A year has passed since the tragedy related in the last chapter. Menelaüs, thanks chiefly to the fickle temper of Antiochus, had escaped the fate which overtook his accomplice Andronicus, and had returned to pillage his unfortunate countrymen in Palestine. But his lease of power had come to an end. Jason, his dispossessed rival, had taken the opportunity of a report that Antiochus was dead, and attacked him. There could hardly be any choice between the two men. Both were equally rapacious; equally unfaithful to their religion and their country. But Jason had been out of power for two years, and his misdeeds had faded a little from the memory of the people; Menelaüs’s enormities were still fresh in their recollection. After a sharp conflict, the losses of which were utterly out of proportion to any gain that could possibly come from it, Jason had won the day, and his rival had [pg 69]been compelled to take refuge in the Castle. Then came the news that the report of the death of Antiochus was false. He had settled affairs in Egypt after his liking, and was now on his way northwards, furious at the trouble which this obstinate province was giving him, and resolved, as he said, to quiet it for good. Jason had fled in headlong haste, and his partisans, and, indeed, most of those who had the means to go, had followed his example. Meanwhile Jerusalem was awaiting the future with fear and trembling.
It is an evening in the early summer, and the western wall of the city is crowded with men and women, who are gazing with awe-stricken faces on the strange appearance of the sunset. All day people had been talking of the marvellous shapes which had appeared the evening before in the western sky, and now a great multitude had assembled to see whether the marvel would be repeated, and, if so, to judge of it for themselves. Nor had they assembled in vain. Never, within the memory of man, had the heavens worn a stranger, a more terrifying look. Above the spot where the sun was just sinking to his rest the whole sky glowed with a red and angry light. On this background, so to speak, the clouds of a lower stratum had shaped themselves into the forms of two armies ready to engage in battle. The spectators seemed to be able to trace in one place the serried ranks of infantry, in [pg 70]another the massed array of chariots and horses. A space, brilliantly coloured, as it might seem, with something like the hue of blood, intervened between the two airy hosts. But these seemed to be slowly nearing each other, and the gazing people watched the lessening space, expecting, one might think, to hear the actual clash of arms when they should have met. But then the sun set, and with the sudden failing of light that marks the evening of more southern climes than ours, the whole pageant vanished from before the eyes of the spectators.
Among the crowd is our old acquaintance Menander, or Micah, whom we last met in the library of Jason. Things have not gone well with him since then. He had cherished a belief that Greek culture, the brightness of Greek literature and art, would do something to amend the severity, and what he was pleased to call the tastelessness of Jewish life. To a certain extent it had been an honest belief, though the pleasure-loving nature of the man, in its revolt against the stern morality of the Law, had had something to do with developing it. But his experience of Greek culture and its works had not been encouraging. If the reforming doctrine had to be preached by such prophets as Jason, and Menelaüs, and the cruel and profligate young tyrant Antiochus, it was more than doubtful whether it would do any good. Hitherto, certainly, it had done no good at all. The people were more unhappy, more spirit[pg 71]less, more like slaves than they had ever been before; the rulers were more greedy and selfish, more absolutely careless of all that did not concern their own interests. Might he not, he began to think to himself, have made a mistake? Might not the old life, which was at least the life of free men, be better than the new?
He was busy with such thoughts when he heard a woman’s voice behind him whisper “Micah.” He did not recognize it at once, but its tones were familiar to him, and they seemed to touch the same chord in his heart with which his thoughts were then busy. And the name, the old Hebrew name, that too was familiar, though it was long since he had heard it. He was “Menander” to his friends; for his friends were either Greeks, or else Jews who, like himself, had cast off the associations of his birth and race.
“Micah,” said the voice again, and he turned to look at the speaker.
She was a woman of some thirty years, plainly, almost poorly, dressed, but with all the air of gentle birth and breeding. Her face was beautiful, not with the brilliant loveliness of youth, but with that which is brought into the features by a pure and tender soul. There were the lines of many sorrows and cares upon her forehead, and round her eyes, and in the corners of mouth and cheek; but her eyes, save that they seemed almost too large for the [pg 72]thinner contours of the face, were as beautiful as they had been in the first glory of her youth.
It was Hannah, his elder sister, who had been as a mother to him in his orphaned childhood, that Menander recognized. Years had passed since they met. There had been no quarrel, but circumstances had made a barrier between them. What Menander’s life had been we know, and Hannah was the wife of a faithful and devout Jew, Azariah by name, who, though still cherishing kindly thoughts for his young kinsman, had felt that, for the present at least, they were best apart.
