The quenchless light

by Agnes C. Laut

Where was Mariamne, Herod the Great’s proud wife, murdered by him? Her tomb has recently been discovered near Jerusalem; but it was in the Fort east of the Dead Sea that Herod went mad with remorse over his crime against her.

APPENDIX C
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FALL OF
JERUSALEM AND THE BREAKING UP
OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The fall of Jerusalem was of deeper, subtler significance than the surrender of any one of the countless cities which were subject to Rome.

Rome had passed through a few years of terrible turbulence after Nero’s suicide in 68. When Vespasian, the steady-headed general with the Army’s strength and loyalty behind him, surged to the crest of the turbulence as Emperor in 69, Rome realized in order to stabilize her entire Empire, she must crush rebellion or revolution wherever found. If one city like Jerusalem, or one little province like Judea not much larger than Vermont or New Hampshire, could defy Roman power, all the Eastern provinces would flame in revolt; and there were certain considerations that particularly embittered the Romans towards the Jews. From at least thirty or forty years before the birth of Christ, the Jews of Jerusalem had been granted special privileges by the Roman Senate. They were allowed freely to exercise their own peculiar religious rites. Their huge temple revenues from Jews in every part of the world were left untouched by Rome. Though a head tax had been imposed from the days of the census in Christ’s boyhood—supposed not to have exceeded from fifty to sixty cents of modern money—the Jews paid no other tributary taxes to Rome. Certain seaport towns, from the borders of Egypt in the south to Asia Minor on the north, seemed to have paid some sort of municipal tax in excise, which went to the members of the local rulers like the Herod family as a personal revenue or bride’s dowry; and yet all local rulers amassed colossal fortunes. How did they do it? By the perversion of justice. While the Jews had their own courts dominated by high priests, these court decisions were subject to appeal to Rome; and as evident in the case of Paul and Felix and Festus at Cæsarea, a bribe could buy freedom or friendship. Paul could have had his liberty if he had paid a bribe. He would not and was held for two years. Then, while the Roman generals cleaned out the robber bands and kidnappers of the desert and Galilee and Dead Sea caves, they too often, like Felix, sold both defeated brigands and brigand prisoners as slaves for immediate profit.

Now the Roman in religion was all things to all men. He set up the goddess Roma in the temples with the features of whatever emperor happened to be ruling, not because he believed his own ruler a god, but because he saw that the great diversity of gods in the East split the Empire up into warring factions; and Rome aimed to unify her Empire by religion, and doubtless winked cynically at neglect to worship the goddess Roma, as long as no disrespect was offered the statue; but statue, image, picture, painting—all were abhorrent to the Jew, who regarded all outside the pale of the chosen people as cursed by God; so the Jews abominated the conqueror Romans; and the Romans despised the Jews as bigots, fanatics, stiff-necked factionists.

