Which set upon us both by night and day.
It is recorded that in the month Adar,—answering, according to our computation of time, to the period between the middle of February and March, the end of the Jewish year,—during the reign of Pharaoh IV., king of Egypt, in the year of the world 2509 (anno 1495 before the Christian era), and in the 80th year of the life of Moses, the sacred historian and great captain of the hosts of Israel, many awful prodigies in the natural world commenced, especially in commotions of the elements, which were succeeded by a pestilence destructive both to men and beasts in the low lands of Egypt. This terrible pestilence was preceded by fearful commotions of the elements,—hail, thunder and lightning, heat and drought, the generation of insects, &c.; for the summer had been hot, and attended with heavy cold nocturnal dews alternating with rains, after a humid winter. The weather had been very variable; the excessive heats and hot winds exhausted the inhabitants by day, and the cold damp dews chilled them by night: the atmosphere was so filled with fiery elements, and clouds of dust and sand, that men and cattle were in imminent danger of suffocation, and were compelled to seek shelter from these dry storms and tempests. On the 10th, universal darkness prevailed, which continued for three days; and on the 14th, deadly pestilence commenced, which, in one sudden and universal destruction, swept away millions from the face of nature.
Anno 1471 B.C., by dire pestilence, the murmurers and mutineers in the company of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram were destroyed in the encampment at Kadesh, in the desert of Paran, to the number of 14,700 persons; and nineteen years after (1452 B.C.), by a similar pestilence, of the riotous and drunken worshippers of Baal-peor, 24,000 men and women perished.
In the year 1310 B.C., sixty years previous to the Trojan war, the island of Ægina was visited by an epidemic pestilence, which was fatal to great numbers.
Anno 1141 B.C., the people of Ashdod, a place lying on the seashore between Gaza and Joppa, which is called in the New Testament Azotus, were visited by an epidemic pestilence termed Emerods—an affection of the bowels, or malignant dysentery.
In the time of David, 1017 B.C., there broke out a pestilence which in three days destroyed 70,000 persons. About the period of this infliction, the first dreadful epoch of Spanish epidemiology is recorded. The period, however, has been variously given; by some, it is fixed at 1100 B.C., while other writers mention it as having occurred during the great plague or dearth in Egypt. There were, without interruption, twenty-five years of drought in Spain; springs were dried up, rivers became fordable, their waters becoming almost stagnant; there was neither pasture for beasts nor fruit for man; so great was the barrenness of the land, that there was scarcely any green thing to be found, except some olive-trees on the banks of the Ebro and the Guadalquiver. Such, says the historian, was the melancholy state of our ancient Spain; “full of dreadful mortalities, plagues, and miseries of every description, which, with emigration to other lands, nearly depopulated our country.”
Plutarch mentions the occurrence of a great pestilence that happened in Rome in the year 790 B.C., soon after the murder of Tatius: it was so rapidly fatal that it is represented as killing almost instantaneously; cattle as well as men were swept away, and all nature appeared one desolate and abandoned waste: during this awful period it is said to have rained blood, or crimson insects which turned the waters to the colour of blood, as happened in Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh: the crops failed, and the country of Campania may be said to have been ravaged by the sword, famine, and pestilence. Plutarch also gives an account of an epidemic pestilence which afflicted the inhabitants of Italy, especially the capital of the empire, during the reign of Numa Pompilius, of Hezekiah over Judah, and of Sennacherib over Assyria in the year 710 B.C.: by this pestilence 185,000 of the Assyrian armies perished at the siege of Jerusalem, which compelled the assailants to raise the siege and to return to Nineveh, even after they had taken all the principal cities of Judah, including Libnah, a city situated about twelve miles south-west of Jerusalem. It was at this period that Numa Pompilius instituted the Salii, a college of priests of Mars, who carried the sacred shields in procession, to stop the pestilence.
Livy describes another pestilence which occurred at Rome during the reign of Tullus Hostilius, 694 B.C. Zosimus, an officer during the reign of Theodosius the Younger, speaks of the prevalence of a pestilence in the city of Rome during the reign of Tarquin, anno 671 B.C.; and Dionysius Halicarnassus, Murator, and Functius have also mentioned the occurrence of a great famine and pestilence in Rome, anno 545 B.C., which nearly depopulated Velitræ, an ancient town of Latium on the Appian Road, about twenty miles to the east of Rome. A murrain prevailed about this time among their cattle, which destroyed vast numbers, and such havoc was made among the inhabitants of Latium that the Volsci were necessitated to apply to the Romans to re-people their cities. Rome also suffered the year subsequently, as did Campania, celebrated for its lake Avernus, which emitted such poisonous vapours that birds would not go near its banks: this pestilence spared neither age nor constitution, and yielded to no remedies. It appeared suddenly, destroyed its victims rapidly, and on the approach of continued cold weather disappeared as suddenly as it came.
Anno 594 B.C. There perished this year a third part of the inhabitants of Jerusalem by a severe pestilence.