Brother and sister eagerly clasped hands, and Menander, or Micah, as we will call him, felt a lump rise in his own throat as he saw the tearful smile in Hannah’s lustrous eyes.
“Micah,” she said—“for you will not mind my calling you Micah, though I hear you use another name; but you were always Micah to me—this is a strange sight on which we have been looking.”
“Yes, sister,” he answered, with a gaiety of tone which was more than half assumed—“yes, sister, strange enough; but then we know that the clouds do take strange shapes at times. A current of air blows them this way or that, and, with our fancy to help, they become anything in heaven or earth that we may fancy.”
“Nay, Micah, there is more than fancy here. You and I used to watch the clouds from the [pg 73]window in the old house, and to laugh at the odd shapes which we found in them—lions, and dogs, and whales, and such things—but we never saw such a sight as this.”
“But we had not in those days such thoughts of our own to read into the sights of the skies. But tell me, Hannah, what do you think it means?”
“What can it mean,” she answered, in a low voice, “but wrath—wrath upon us and upon our children?”
“Wrath, perhaps,” he cried; “and the sky has, I must confess, an angry look. But why must it be upon us? Why not rather upon our enemies? I see nothing in the skies which tells us whether these sights be meant for us or for them.”
“Nay, my brother, speak not thus, for you know better in your heart. The heavens give us these signs, or rather God gives them to us through the heavens, but He leaves it to our own hearts to interpret them. They tell us surely enough on whom this wrath must fall.”
“But, sister, tell me why on us? Are we worse than our neighbours—than these robbers of Edomites and Ammonites, these sullen Romans, never satisfied except when they are fighting—these mongrel Syrians?”
“They are heathen,” said Hannah, in a solemn voice, “and they do not sin against light. Let us leave them to the judgment of God. But ourselves [pg 74]we can judge. Look at this city; we call it the City of David—but where is the spirit of David? Have we not trampled the Law underfoot, making to ourselves graven images of things in heaven and earth and the water under the earth? Where is the honour of the Sabbath? Where is the morning and evening sacrifice? Where are the yearly feasts? Will our God deliver us again, when we will not thank Him for the deliverances that He hath wrought already? Oh, Micah, I do not seek to anger you; but are you such as our father, now in Abraham’s bosom, would rejoice to see you? And tell me, how was it that we Hebrews became a great people? A Syrian ready to perish was our father, and lo! before a thousand years were past, Solomon reigned from the great river to the Western sea. How came we by this might? Was it by aping Egyptian or Greek? Did we not keep to our own way, and walk after our own law, and worship our own God? Then it was well with us, and the nations round about feared us and honoured us; but now they laugh us to scorn, for we are ashamed of our own selves, and seek to be what they are, and cannot attain to it, and so fall short both of their greatness and of ours.”
Micah stood dumb before this fierce torrent of words. Was this the gentle Hannah of his youth? There must be some mighty influence that could change the lamb into the lioness.
[pg 75]She went on, in a gentler voice, “You are not angry with me, brother?”
“Surely not.”
“I must go, for my husband will be waiting for the evening meal. Come, children,” she went on, speaking to two little girls who had been clinging to their mother’s cloak, gazing open-eyed and half-terrified at this strange kinsman.
“And are these my nieces?”
“Yes; Miriam and Judith,” answered Hannah, pointing first to one and then to the other. “This, children, is your dear uncle, Micah.”
The young man stooped and kissed the children.
“You will not let it be so long before we see you again?” said Hannah.
His answer was to wring her hand, and turn away. Her words had pricked him to the heart, and he did not know whether to thank her or be angry.
We must now turn to another group which had also been drawn to the walls by the report of the marvellous sights that were to be seen in the heavens. A group it was that would have attracted attention anywhere, so remarkable were the contrasts and the resemblances which it presented.
