER XVII.
“Tribes of the wandering foot and weary breast,
How shall ye flee away and be at rest!
The wild-dove hath her nest, the fox his cave,
Mankind their country—Israel but the grave!”
Byron.
In obedience to the insnaring commands of his unfeeling master, Adonijah stood near the Porta Triumphalis,[[15]] through which that father and son were to pass on their way to the Capitol, who had subdued the chosen people of the Lord, and led them to their long and woeful dispersion. The procession was headed by a band of chosen musicians, who tuned their instruments and voices to the praise of the victors. Next came the select youths who led the gilded and garlanded victims, and after them appeared the spoils of the vanquished nation and the long file of Hebrew captives splendidly arrayed as if in mockery to their misery. Then the sacred contents enshrined in the holy of holies were openly exposed to the view of the heathen multitude. The seven golden candlesticks, the book of the law, the magnificent vessels given by Solomon, the golden vine, and all the costly offerings that native Jew or foreign proselyte had consecrated to the service of the temple of the Lord. The heart of Adonijah burned with grief and indignation as he witnessed the desecration of these hallowed things; he felt that God had indeed utterly forsaken his people. Art was exhausted to make the spectacle imposing; the pageants represented with cruel fidelity every city, town, or fortress of his unhappy country, with the part they had taken in this disastrous war. The ensigns were adorned with paintings representing the land of Judea before the armies of the Gentile conquerors had defaced the Eden-like prospect, and on the reverse bore the pictured semblance of its present desolation. A horrible fascination riveted the eyes of Adonijah to these affecting images of national woe, but a sensation almost allied to joy thrilled through his frame as he gazed on the ruined towers of Jotapata, and remembered that all his kindred had perished there. They did not swell the train of wretched captives, who clanked their chains after the chariot of the victors; their ashes were mingled with the soil of the holy, the beloved Judea. A fiercer, sterner feeling agitated him as he looked upon the sullen face of Simon Gioras, the monster whose crimes he believed had drawn down the vengeance of Heaven upon Jerusalem, and who basely survived the ruin he had wrought. The assassin showed no generous pride, no constancy, no remorse; he meanly cowered from the doom awaiting him, and surviving the death of honour craved for life. The indignant Hebrew turned away sick with disgust and loathing from the traitor. Unconsciously he joined in the shout the people raised to greet the emperor and his son. The Io Triumphe! burst from his lips; he forgot he was uniting his voice to hail the approach of the conquerors of Judea, for reason was fast forsaking him, and the fire of insanity sparkled in his restless eyes as he turned them on the pageant representing the captivity of the holy city, when they suddenly encountered the glance of a female captive chosen for her surpassing beauty to typify the fallen genius of the land. She was sitting under a palm-tree (the emblematical symbol of Judah) in such an immovable attitude of disconsolate sorrow that the spectators doubted whether the graceful drooping form was a miracle of art, or a living, breathing image of despair. Her dark dishevelled ringlets descended to her feet, partially veiling her downcast face. Her eyes so black, so intensely bright, glanced wildly beneath the long jetty lashes that fringed them, and then expanded fearfully as they met the fixed look of Adonijah, who echoed back her cry of agonized recognition, smiting his breast vehemently, and exclaiming, “Tamar, miserable Tamar! woe is me, for thou hast brought me very low, my sister! Unhappy maid, why didst thou not perish with Jotapata? Oh that thou hadst died when the Roman steel was gleaming over thee! The Gentile chains are round thy hands, my sister. Awake, awake, loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, thou captive daughter of Zion; thou that hast drunk of the cup of trembling, who art drunken with sorrow, but not with wine.”
Tamar answered these unconnected ravings with a look of such intense misery, that it instantly recalled the wandering senses of her wretched brother, and united the severed chain of reason anew. In that single look might be read her whole dreadful story. It told of wrong, of shame, of bitter bondage, of unmerited scorn, of all the woes and outrages lovely helpless woman is doomed to suffer in captivity, but which her chaste lip can never utter.
Adonijah saw it all; he rushed forward, and with desperate strength drove back the thickening crowd, and, leaping on the car, caught her in his arms, exclaiming with a deep and bitter cry, “Tamar, my sister, we will never part!”
The poor broken-hearted captive bowed herself upon her brother’s neck, murmured feebly his name, shrouded her face in his bosom, and died without a sigh or struggle.
The tumult, the roar of the furious multitude, the weapons that glittered round him, were unheard, unseen by Adonijah, who, holding his dead sister in his arms, was pouring over her remains a wailing lamentation in his own language, whose wild pathos, could its meaning have reached their ears, might have softened even the enraged populace then thirsting for his blood.
The cause of the uproar was quickly made known to Vespasian, whose voice interposed between the people and their intended victim. He commanded some soldiers of the Prætorian cohorts to seize the Jew who had interrupted the triumph, and convey him to the Mamertine prison. In a moment Adonijah was overpowered, fettered, and hurried from the scene where the last act of his country’s tragedy was performing, to the depth of that dreadful dungeon.
The procession proceeded forward along the Via Sacra till it reached the Capitol, where, according to the barbarous ancient usage, Simon Gioras, the captive leader of the Jews, was to be put to death. A ferocious joy then sat on every face as the lictors flung the rope round the neck of the guilty wretch and dragged him to the edge of the Tarpæian rock, over which they hurled him trembling and shrinking from the death his crimes deserved. The imprecations the captive Jews heaped upon the mangled victim were mingled with the triumphant yells with which the Romans greeted his fall and stifled his expiring cries. Thus died Simon the Assassin, whose end was as dastardly as his life was cruel.
