Jerusalem

Caesar authorized Hyrcanus to rebuild the walls that had been demolished by Pompey; but in 48B.C. he appointed Antipater, the Idumean, governor of Palestine, and the latter, four years afterwards, obtained the appointment of his eldest son, Phasael, as prefect of Jerusalem, and of his youngest son, Herod, as governor of Galilee. When Antipater died (43), Antigonus, the son of Aristobulus II, seized the throne, sent Hyrcanus II into exile among his allies, the Parthians and imprisoned Phasael, who killed himself in despair. Herod fled to Rome, where the Senate proclaimed him King of the Jews (40). But it was three years before he wrested Jerusalem from Antigonus, and only after bringing conflagration and bloodshed upon the city. Antigonus, the last of the Hasmonean dynasty, was condemned to death. In 24B.C., Herod the Great built himself a splendid castle upon the site of the Tower of Baris, or of Birah (Nehemiah 2:8), named it Antonia, in honour of Mark Antony, and took up his residence there. He also built a theatre and an amphitheatre for gladiatorial combats. In 19 B.C. the king, whose origin as well as his cruelty rendered him odious to the Jews, thought to win their goodwill by reconstructing the Temple of Zorobabel, little by little, until it should be as splendid as that of Solomon. He also enlarged the sanctuary by extending the galleries to the fortress of Antonia, on the north, and connecting it, on the south, with the site of Solomon's palace, so as to erect there a superb stoa, or basilica. The opening of the new Temple took place in the year 10B.C., but thousands of workmen laboured at it until A.D.64. He built a second strong castle at the northwest angle of Mount Sion, and flanked it with three superb towers-Hippicus, Phasael, and Mariamne. He also opened the tomb of the kings of Juda, in quest of treasure, after which, to allay the popular indignation aroused by his sacrilege, he erected a monument of white marble at the entrance of the tomb. Herod was nearing the end of his reign of nearly forty-one years when Jesus, the Divine Saviour, was born at Bethlehem. A few months after the visit of the three Wise Men of the East, and the massacre of the Innocents he died of a hideous malady, hated by all his people (4B.C.).

Anastasis	Tomb of Jesus

Archelaus, his son, took the title of king, but in the course of the same year Rome left him with only the title of Ethnarch of Judea, Samaria, and Idumea. Ten years later, he was deposed, and Judea was reduced to the status of a Roman province. Coponius, Marcus Ambivius, Annius Rufus, Valerius Gratus (A.D.14) and Pontius Pilate (26) were successively appointed procurators of the country. Pilate occasioned several seditions, which he stifled with extreme brutality. Under the administration of Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ was arrested and put to death. The Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of the Divine Saviour have rendered Jerusalem-which was already glorious-the most celebrated city in all the world. The enthusiasm with which, after the Day of Pentecost, thousands of Jews declared themselves disciples of Jesus Christ provoked a violent persecution of Christians, in which the deacon Stephen was the first martyr (Acts 6:8-15). Pontius Pilate having one day seized the funds of the Corban to pay for the construction of an aqueduct, a violent uprising of the Jews was thus occasioned (35). Summoned to Rome to give an account of his conduct, he was banished by Caligula. Two years later, the emperor made Herod Agrippa I, grandson of Herod, tetrarch of the countries beyond Jordan; in 41 Claudius made him king of Judea. Agrippa undertook the construction of the third wall, to the north of the city. To please the Jews, he caused St. James the Greater to be beheaded, and intended the same lot for St. Peter, when an angel came and delivered the Prince of the Apostles from his chains (Acts 12:1-19). Soon afterwards, early in 44, the king died miserably at Caesarea.

