The contents of chapter 12 are, "Titus thought fit to encompass the city round with a wall; after which the famine consumed the people by whole houses and families together;" to which we may add, And those who had not succeeded in escaping from the city were no longer able to do so. The historian, after relating the circumstances of the building of the wall, says: "Now the length of this wall was forty furlongs, one only abated. Now at this wall without were erected thirteen places to keep garrisons in, the circumference of which, put together, amounted to ten furlongs; the whole was completed in three days; so that what would naturally have required some months, was done in so short an interval as is incredible.

"So all hope of escaping was now cut off from the Jews, together with their liberty of going out of the city. Then did the famine widen its progress, and devoured the people by whole houses and families; the upper rooms were full of women and children that were dying by famine; and the lanes of the city were full of the dead bodies of the aged; the children also and the young men wandered about the market places like shadows, all swelled with famine, and fell down dead wheresoever their misery seized them. As for burying them, those that were sick themselves were not able to do it; and those that were hearty and well were deterred from doing it by the great multitude of those dead bodies, and by the uncertainty there was how soon they should die themselves; for many died as they were burying others, and many went to their coffins before that fatal hour was come! A deep silence also, and a kind of deadly night, had seized upon the city; while yet the robbers were still more terrible than these miseries were themselves; for they brake open those houses that were no other than graves of dead bodies, and plundered them of what they had; and carrying off the coverings of their bodies, went out laughing, and tried the points of their swords upon their dead bodies; and, in order to prove what sort of mettle they were of, they thrust some of those through that still lay alive upon the ground; but for those that entreated them to despatch them, they were too proud to grant their requests, and left them to be con

sumed by the famine. Now every one of these died with their eyes fixed upon the temple, and left the seditious alive behind them. Now the seditious at the first gave orders that the dead should be buried out of the public treasury, as not enduring the stench of their dead bodies. But afterwards, when they could not do that, they had them cast down from the walls into the valleys beneath.

"However, when Titus, in going his rounds along those valleys, saw them full of dead bodies, and the thick putrefaction running about them, he gave a groan; and spreading out his hands to heaven, called God to witness that this was not his doing: and such was the sad case of the city itself. So Cæsar out of his commiseration of the people that remained, went his rounds through the legions, and hastened on the works, and showed the robbers that they were now in his hands. But these men, and these only, were incapable of repenting of the wickedness they had been guilty of; and separating their souls from their bodies, they used them both, as if they belonged to others, and not to themselves. For no gentle affection could touch their souls, nor could any pain affect their bodies, since they could still tear the dead bodies of the people as dogs do, and fill the prisons with those that were sick."

Chapter 13 describes "the great slaughters and sacrilege that were in Jerusalem;" and here the historian says-after informing us that Judas, one of Simon's under officers, with ten others entered into a conspiracy to surrender the wall to the Romans, and called to them from the tower about the third hour-" But when Titus was just coming thither with his armed men, Simon was acquainted with the matter before he came, and presently took the tower into his own custody, before it was surrendered, and seized upon these men, and put them to death in the sight of the Romans themselves; and when he had mangled their dead bodies, he threw them down before the wall of the city.

Hereupon some of the deserters, having no other way, leaped down from the wall immediately, while others of them went out of the city with stones, as if they would fight them; but thereupon they fled away to the Romans :- but

here a worse fate accompanied these than what they had found within the city; and they met with a quicker despatch from the too great abundance they had among the Romans, than they could have done from the famine among the Jews; for when they came first to the Romans they were puffed up by the famine, and swelled like men in a dropsy; after which they all on the sudden over-filled those bodies that were before empty, and so burst asunder, excepting such only as were skilful enough to restrain their appetites, and, by degrees, took in their food into bodies unaccustomed thereto. Yet did another plague seize upon those that were thus preserved; for there was found among the Syrian deserters a certain person who was caught gathering pieces of gold out of the excrements of the Jews' bellies; for the deserters used to swallow such pieces of gold, as we told you before, when they came out, and for these did the seditious search them all; for there was a great quantity of gold in the city; but when this contrivance was discovered in one instance, the fame of it filled their several camps, that the deserters came to them full of gold. So the multitude of the Arabians, with the Syrians, cut up those that came as supplicants, and searched their bellies. Nor does it seem to me that any misery befell the Jews that was more terrible than this, since in one night about two thousand of these deserters were thus dissected.

