Meditations

Jews

The Jews were punished

Jesus predicted the calamities that would befall the Jews: Woe to the women who will be pregnant and to those who will nurse their children in those days. Pray that your escape will not take place in winter or on a Sabbath, for there will then be great suffering which never, from the beginning of the world until today, has occurred, nor will it ever happen again.
(Mt 24, 79-21).

By fulfilling this prophecy, the righteousness of God sent the Jews to ruin forty years after the savagery they had wrought against Christ.

During the siege of Jerusalem by the Roman army, famine was a real torment, as described by the book of the Jewish War and as also reported by Eusebius of Caesarea, whose passages are excerpted below.

From the fifth book of the Histories of Josephus thus describes the drama: The greatest of all evils was hunger; women snatched food from their husbands' mouths, children from their fathers', and, what is very worthy of mourning, mothers from their children's.

They could not even stay hidden, if the house was locked it was a sign that there was still something left to eat, the rioters would break down the doors and, grabbing the unfortunates by the throat, almost make them spill out the morsels.

They beat old people who resisted, tore the hair off women if they tried to hide something in their hands; they had no respect whatsoever for either old people or children.

If they found nothing, they inflicted tremendous suffering on each one to induce them to confess where they had hidden a piece of bread or a small amount of barley.

Hunger, which became more and more acute, was killing people in their homes and exterminating whole families; for the terraces were overflowing with the corpses of women and infants, the alleys with the corpses of old men. Children and young people, swollen, like ghosts gathered in the squares and fell where starvation made them sprawl on the ground.

The sick did not even have the strength to give burial to their loved ones, and those who still maintained their strength recused themselves [from doing so] because of the large number of the dead and the insecurity of their fate: for many fell dead on those they had testily buried, and many descended into the graves before the fate of death presented itself.

No wailing or crying was heard among these doom, for hunger had suppressed even feelings; those who were about to die watched with dry eyes as those who had gone before them failed; the city was plunged into a deep silence and gloomy darkness, of companion death.

But the robbers were even more terrible than these evils; and they plundered the houses, and robbed the dead, and when they had stripped them of what was still covering their bodies, they came out laughing; and they even tested the points of their swords on the dead, and tried the blade of it by piercing some of those who had been left alive.

Instead, they let those who begged them to help them or to put an end to their suffering by piercing them with the sword consume them with disdain from hunger.

In the sixth book Joseph writes again Eusebius of Caesarea: By now incalculable was the number of victims that hunger reaped in the city, and untold sufferings. In every house it was war if there was only the shadow of food; the dearest relatives came to hands on each other, tearing the meager sustenance from their mouths. Those who suffered were not those who died, but those who were still alive, to whom the brigands also robbed a miserable morsel so that none of them died with food hidden on them.

These events occurred in the second year of the reign of Vespasian, just as he had foretold the prophecy of Jesus referring it to the city of Jerusalem: If you also knew things for your peace on this day! But now it is hidden from your eyes, for days will come when your enemies will surround you with a trench, they will close you from all sides and kill you and your children.

And elsewhere; When you see Jerusalem besieged by soldiers, then know that its ruin is at hand. The reference year is 70 AD, the date of the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus.

The siege of Jerusalem culminated on 9 August with the burning of the Temple and the legionary banner erected on the Eastern Gate. The detailed chronicle of the events of the whole war has been described by the historian Josephus, who tells how the total number of prisoners captured during the whole war was 97,000 and the deaths amounted to 1,100,000.

More casualties than any extermination performed before that. During the siege of the city most of the victims were Jews, not of Jerusalem, but came from all over the country to celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and the overcrowding first generated the plague and then the scourge of hunger.