The principal figure was an old man dressed in the everyday garb of a priest. The burden of years had bowed his stately figure, for he had long since passed the limit which the Psalmist assigns to the [pg 76]life of man, but his eye was as brilliant as ever, and his voice, when he spoke, had lost none of its depth and fulness of tone. His three companions were men in the vigour of life. All surpassed the common stature, but yet none of them equalled the height of their father, for that they were father and sons the most casual observer must have seen. In age there was little difference between them. The eldest may have numbered about forty years, the youngest, perhaps, four less. Their dress was mainly that of the middle-class Jew, and so different from the old man’s priestly garb, but not without some distinctive marks that indicated the fact that they belonged to the House of Aaron. The multitude of priests was indeed so great that but a very small share in the services of the Temple, even when these were fully carried out, fell to the lot of any one man. These services had now been reduced to a minimum, and numbers of the priestly houses, while not repudiating their hereditary office, practically devoted themselves to the ordinary avocations of life. This had been done by the three sons of Mattathias of Modin, for such was the name and such the ancestral city of the aged priest.
“Judas,” said the old man, addressing one of his sons, “these signs in the heavens are of a surety from the Lord.”
The son addressed was the youngest of the three; but it was evident from the bearing of his brothers, [pg 77]and from the air of respect and attention with which they waited for him to speak, that they were accustomed to see him the first recipient of their father’s confidence. And indeed it was not difficult to see, under a superficial resemblance of figure and face, something that distinguished him from his companions. John, the eldest, was a plain, blunt soldier, raised above the average level of his profession, by the purity of his life and the depth of his religious convictions, but still essentially a soldier, one who saw no way of solving complicated questions save by a downright blow of the sword. Simon, the second in point of age, had a singularly mild and benevolent expression, though his eyes were full of intelligence and the lines of his mouth and chin seemed to show that he could be firm on occasion. But Judas had all the outward characteristics of a hero. A sturdier soldier never wielded sword, but he saw that there are difficulties to which the sword alone can bring no solution. Nor was he slow to follow all the subtleties of diplomacy; but, at the same time, he never lost his grasp of the principles which all the skill of the diplomatist is unable to change.
“Father,” he now said, “that these signs are from the Lord I do not doubt. But what is your counsel?”
“Speak you first, my son,” replied the old man; “’tis ever best so. You might be unwilling to differ from me and yet be in the right. This at least my [pg 78]years have taught me—that it is easy for any man to err.”
“Let us stay,” said Judas. “’Tis true the air is stifling, such as a free man can scarcely bear to breathe. But there are many, father, that look to you for counsel and guidance, and we may scarcely leave them, at least till the call sounds more plainly in our ears.”
“Nay,” cried John, the soldier, “I am not, as you know, one that would readily give his vote for flight. But here we are, methinks, as rats in a hole. May we not lawfully, and with good faith to God and our brethren, seek some place where we may at least have space to draw our swords and strike a blow?”
“And you, Simon, what say you?” asked the old man, turning to his second son.
“God knows that I would give much to be back at home. But our brethren need us here, and we may give them some comfort. Let us stay.”
“Judas and Simon,” said the old man, after a pause, “you have spoken well, and I give my voice with yours. As yet our duty seems to keep us here. When it shall call us hence, we will follow it. And you, John, think not that you will long want for an occasion to strike with the sword. It shall come; but you will be readier for it if you make no haste to meet it.”
With this the little party turned away from the wall, and made their way to their lodging in the city.
It was not long before the portent which the terrified crowd had watched from the walls of Jerusalem found, or at least began to find, its fulfilment, for, indeed, many days were to pass before the wretched people had drained the cup of suffering to the dregs.
First there was the actual arrival of the army, the rumour of whose approach had struck such terror into Jason. At its head came Antiochus in person, fresh from his successful campaigns in Egypt and in his train followed the renegade Menelaüs with a crowd of unscrupulous and profligate adventurers. There was no attempt at resistance. The gates were thrown open by the King’s adherents in the city. But if the citizens had hoped to soften the tyrant’s heart by their submissive attitude they were miserably disappointed. For days the streets of the city ran red with blood. The prominent members of the patriotic party were the first to perish. Then [pg 80]came all the private enemies of the returning renegades; and then a far greater multitude who were singled out for destruction by the possession of anything that excited the cupidity of the conquerors. Lastly, as ever happens at such times, the massacre that is suggested by hatred or greed was followed by the massacre that is the result of the merest wantonness. But there were victims more unhappy than those who thus perished by the sword of the heathen. The money found on the persons and in the houses of the victims did not satisfy the cupidity of their murderers. There were thousands who had indeed nothing of their own to lose, but who were in themselves a valuable property. These were sent off in droves to be sold, till the slave-markets of the Eastern Mediterranean were glutted with the Jewish youth.
