With the British Army in The Holy Land

by H. O. Lock

"The intelligence of the insurrection, magnified into a deliberate revolt of the whole nation, reached Antiochus. He marched without delay against Jerusalem, put to death in three days' time 40,000 of the inhabitants, and seized as many more to be sold as slaves. He entered every court of the Temple, pillaged the treasury, and seized all the sacred utensils. He then commanded a great sow to be sacrificed on the altar of burnt offerings, part of the flesh to be boiled, and the liquor from the unclean animal to be sprinkled over every part of the Temple; and thus desecrated with the most odious defilement the sacred place which the Jews had considered for centuries the one holy spot in all the Universe."[3]

Two years afterwards, Antiochus determined to exterminate the Hebrew race from the face of the earth. This produced the revolt of the Jews under Mattathias, whose illustrious son, Judas Maccabæus, founded the Maccabæan dynasty. By 128 b.c., the Jews, under John Hyrcanus, recovered their complete independence, which they maintained until compelled to acknowledge the dominion of Rome.

But the native rulers could not govern for long without dissension. Soon were two more competitors, Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, quarrelling about the succession to the Jewish throne. The republic of Rome, having trampled under foot the pride and strength of the great Asiatic monarchies, assumed a right of interfering in the affairs of every independent kingdom. The ambassadors of Aristobulus and Hyrcanus appeared before Pompey, who was then in Syria and was at the zenith of his power. After subjugating Arabia, Pompey, in 63 b.c., marched directly into Judæa. Espousing the candidature of Hyrcanus, Pompey marched against Jerusalem, within the walls of which he was admitted by the party of Hyrcanus. Aristobulus and his supporters, with the priesthood, withdrew to the Temple and prepared for an obstinate defence. At the end of three months, and after great loss of life, the Romans made themselves masters of the Temple. "The conduct of the Roman General excited at once the horror and the admiration of the Jews. He entered the Temple, and even penetrated and profaned with his heathen presence the Holy of Holies. All the riches he left untouched, and the Temple he commanded to be purified from the carnage of his soldiers."[4] He stipulated the tribute which the country was to pay, demolished the walls of the city, and nominated Hyrcanus to the priesthood, though without the royal diadem. The magnanimity of Pompey, in respecting the Treasures of the Temple, could not obliterate the deeper impression of Jewish hatred excited by his profanation of the sacred precincts.

From this time forward Judæa becomes more and more under the shadow of Rome. The walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt by Antipater, and later, the Temple, which had become much dilapidated, was demolished, and rebuilt in great magnificence by Herod the Great. He was the last King of Judæa with any semblance of autonomy, and, in the year a.d. 6, Palestine was annexed to the Roman Empire.

We pass over the incidents in the Life and death of our Lord, which, at the time, could have but little affected current events, but which were destined to influence so deeply the subsequent history, not merely of Palestine but of the whole world. And we come to the cataclysm of which Our Lord had been the sorrowful yet unerring Prophet.

Blinded by religious fanaticism, and convinced that God must fight upon their side and give victory to His chosen people, be their conduct never so cruel and their bearing never so arrogant, the Jewish race, though a mere handful of men, offered war to the mistress of the world. With little military organization or training, divided by factions and torn asunder by internal dissensions, they yet dared to defy the mighty power of Rome. They defeated the ill-starred expedition of Cestius Gallus, and inflicted upon the Roman arms the most terrible disgrace they had ever endured in the East. But the triumph was short-lived; a terrible revenge was at hand. It was in this year, a.d. 70, that Titus laid siege to the city. At the time, its population was swollen ten or twenty-fold by the pilgrims attending the Passover. The reserves of food were destroyed in faction fights even before the Romans arrived outside the city walls. "Of all wretched and bloody sieges in the world's history, few, if any, have been more wretched or more bloody than the siege of Jerusalem by Titus. Fierce and bloody as was the fighting, the deaths from sickness and famine were yet more terrible. Dead bodies were thrown out into the valleys, where they lay rotting, a loathsome mass. The number of those who died in the siege were estimated at 600,000. At night, miserable, starving wretches would steal into the ravines to gather roots for food; here they were pounced upon by ambushed Romans and crucified by hundreds next morning in full view of the battlements."[5] Gradually the assaulting Romans got possession of portions of the city, yet the portions still uncaptured refused to surrender, their defenders still hoping against hope for a divine intervention, as in the days of Sennacherib. At length the city fell. The Romans, pouring in, began by slaying indiscriminately. Tiring of butchery, they turned their thoughts to plunder, but stood aghast at the houses filled with dead and putrefying corpses. The Temple of Herod was burnt, the city was desolate, while those whose miseries had not been relieved by death, were carried away into yet more miserable slavery or to a death more ignominious at Rome. As a Jewish city, Jerusalem had perished for ever.

Sixty years later, Jerusalem was rebuilt by the Emperor Hadrian. He resolved to suppress altogether the troublesome and turbulent Judaism. The measures which he took caused the Jews to rise against him under Barcochebas. This was the wildest and the most bloodthirsty of all the Jewish revolts; but it was the last. Jerusalem having been recaptured, Hadrian converted it into a Roman colony, forbade Jews to approach, and built a temple of Jupiter on the site of the Temple.

It was when the Roman Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity, and his mother Helena discovered the true Cross and the Holy Places, that Jerusalem came again into prominence. Thereafter, churches and monasteries sprung up throughout Palestine, which thus, for a time, became thoroughly Christianized, under the Christian Emperors of Rome and Byzantium. But the seventh century saw the fall of the Christian ascendancy in Syria. In a.d. 614, the Persians, under Chosroes, swept through the land, massacring the Christians wholesale, and destroying most of their churches, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The withdrawal of the Persians was followed by a brief return of Christian ascendancy lasting but eight years, under the Emperor Heraclius. And then, in 637, Jerusalem fell to the growing power of Islam. It was this new religion, with a calendar only dating from a.d. 622, which was to control the future destinies of the Holy City.

Islam arose at Mecca and Medina in barren and uninviting Arabia. When it started on that expansion, whereby it overspread half of the known world, Syria, from its situation, was naturally the first country to tempt its restless and devoted Arab warriors. Within ten years of the Hegira, or commencement of the Mahomedan era, we find the followers of the Prophet already in Syria. The Byzantine army was overwhelmed at the battle of the Yarmuk, and the Arabs laid siege to Jerusalem. The city capitulated to Omar, who granted terms of comparative magnanimity. His terms gave to the Christians security of person and property, safety of their churches, and non-interference on the part of Mahomedans with their religious exercises, houses or institutions. Upon the site of the Temple, which had been systematically defiled by the Christians out of abhorrence for the Jews, but which was honoured by the Moslems as the spot from which Mahomed ascended to heaven, was now erected the Mosque of Omar. This site became to the Mussulman, the most venerated spot in Jerusalem, as was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Christian. When, in after years, pilgrimages to Mecca were temporarily interrupted, devout Mahomedans made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem instead.

For the next few centuries Christian and Muslim lived together upon a fairly workable basis of toleration. Massacres of Christians and destruction of their churches occurred periodically, either in revenge for Christian successes elsewhere, or in connexion with other Mussulman disorders when mutual assassination was popular. But, on the whole, pilgrims, who at this time swarmed from all over Europe to visit the Holy Places at Jerusalem, were allowed to do so comparatively unmolested—that is, they were probably not robbed more in Palestine than in other professedly Christian countries through which they had to pass along their road. Had the Arab Mussulman remained master of Jerusalem, the Christians of Europe would probably have remained content with the situation.