But the glory of this costly edifice lasted only thirty-four years; for, during the reign of Rohoboam, the son and successor of Solomon, Shishak, king of Egypt, seized and pillaged it, and carried away its treasures. Indeed, the city of Jerusalem was several times taken, during those early periods, and sometimes it was burnt; but it was as often rebuilt.
About six hundred and two years before Christ, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Egypt, invaded Palestine, and threatened the destruction of the city and temple; but was prevented from effecting his object by the submission of Jehoiakim, the king. Efforts being made, soon after, however, to throw off the yoke, Nebuchadnezzar again appeared with his army before the city, and, after a siege of fifteen or sixteen months, took it, and laid both the temple and the whole city in ashes. This was B. C. 590.
About B. C. 530, by permission of Cyrus, Jerusalem began to be rebuilt under Nehemiah, and repeopled; but the walls were not completed till B. C. 456. The temple was also rebuilt, by Zerubbabel; but this last temple was never so splendid as the former.
The city itself was again destroyed, many years afterward, by Ptolemy. It met with a similar fate still later, from Antiochus Epiphanes, who slew forty thousand of the people, and made slaves of as many more. It was rebuilt by Judas Maccabeus, and in the time of our Savior was somewhat flourishing. But about A. D. 70, after a dreadful siege of two years, by the Romans, during which the inhabitants suffered so much from famine as to eat, in some instances, the dead bodies of their friends, the city was taken, and, according to the prediction of our Savior, nearly forty years before, it was made a heap of ruins. The temple was completely destroyed, so that not one stone lay upon another; and the ground where it had stood, was ploughed up. Even the name of the city was changed.
Adrian, another Roman emperor, undertook afterwards to rebuild the city, but his plan only partially succeeded. In the mean time, he banished all the Jews, forbidding their return. Constantine the Great, enlarged the city, and restored its ancient name.
Since that time the fate of Jerusalem has been various and singular. In 614, the Persians captured it; and in the capture, ninety thousand Christians were slain. In 637 it was seized by the Saracens, who held it till 1079, when the Seljukian Turks got possession of it. After the Crusades, the Ottoman Turks became its masters; and these own it at the present day.
We have already represented Jerusalem as standing upon several eminences, and surrounded by a wall, forty or fifty feet high. Towers rose at various places on these walls, some of them to the height of one hundred, or one hundred twenty feet. The length of the wall, or circumference of the city, about the time of Christ, must have been, according to the best accounts, about four miles and a half. It was very thickly populated; containing, as some suppose, nearly three million inhabitants. This may be too high an estimate; but the population was certainly very large. One evidence of its great population is the fact, that there were in it, at this time, nearly five hundred Jewish synagogues. At present, Jerusalem contains five synagogues, eleven mosques, and twenty monasteries.
But Jerusalem is very far from being now what it once was. Instead of containing millions of inhabitants, as some suppose it formerly did, it scarcely contains twenty thousand. Of these, perhaps ten thousand are Mohammedans, six thousand are Jews, two thousand are Greeks, one thousand five hundred Catholics, and five hundred Armenians. Instead of being four and a half miles in circumference, the city scarcely measures two miles and two thirds. The following spirited account of Jerusalem, as it now is, is from the “Modern Traveller.”
When seen from the valley of Jehoshaphat, Jerusalem presents an inclined plane, descending from west to east. An embattled wall, fortified with towers, and a Gothic castle, compasses the city all round, excluding, however, a part of Mount Zion, which it formerly enclosed. In the western quarter, and in the centre of the city, the houses stand very close; but in the eastern part, along (towards) the brook Kidron, you perceive vacant spaces.
The houses of Jerusalem are heavy, square masses, very low, without chimneys or windows. They have flat terraces or domes on the top, and look like prisons or sepulchres. The whole would appear to the eye one uninterrupted level, did not the steeples of the churches, the minarets of the mosques, and the summits of a few cypresses, break the uniformity of the plan. On beholding these stone buildings, in the midst of a stony country, you are ready to inquire if they are not the confused monuments of a cemetery in the midst of a desert.