Still worse in the eyes of all pious Jews than the massacre or the captivity was the profanation of the Temple. The innermost shrine, the Holy of Holies, which the high priest himself was permitted by the Law to enter but once only in the year, was thrown open to the unhallowed gaze of a debauched heathen. With a horror that passes description the people saw the renegade Menelaüs, bound to be the guardian of the sanctity of the place, actually drawing aside the veil with his own hand, and conducting the King into the awful enclosure. They saw the most sacred treasures, gifts of the piety of many [pg 81]generations, treasures to which the revenue of the Persian kings, and even of the victorious Alexander himself had contributed, become the spoil of the sacrilegious intruders. The golden altar of incense and the table of the shew-bread were taken by the King, while the seven-branched candlestick of gold fell, as was commonly believed, to the high priest himself. They saw it, and it almost overturned their faith that no visible sign of the Divine wrath followed an impiety so terrible.
So Antiochus came and went, leaving behind him as his deputy, Philip, the Phrygian, “in manners more barbarous than he who set him there.” The time that followed was one of grievous depression and sadness. Life went on, as it will even amidst the gloomiest circumstances, but all the joy and brightness were crushed out of it.
Micah’s sister, the Hannah whom we have seen talking to him on the wall, gave birth to a son shortly after the departure of Antiochus. No feast was held on occasion of the rite that made the little one a member of the family of Abraham. When the forty days of purification were past, the mother was not taken to present her offspring in the Temple. The Temple, the haunt of pagans and apostates, was no place for faithful sons and daughters of Abraham. A visit to its courts could hardly be the seal of purification when it needed purifying so sorely itself.
[pg 82]An occasion that should by right have been still more joyful was allowed to pass with the absence of festivity. A younger sister of Hannah, Ruth by name, had long before been promised to Seraiah, a friend and relative of her husband. Time after time the marriage had been postponed, under the pressure of evil times; and when at last it was performed, not even then without sore misgivings and anticipations of evil among all the elders of the family, the celebration was of the quietest kind. Not a guest beyond the few friends who attended on the bridegroom was invited; and it was in dead silence, not with the usual shouts of merriment and gay procession of torches, that the bride was taken to her husband’s home.
And yet, as we shall see, even for these evils there was a compensating good.
Micah, though he had affected to make light of the foreboding of evil which he had heard from his sister, had really been impressed by it—so much impressed, indeed, that he had left the city for a little country house at the northern end of the Lake of Galilee, that belonged to him. He had invited his relatives to accompany him, but they had declined. Their place, they said, was at home, among their poorer brethren, where they might do something to help and strengthen. All that Micah could do was to commend them to the protection of the Greek party in the city, with whom, in spite of his [pg 83]fast increasing disgust at their proceedings, he had not yet broken.
He had now returned, and he lost no time in finding his way to his sister’s house. The ravages made by fire and sword were only too plainly visible as he walked along. Houses that he had known from his childhood, in which he had often been a guest, were now but blackened walls; others were shapeless ruins. Again and again he saw on fragments of stone and plaster hideous blotches which he knew to be of blood; and as he saw these things he cursed aloud the hands which had wrought these horrors, not without the bitterest self-reproach that his own hand might have grasped them in friendship.
It was a great relief to find that his sister’s house had been spared any outrage. But when he demanded admittance in the usual way, by kicking the door, it became evident that there had been a reign of terror, and that the inmates of the dwelling were not sure that it was yet over. The door was not thrown open in the usual free fashion of Jewish hospitality, but he became aware by a slight movement of one of the closed lattices that he was being inspected from above. The inspection was apparently satisfactory, for in another minute there was a sound of undrawing bolts and unfastening chains, and the inhospitable door was at last open. Hannah, sadly aged in look her brother thought, met him in the hall, and greeted him with a silent [pg 84]embrace. After a pause, in which she seemed to be struggling with her tears, she said—
“Welcome, dear Micah; while you and my husband and my children are left to me I feel that I cannot be unhappy. And perhaps you,” she added, with a wistful look in his face, “will draw nearer to us now. But come and see my dear ones.”
She led the way to a room at the back of the house, looking out into a little garden shaded by a wide-branching fig-tree. Hannah noiselessly drew aside the curtain that served for a door, and the two stood by common consent and watched the scene that met their eyes. Azariah, the father of the family, was sitting with his back turned to them, holding on his knees a copy of the Law. On two stools at his feet sat his daughters, each holding in one hand a tablet covered with wax, and in the other a stylus or sharp-pointed iron pen. He was slowly dictating to them the words, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one Lord,” and the little creatures were laboriously forming, not without many pauses for thought, the scarcely familiar letters.