The day of triumph drew near to its close, but the distant shouts of the mad multitude still at intervals met the throbbing ears of Adonijah as he lay fettered on the flinty floor of the dungeon, listening to every sound with the intense attention of one who expects every instant to receive the sentence of death. Between him and the fathomless gulf of eternity only a brief space apparently intervened. The harrowing excitement that had shaken his reason only a few hours ago subsided into a melancholy consciousness of the reality of those events that had jarred every fibre of his brain. He wished to lift the dim veil that overshadowed his own destiny and that of his outcast people. Where was that mighty arm that had “divided the waves of the Red Sea for His ransomed to pass through,” and then commanded the exulting billows to return to their appointed place, overwhelming the impious Pharaoh and his warlike host? Where was the promised Messiah, where the hope of Israel? Who now should recall the scattered tribes, and bind up the incurable wounds of the daughter of Zion? What hand could heal the broken-hearted captive of Judah, condemned to become a curse to the whole earth?
Then from contemplating his country’s woes his thoughts turned to her—so long numbered in his memory with the dead, so vainly found, only to die within his arms. How sadly seemed her image to rise before his mental vision, not fair and bright as in those happier days when the brother and sister were all the world to each other, when Tamar appeared a creature of happiness and smiles, full of song and sunshine!
Tamar, the dishonoured desolate captive, Tamar become the emblem of her nation’s humiliation and despair—alone met his view. Again he seemed to hear her thrilling cry of recognition; again her dark, troubled eye flashed across his sight; again he felt the last wild throb of her breaking heart beat against his bosom.
The shades of thick coming darkness could not exclude the cruel picture; he closed his burning eye-balls, but still her figure appeared to stand distinct and sad before his shrouded orbs. His spirit sank into the lowest depths of dejection, all the curses of the law seemed poured out upon his head during these lonely hours. “Why hast thou forsaken me?” cried he; “my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Suddenly the remembrance of those denunciations written in the Gospel, which he had trampled upon in his unbelieving indignation, came over his mind with the rapidity of lightning. All had been accomplished, all had been fulfilled. In darkness—fast bound in affliction and iron—a fear that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Christ entered the doubting soul of the Hebrew. He strove to harden his heart against conviction, but still conviction struggled mightily within him—till, exhausted with the mental warfare he sustained, he sank into a deep, death-like sleep, from which he did not awaken till the wandering sunbeams glimmering on his chains recalled him to consciousness and misery.
The morning brought a companion to share in his sorrows—an elderly man of his own tribe, one of the defenders of Jerusalem under Simon Gioras. Every particular of this memorable siege was related by Josadec with terrible minuteness—the divisions among the leaders, the sacrilege, the murder, the cruel famine, and that deed whose matchless horror had made Titus swear “that the sun should never shoot his beams into a city where such a barbarity had been committed.” Adonijah groaned; he writhed in agony, a cold dew bathed his trembling limbs, his hair stood up, but Josadec, like a person rendered insensible to feeling by the dreadful force of habit, continued his revolting relations with an apathy that disgusted his sensitive auditor. The signs and portents of the nation’s fall; the warning voice whose perpetual cry of “Woe, woe!” had never been mute till the Roman missile silenced it for ever; the blazing star hanging over the devoted city in the form of a sword; the mighty sound as of a host rushing forth from the holy of holies with the awful words, “Let us depart;”[[16]] the temple laid in ashes, the foundations of the city ploughed up by Titus’ orders;—all convinced Adonijah that the Lord Himself had utterly forsaken the Jews. His arm had fought against them, and all the curses written in the book of the law were now fulfilled upon them. Again the awful prophecies concerning Jerusalem came into his mind. Jesus of Nazareth had foretold the coming miseries of Jerusalem.[[17]] “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Was Adonijah to acknowledge Him as a prophet, or as the promised Messiah, set at nought and rejected by the Jews? He was confounded. Unresolved and terrified, feeling himself exposed to the wrath of God, yet hanging on the very verge of eternity, the Hebrew knew not what to think; he wished to pray, yet like the prophet could only say, “Thou hast covered thyself with a thick cloud so that our prayer cannot pass through.” His companion too derided him. “God has forsaken us for ever; we are now without a priest, and without a king, and without a sacrifice: all prayer is vain, from this second captivity there can be no return.”
Adonijah’s heart was softening from its hardness, and, pierced with a sense of his sins, he poured forth a flood of tears. Josadec, sullen and immovable as marble, turned contemptuously away, nor did he again address himself to his unfortunate companion.
That evening both received their sentence: Josadec was doomed to combat with wild beasts in the arena; Adonijah was condemned to fight with one of his own countrymen in the Circus Maximus. Josadec received the intelligence with sullen apathy; Adonijah, with indignation. Raising his hand towards heaven, he swore by the Almighty name of God to suffer the severest tortures rather than aim a hostile blow at a son of Israel. Dearer than life at that moment seemed the captive children of his people; dearer in their degradation and misery than when he was free and pursuing the flying legions of Cestius Galius, flushed with victory, and believing that he was fighting the battles of the Lord.
| [15] | See Appendix, [Note VIII.] |
| [16] | See Appendix, [Note IX.] |
| [17] | See Appendix, [Note X.] |