What added gall to bitterness with the Jews was that, from the time of the captivity in Babylon and Persia, from five to seven centuries before Christ, they had not known a national, safe, stable government of their own. There were more Jews in Egypt and Asia Minor than in Palestine. Faction had followed faction; revolution had followed revolution till the Chosen People were the prey to any conqueror from Egypt to Persia; and so there grew up the hope of a Redeemer, a Messiah, a royal son of the line of David, to throw off the conqueror’s yoke and lead them to victory. Such a Messiah, the prophets and the scrolls of the prophets foretold. A Sadducee might be a bigoted sceptical materialist, but when he heard the scrolls of the seers of 500 to 700 B.C. read, predicting exactly what had happened to Babylonia and Assyria and Persia and Greece, the agnostic Sadducee was not prepared to deny there might be a Messiah. Somehow, in the modern mind, the Pharisee is held in lower esteem than the Sadducee. The Pharisee was a gentle and, it might be, attudinizing self-conscious poseur; but he was a scholar, and he was liberal, and he was a gentleman. The Sadducee was a hard, ignorant, materialistic bigot. He swore by Moses, but denied a future life and set himself to grasp all the good things of this life within reach, and had at the time of Christ’s death captured the best sinecures among the offices of the high priests and council of seventy. He hated the Roman with a bigoted, materialistic hatred, though he played politics with him for his own job. The disappointment of both Sadducees and Pharisees at a poor Nazarene named Jesus, calling himself the Messiah and gaining an enormous following, flamed into delirious fanatic frenzy; and just then rose the Zealots and Sicarii (short sword fighters) shouting “freedom at any cost” and rallying all Jews in the Passover of spring—when more than two million pilgrims visited the Holy City—to rise and throw off the Roman yoke. The city gates were shut. The citizens inside had no choice but to join the rebels, or let themselves down by ropes from the walls at night and flee for the desert; but many citizens, knowing the power of Rome and having all their means invested in Jerusalem, tried to compromise. They were plundered, tortured, murdered. Women and children were held for ransom, or hostages for the loyalty of the waverers; and the rebellion that had flamed up in the name of “freedom” presently ran lawless riot under an ægis better named “folly”; and for seven months the Holy City was ruled by brute-beast crime and anarchy. If the Sadducees and the Pharisees had intrigued with the rebellion at first, they were now trapped in their own intrigue, for they saw their temple chests rifled of the revenues of almost a century, the gold sheathing ripped from the great pillars and colonnades, the holy wine brought from vault and cellar and poured out, mingled with human blood, in a deluge of frenzied debauch that lasted from spring till autumn—seven long months. Famine only rendered the conditions more desperate. If the Zealots surrendered now, they knew they would be put to the sword and lose the loot hidden in the secret aqueduct under the Temple; so they fought with the maniacal frenzy of cornered beasts. The Pharisees and Sadducees of the Sanhedrim would now have surrendered to Rome; but the Zealots pursued them into the Holy of Holies and either stabbed them there and threw their bodies in the aqueduct below, or pursued them into the very aqueduct, where they were slain.

Keep in mind the configuration of the Holy City at this time—the Herod Palaces to the west, the great Temple to the east, the whole city like an eagle’s nest on the flat top of a lofty rock. Between the Temple and the Palaces lay the main body of the cramped, crowded city thoroughfares. This central city lay in a slight depression. Between the Temple east and the Palaces west ran an overhead bridge. Below ran a very large underground aqueduct, which supplied water to the Temple. The water supplies came from pools and cisterns used at the Palaces and were sluiced on during the great yearly sacrifices through the aqueduct to run under the Temple and carry off the refuse to the precipice to the east or south of the Temple. When the sacrifices were over, the water was turned off the aqueduct and presumably used for the Royal Palace enclosures.

The best description of ancient Jerusalem is in Josephus covering hundreds of pages; of modern Jerusalem is in Thomson’s Land and Book; but until the transfer of control of the Holy City from Turkish power, it has been impossible to examine the underground passages beneath the city of which there are many, or the lines of the old Herod walls. Within fifty years of Christ’s death, the site of the Temple was plowed and a shrine set up to a pagan Venus.

Whichever way the war befell, the Herod regime was doomed. By rebellion, the Jews had forfeited their privileges. There could be no royal revenues for the Herods through local governments. If the Zealots had triumphed, then Roman protection would no longer hold the Herod throne secure; and the Herods were hated by the populace.

Up to the final truce portrayed in the story of the fall of the Holy City, Titus, the commanding Roman general, had exercised great clemency and forbearance. He had permitted refugees from the beleaguered city to pass through his lines untouched, to the desert beyond Jordan. He had sent emissary after emissary to the more intelligent section of rulers to advise them to save themselves by surrender; but each peace mission had met with treachery and insult. Twice in sorties of semipeace messengers, Titus had been cut off from his own soldiers and almost slain; so it was necessary to call to the aid of the regular Roman Army, the Macedonian Mercenaries; and from that moment, Jerusalem was doomed, for the Mercenaries were paid in plunder.