“Now read it, my children,” said Azariah, when the task was finished; and one after another the sweet, childish voices repeated the well-known words. Micah, as he listened, felt himself strangely touched. Presently he heard his sister murmur to herself, “In Thy Law will I meditate day and night,” and glancing at her face saw it illumined [pg 85]with a joy which he could scarcely have believed those wasted features capable of expressing.
“’Tis well, Miriam; ’tis well, Judith,” said Azariah to the little girls, and putting his hands upon their heads, as they stood before him, for they had risen to repeat the holy words, he repeated, “The God of Abraham and Sarah bless you.” And then, for they were mere children after all, and not above childish rewards, gave each a ripe fig from a basket which stood on a table by his side.
The lesson being over, Hannah advanced, and her brother followed. Azariah turned and greeted the new comer not unkindly, but with a certain reserve, for he could not forget that his visitor was a Menander as well as a Micah, and that he had been the friend of the traitorous Jason, and the yet more traitorous Menelaüs. The children, after their first feeling of alarm, for a strange face was seldom seen in that home, and when Miriam, the elder, had recognized her uncle, showed no reserve in their welcome. They clung about his neck, and kissed him. They insisted on his coming to see their pets—Miriam’s turtle-doves, and Judith’s dormice, and the little gazelle fawn which they owned in common. “They have not heard a word against me,” thought Micah to himself; and this affectionate loyalty touched him to the heart. From his sister he might, perhaps, have expected it, but that the stern Azariah, a narrow-minded bigot, without a kindly thought for [pg 86]any that did not walk in his way, as he had been accustomed to think of him—that Azariah himself should have dealt with him so mercifully, was a surprise as it was also a reproach.
He stopped with them for the rest of the day, and after the evening meal, when the little ones had gone to bed, after making their uncle promise that he would soon come and see them again, the three had much serious talk together.
Micah had, of course, the family history to hear, for, stranger as he had been to them for some years past, he knew scarcely anything about it. He learnt now for the first time that a little boy had been born who, had he lived, would have been about two years younger than Judith. The mother had much to say about his beauty and goodness, and his rare promise of intelligence. Micah was touched all the more because he could not forgive himself for the alienation which had prevented him from saying a word of comfort to his sister in the hour of her bereavement. “It was, indeed, a terrible loss,” and he rose from his seat and kissed her. He felt that this little proof of his love would be better than many words.
“Nay,” she said, with a cheerfulness that almost startled him—“nay; you must not say that we have lost our dear little Joshua. I know that I have a son still, though he is not here. I confess that it was very hard to part with him. But he is quite [pg 87]safe in Abraham’s bosom, safer and better off,” she added, with a sad smile, “than he would be here; and some day I shall see him, and show him to you, dear Micah, and we shall be happy together.”
After this the little party had much talk about the state of things in the present, and the prospects of the future. Again Micah was astonished to see the cheerfulness and courage which his sister and her husband kept up in the midst of circumstances which must have been most disheartening.
“Ah!” said Azariah, when the conversation turned upon the desolation of the Temple, and the loss of all the ceremonial of worship, the daily sacrifice, and the great festivals of the year—“Ah! there are consolations even here. Perhaps we thought too much of these things in the old time. We were taken up with the outside, with the show and the splendour, the vessels of gold, and the clouds of incense smoke as they curled about the pillars and the roof, and we forgot what they meant. But now that the outside things are taken from us, we can give our hearts to that which is within. We have our gatherings still, though the Temple doors are shut. Every Sabbath-day we meet, and the Law and the Prophets are read in our ears—aye, and there are those who can expound them, and speak words that comfort and strengthen us. I, myself, have felt the Spirit move me once or twice to exhort and cheer the brethren. No, brother! believe me, [pg 88]it is not wholly loss that we cannot assemble any more in our beautiful house. Our fathers learnt much when they sat mourning by the waters of Babylon, and we also are learning much in this our second captivity.”
This sounded strange to the young man, who, indeed, had dulled his understanding of spiritual things by his follies and excesses. Still he could not help feeling deeply impressed by the evident earnestness of the speaker. But he felt that he could say nothing. A trifler and unbeliever like himself could only remain silent in the presence of thoughts and feelings so much higher than anything to which he could reach.