"When Titus came to the knowledge of this wicked practice, he threatened that he would put such men to death, if any of them were discovered to be so insolent as to do so again; moreover, he gave it in charge to the legions that they should make a search after such as were suspected, and should bring them to him; but it appeared that the love of money was too hard for all their dread of punishment, and a vehement desire of gain is natural to men, and no passion is so venturesome as covetousness; otherwise such passions have certain bounds, and are subordinate to fear; but in reality it was God who condemned the whole nation, and turned every course that was taken for their preservation to their destruction. This, therefore, which was forbidden by Cæsar under such a threatening, was ventured upon privately

against the deserters, and these barbarians would go out still, and meet those that ran away, before any saw them, and looking about them to see that no Roman spied them, they dissected them, and pulled this polluted money out of their bowels; which money was still found in a few of them, while yet a great many were destroyed by the bare hope there was of thus getting by them, which miserable treatment made many that were deserting to return back again into the city.

"But as for John, when he could no longer plunder the people, he betook himself to sacrilege, and melted down many of the sacred utensils, which had been given to the temple; and said to those that were with him, that it was proper for them to use divine things while they were fighting for the Divinity, without fear, and that such whose warfare is for the temple should live of the temple; and here, I cannot but speak my mind, and what the concern I am under dictates to me, and it is this:-I suppose that had the Romans made any longer delay in coming against these villains, the city would either have been swallowed up by the ground opening upon them, or been overflowed by water, or else been destroyed by such thunder as the country of Sodom perished by, for it had brought forth a generation of men much more atheistical than were those that suffered such punishments; for by their madness it was that all the people came to be destroyed.

"And indeed why do I relate these particular calamities? -while Manneus, the son of Lazarus, came running to Titus at this very time, and told him that there had been carried out through that one gate that had been intrusted to his care no fewer than a hundred and fifteen thousand eight hundred and eighty dead bodies. This was itself a prodigious multitude; and though this man was not himself set as a governor at that gate, yet was he appointed to pay the public stipend for carrying these bodies out, and so was obliged of necessity to number them, while the rest were buried by their relations, though all their burial was but this, to bring them away, and cast them out of the city. After this man there ran away to Titus many of the eminent

citizens, and told him the entire number of the poor that were dead; and that no fewer than six hundred thousand were thrown out at the gates, though still the number of the rest could not be discovered; and they told him farther, that when they were no longer able to carry out the dead bodies of the poor, they laid their corpses on heaps in very large houses, and shut them up therein; as also that a medimnus of wheat was sold for a talent; and that when, a while afterward, it was not possible to gather herbs, by reason all the city was walled about, some persons were driven to that terrible distress as to search the common sewers, and old dung-hills of cattle, and to eat the dung which they got there; and what they of old could not so much as endure to see, they now used for food. When the Romans barely heard all this, they commiserated their case; while the seditious, who saw it also, did not repent, but suffered the same distress to come upon themselves; for they were blinded by that fate, which was already coming upon the city, and upon themselves also."

Thus, as we progress with the historian's narrative, not only is the intensifying of the foreshown calamities of the Jews revealed, but also the grand catastrophe of the destruction of the city and temple foreshadowed as not far distant. The description of that catastrophe is contained in Josephus's book vi., to which we are now arrived. The details of the siege of Jerusalem, which we find therein, being already well known, and an extended notice not being necessary to our purpose, the headings of the several chapters, together with such extracts as may be necessary to exhibit continued calamities to the Jews, will sufficiently develop our illustrations until we reach the record of the grand events of the prophecy-the destruction of the city and temple, the subversion of the Jewish polity, and the surviving Jews being driven to seek in foreign lands, the shelter from the "great hail," which their own country could no longer afford them. The historian, in chapter 1. recounts, "that the miseries of the Jews still grew worse; and how the Romans made an assault upon the tower of Antonia." And here he says:-"Thus did the miseries of