For the Temple: A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem

by G. A. Henty

"Yes, the Lord be praised, he was well when we heard of him, a week since!"

The travelers were at once conducted to a room, and supplied with water and clean garments. By the time they had changed, and returned to the general room, John's uncle and cousin had been fetched in from the farm, and he received another hearty welcome.

It almost seemed to him, as he sat down to a comfortable meal, with Mary and his mother waiting upon him, that the events of the past two months had been a hideous dream; and that he had never left his comfortable home on the shore of the Lake of Galilee. As to Jonas, unaccustomed to kind treatment, or to luxury of any kind, he was too confused to utter a word. When the meal was over, John was asked to tell his news; and he related all the stirring incidents of the siege, and the manner in which he and his companion had effected his escape.

"We are, no doubt," he concluded, "the sole male survivors of the siege."

"Not so, my son," Martha said. "There is a report that Josephus has survived the siege; and that he is a prisoner, in the hands of the Romans."

"It may be that they have spared him, to grace Vespasian's triumph, at Rome," John said. "It is their custom, I believe, to carry the generals they may take in war to Rome, to be slain there."

It was not until some time afterwards that John learned the particulars of the capture of Josephus. When he saw that all was lost, Josephus had leaped down the shaft of a dry well, from the bottom of which a long cavern led off, entirely concealed from the sight of those above. Here he found forty of the leading citizens, who had laid in a store of food sufficient to last for many days. Josephus, at least, who gives his account of all these circumstances, says that he quite unexpectedly found these forty citizens in hiding there; but this is improbable in the extreme, and there can be little doubt that he had, long before, prepared this refuge with them, when he found that the people would not allow them to attempt to make their escape from the city.

At night Josephus came up from the well and tried to make his escape but, finding the Romans everywhere vigilant, he returned to the place of concealment. On the third day a woman, who was aware of the hiding place, informed the Romans of it--probably in return for a promise of freedom, for the Romans were searching high and low for Josephus; who could not, they were convinced, have escaped through their lines. Vespasian immediately sent two tribunes, Paulinus and Gallicanus, to induce him to surrender by promise of his life.

Josephus refused to come out, and Vespasian sent another tribune, Nicanor, a personal friend of Josephus, to assure him of his safety, if he would surrender. In the account Josephus gives of the transaction, he says that at this moment he suddenly remembered a dream--in which it was revealed to him that all these calamities should fall upon the Jews, that he himself should be saved, and that Vespasian should become emperor--and that, therefore, if he passed over to the Romans he would do so not as a renegade, but in obedience to the voice of God.

It was certainly a happy coincidence that the dream should have occurred to him, at this moment. He at once announced his readiness to surrender; but his forty companions did not see the matter in the same light. The moment Josephus left them, the Roman soldiers would throw combustibles down the well, and suffocate them, if they did not come out and submit to slaughter.