After a short pause Azariah went on—“The Lord has not seen fit to renew among us the spirit of prophecy, and we know not certainly of the things that are coming upon the earth. Yet a man, though he be no prophet, may read the signs of the times. Believe me, there are days to come more full of evil and darkness even than those that we have seen. My heart sometimes fails me when I think of this dear woman,” and as he spoke he laid his hand upon his wife’s shoulder, “and of the little ones whom God has given us. It will be a hard time for men to battle through—but for women and children——.” And his voice faltered.
Hannah turned to him with her brave, cheerful smile—“ ‘As thy days, so shall thy strength be.’ The [pg 89]great prophet said it, did he not, to all his people—to the weak ones as well as to the strong?”
Shortly after Micah took his leave. As he walked through the deserted streets he thought much of the words which he had heard that night, and still more of the cheerfulness and courage, ten times more eloquent than all words, which he had witnessed.
“Is all this a delusion?” he asked himself. “Six months ago, perhaps even six hours ago, I should have had little doubt in saying so. But now—well, if it is a delusion, it is strangely like a reality. Anyhow its effects are real enough. Dear Hannah! always the best and kindest of sisters, but a timid creature, whom I used to amuse myself by frightening. But now—she is as bold as a lioness. Well, I can only hope that the truths which I have been learning, if they are truths, will stand me in as good stead when the need comes.”
Azariah had read the signs of the times aright. The darker days had come, days so full of trouble that the unhappy people looked back to the past that had seemed so sad and gloomy as to a time of rest. Things had not been going well with King Antiochus, for the Romans had driven him out of Egypt, and in his rage and fear he turned against his Jewish subjects with greater ferocity than ever. One of his motives was the brutal desire to wreak upon the feeble the vengeance which he could not exact from the strong; the other was a genuine fear lest he should lose another province as he had already lost Egypt. He saw that the policy of Rome was to stir up against him the national spirit of subject peoples, and he knew well enough that in the Jews, crushed though they had been by oppression and massacre, this national spirit was not by any means dead. Accordingly he set himself with relentless ferocity to extinguish it. Everything distinctive [pg 91]of the people was to be rooted out; that done they might become really submissive; there would be no more a land of the Jews, but simply a province of Southern Syria.
The first thing, he conceived, would be to strike such terror into the hearts of the people that there should be no thought among them of resistance. For such a purpose nothing could be more effective than another massacre such as that which had already been perpetrated two years before under his own eyes: only this, he determined, should be more complete. He perceived with a devilish ingenuity that his orders would be more relentlessly carried out if he entrusted their execution to some one else, than if he were personally present. Appeals might be made to him to which he might yield out of sheer weariness, whereas a lieutenant, if he were only hard-hearted enough, would simply fall back upon the orders which he had received, and refuse all responsibility save that of seeing that these were fully carried out.
Such a lieutenant he knew that he possessed in the person of a certain Apollonius, a Cretan mercenary, who had already given proofs enough that he was about as little troubled as any man could be with a conscience or with feelings of compassion. To Apollonius, accordingly, the commission was entrusted, and he proceeded to execute it in a particularly brutal and treacherous way.
[pg 92]He marched to Jerusalem, taking with him a picked force of some five thousand men—picked, it may be said, quite as much for their unscrupulous and ferocious character, as for their strength and skill in arms. There would have been, in any case, little chance of resistance, but, to make his task the easier of accomplishment, he had so timed his coming that he approached the city two or three hours before the end of the Sabbath. Secret orders had been sent to Philip, the Phrygian, that he was to relax the severity of his rule; and the people had begun to breathe again after a long period of repression. The Temple was still shut, or virtually shut, but the synagogues were open, and were indeed frequented by throngs of fervent worshippers.
It wanted a couple of hours to sunset when the news ran through the city that an armed force was approaching the walls. The first feeling aroused by the tidings was naturally one of alarm. The appearance of the soldiers, however, was such as to disarm all apprehensions. In the first place they were more like a crowd of men who happened to be carrying arms than an army. They were not marching in ranks, or indeed keeping any kind of order. A multitude of country-folk could be seen mingled among them, soldiers and civilians walking side by side in the most friendly and unconstrained fashion. Some of the new comers recognized old acquaintances among the townsfolk, and introduced their [pg 93]comrades to them; and though some of the sterner sort stood rigidly aloof, there were quite enough among the inhabitants of Jerusalem to give the visitors a general welcome. Apollonius himself, a conspicuous figure as he rode on his white charger up and down the streets of the city, was noticeably busy in renewing old acquaintanceships and making new ones.
And then in a moment the whole scene was changed. A soldier and a citizen were standing on the wall, talking and laughing together, and that in a place where they could be seen by all observers. Suddenly, without there having been even the slightest sign of a quarrel, the soldier was seen to plunge his sword into the side of his companion. It was a preconcerted signal. The wretched inhabitants, who would have been defenceless in any case, were taken absolutely off their guard, and had but slender chances of escape. How many hundreds, possibly thousands, perished cannot be guessed. But the massacre was more general, more pitiless than that which had devastated the city two years before. Apollonius’s “picked” men showed themselves altogether worthy of his choice, so brutal and bloodthirsty were they. And Apollonius himself was to be seen everywhere urging his men to make short work with these “pestilent Jews,” as he called them, and not unfrequently striking a blow himself. He earned on that day such hatred that thereafter [pg 94]there was not to be found a Jew, save among the vilest renegades and traitors, but uttered a curse when his name was mentioned.
Of course the soldiers had to be paid for their bloody day’s work, and they were paid by the plunder of the city. The houses were stripped, and the plunderers, when they had carried away everything that had roused their cupidity, often, out of sheer wantonness, completed the work of devastation, by setting fire to the desolated houses. Altogether Jerusalem presented such a spectacle as had not been seen since the days of the Babylonian conquest.
The spirit of the people having been, as it would seem, thus effectually broken for the present, it remained to provide against its possible revival in the future.
Long gaps were made in the line of wall, so long that it took not a few days to make them, and would certainly require as many weeks to repair. The town thus made defenceless was further overawed by the erection of a fort in the City of David, this fort being held by a strong garrison of Greeks and Asiatic mercenaries.
The means of repression thus provided, the next thing was to extinguish all that was characteristic of the national life. First, the great centre of that life, the Temple, was formally desecrated. Already it had been subjected to such indignities that the pious Jew could scarcely bear to enter [pg 95]its precincts. But the final horror, the “abomination of desolation,” was yet to come. On the 15th of the month Chisleu (December) an altar of a Greek pattern, and consecrated to the Olympian Zeus, was placed on the great altar of sacrifice, and ten days afterwards a huge sow was slaughtered on this. Her blood, caught after the Greek fashion in a bowl, was sprinkled on the altar of incense and on the mercy-seat within the Holy of Holies—a hideous mockery of the sprinkling which the Law enjoined to be performed once in every year. From the animal’s flesh a mess of broth was prepared, and this was sprinkled on the copies of the Law. The Temple, thus dishonoured, was as if it had ceased to be.
The meeting-houses, in which, as we have seen, the people had found a substitute for the Temple worship, were summarily closed. An edict was issued commanding that every one who possessed a copy of the Law, or of any one of the sacred books, should give it up without loss of time. To call in cupidity to the aid of fear in enforcing this edict, the King’s officers were instructed to pay a reasonable price for the manuscripts thus produced. It was made a capital offence to read or to recite any part of the proscribed writings. Then the practice of circumcision was forbidden. Death was to be the penalty for all who should take any part in performing this rite—for the circumciser, the mother, the father, even the babe itself.
[pg 96]And then to the policy of repression Antiochus added the policy of bribery and temptation. Their own worship forbidden, the Jews were to be allured by the seductions of the worship of their masters. Hitherto little had been done in this way. Insults indeed, had been heaped upon the people; but little attempt had been made to attract them. The Temple gates, closed for more than a year, were again thrown open; and the courts, long silent, resounded with the mirth of sacrificial banquets and the gaiety of festivals. Not only all the splendours, but all the impure pleasures of heathen worship were called in to assist the attempt that was being made to sap what was left of the faith of the people.
Antiochus, who, for all his wrath at Jewish obstinacy, could not help feeling a certain respect for it, took the trouble to send among the people a missionary, if he may be so called, who was to instruct them in the new religion which their King was so anxious to impose upon them.
Theopompus, or Athenæus, to use the name which was commonly given him from his birthplace, was a follower of the philosophy of Epicurus. He had held a subordinate post, as lecturer in geometry, in the famous school of the Garden, but had found his modest income insufficient to meet his somewhat expensive tastes. If he had had but a tolerable competence, Athenæus would have made an ideal [pg 97]Epicurean. He was devoted to pleasure, but there was nothing unseemly or extravagant about his devotion. For the foolish people who ruined their constitutions and emptied their purses by exhausting excesses he had a genuine contempt. “Give me,” he would say, “a decent sufficiency of ‘outside things,’ and I am content.” As he had a fair smattering of culture, and a real acquaintance with geometry, and had a venerable appearance which happily hit the mean between hilarity and austerity, he might have been, but for a chronic want of money, a real success among the somewhat dilettante philosophers of Athens. But circumstances were against him. Poverty did not ill become an Academic, and positively set off a Stoic; but an Epicurean seemed to have missed his vocation if he could not be always handsomely dressed and able to give elegant entertainments to his friends. Athenæus, who liked above all things to be on good terms both with himself and with every one else, felt this very acutely, and he was proportionately delighted when the Syrian King proposed to him that he should go as a teacher, not without a handsome salary, of Greek religion and Greek culture.
His success was not encouraging. In the first place he had a difficulty in making himself understood. The pure Attic Greek on which he prided himself was strange to the ears of his new audience, and he could not bring himself to descend to the [pg 98]barbarous dialect to which they were accustomed. And when he was seriously called to account in the matter of his belief he found himself involved in difficulties from which he saw no way of escape. At Athens religion was politely ignored. The common people must, of course, have their gods and goddesses; and the wise man, if he were prudent, would say nothing—anyhow in public—to disturb their belief; but within the privileged walls of the schools the names of Zeus and Athené and Apollo were never so much as mentioned, except, perhaps, in the course of some antiquarian discussion.
Among his new disciples, as he would fain have reckoned them, Athenæus found a very different temper. They were terribly in earnest; abstractions and phrases did not satisfy them; they pushed their questions home in a very perplexing way.
One day at the conclusion of a lecture, the customary invitation to the audience to put any questions that might occur to them was accepted by a young man who sat on one of the front benches.
“I would ask you, venerable sir,” he said, “some questions about the gods of your religion.”
“Speak on,” replied Athenæus, with his usual courtesy; “I shall be delighted to satisfy you to the best of my power.”
“Are we to believe the stories that are told us in this book?” and he held up, as he spoke, a little volume of popular mythology, filled from beginning to end [pg 99]with tales that, to say the least, were not edifying. “For, if these be true, these divine beings were such as would be banished from the society of all honest men and women. They are thieves, adulterers, murderers. It would be a thousand times better to have no gods at all than such as these.”
“You are right, sir,” said the lecturer; “these stories are for the ignorant only, at least in their outward meaning, though they have an inner meaning also, which I will take some fitting occasion to expound. But not such are the gods whom we worship.”
“Will you tell us something of them?” continued the questioner.
“Willingly, for they are such that the wisest of men need not be ashamed of them. They dwell in some remote region, serene and happy. Wrath they feel not, nor sorrow, nor any of the passions that disturb the souls of men.”
“And do they care for our doings upon earth?”
“How so? They neither love nor hate; and both they must do, I take it, did they concern themselves with human affairs.”
“What profit, then, is there in them? How are men the better for their being?”
“That I know not; only that it is part of the order of things that they must be.”
“Far be it from me,” exclaimed the young Jew, “to exchange for such idle existences the God of my [pg 100]fathers! He may smite us in His anger till we are well-nigh consumed, but at least He cares for us. He led our fathers through the sea and through the wilderness in the days of old. He has spoken to us by the prophets, and He has made His Presence to be seen in His Temple; and though He has hidden His face from us for a time, yet He will repent Him of His wrath, and devise the means by which He shall recall His banished unto Him. No, we will not change our God for yours!”
A loud murmur of assent went round the benches when the speaker sat down, and Athenæus felt that he had made but small way with his audience.
Finding his theology and philosophy but ill received, Athenæus bethought him of what seemed a more hopeful method of proselytizing. Could not a specially powerful attraction be found in the festival of Dionysus, the wine-god? Vintage feasts, he reflected, are common to every country where wine is produced, and it would not be difficult to ingraft the Greek characteristics on a celebration to which the Jews were already accustomed. Some of the less scrupulous might be tempted to take part in such a festival, a beginning would be made, and more would follow in due time. How the scheme prospered will be told in the next chapter.