At this epoch there came to Jerusalem Saddan, who was called among the Greeks Helen, Queen of Adiabene, a country situated on the Adiabas, which is an eastern tributary of the Tigris. Converted to Judaism, together with her numerous family, she comforted the poor with her bounty during a terrible famine (Acts 11:28). It was she who caused to be excavated, for herself and her family, to the north of the city, the imposing sepulchre known as the Tomb of the Kings. At this time the Blessed Virgin died, and was buried at Gethsemani. St. Peter returned from Antioch to preside at the First Ecumenical Council (Acts 15:1-3). The King of Judea was replaced by a procurator, and Agrippa II, son of the preceding Agrippa, was made Prince of Chalcis and Perea, and charged with the care of the Temple of Jerusalem. He finished the third wall, which had been commenced by his father, and brought the work upon the sanctuary to a termination in A.D.64. Cuspius Fadus, Tiberius Alexander, and Cumanus were successively procurators, from 44 to 52. Then came Felix, Festus, and Albinus, from 52 to 66. With the last four, disorders and massacres occurred incessantly. Gessius Florus (66) surpassed the wickedness of his predecessors, and drove the people to revolt against the Roman domination; Agrippa and his party advocated patience, and appealed to Rome against the procurator; but after several days of civil war, the insurgent party triumphed over the pacific, massacred the Roman garrison, and set fire to the palaces. Cestius Gallus, President of Syria, arrived on 30 October, 66, with the Twelfth Legion, but only met with repulses, and had to retire.

The Christians, recalling Christ's prophecies (Luke 19:43,44), withdrew beyond the Jordan into Agrippa's territory, led by their bishop, St. Simeon. Nero commanded his general, Vespasian, to suppress the insurrection, and Vespasian, accompanied by his son Titus, invaded Galilee, in A.D.67, with an army of 60,000 men. Most of the strong places had been captured, when the death of the emperor occasioned a suspension of hostilities. After the ephemeral reigns of three emperors, aggregating eighteen months, Vespasian was raised to the throne in Nov., 69. Titus received from his father the command of the Army of the East, and in the following year, at the season when the Holy City was crowded with those who had come to the Feast of the Passover, he began to lay siege to it. On the 14th day of Kanthic, or of the Hebrew month Abib-the day of the Passover, corresponding to 31 March-Titus took up his position on Mount Scopus with the Fifth, Seventh, and Fifteenth Legions, while the Tenth Legion occupied the Mount of Olives. On the other side, John of Giscala held the Temple, the Antonia, and the new town at Bezetha, with 11,000 men, and Simon, the son of Giora, held the upper and lower city, on the southwestern hill, with 10,000 men. Attacking the third wall, on 9 April, the legions captured that line of defences after fifteen days' fighting. Once master of the new town, Titus took up a position to the west, on the ground known as "the Camp of the Assyrians".

Entrance of the Holy Sepulchre-Anastasis	Dome of the Holy Sepulchre

An attack upon the second wall immediately followed. Five days later, the Romans gained entrance by a breach, but were repulsed, and mastered it only after five days of fierce and incessant fighting. Titus could then approach the Antonia, which offered the only way of access to the Temple, and the citadel of Herod, which covered the first wall to the north of Mount Sion. After three days given to repose, the causeways and movable towers were made ready against the Hippicus tower and the Antonia. But on 17 May the works raised against the Antonia were ruined and destroyed by the soldiers of John of Giscala, and two days later the movable towers which threatened the Hippicus were set on fire by Simon's men, while a heroic struggle was being maintained on both sides. The Roman general then employed his whole army for three days in surrounding the city with an earthwork of circumvallation, designed to cut off all communication with the city, and so to reduce the place by famine. This soon produced terrible results.

After three weeks of fresh preparations, the battering-rams effected a breach in the wall connecting the Antonia with the Temple, near the Pool of Struthius, but in vain. Two days later, the wall crumbled to pieces above a mine prepared by John of Giscala, and a handful of Roman soldiers gained entrance to the Antonia by surprise, at three o'clock in the morning of 20 Jun. Titus at once had the fortress demolished, in order to use the materials in constructing mounds against the Temple. For three weeks the Jews desperately defended first the outer porticoes and then the inner, which the Romans entered only at the cost of enormous sacrifices. At last on 23 July, a Roman soldier flung a blazing torch into one of the halls adjoining the Holy of Holies. In the midst of frightful carnage the fire spread to the neighbouring buildings, and soon the whole platform was one horrible mass of corpses and ruins. The Romans then set fire to the palace in the hollow of El Wad, and to the Ophel; next day they drove the Jews out of the Acra and burned the lower city as far as the Pool of Siloe. There still remained the third rampart, the formidable stronghold of the upper city, where the defenders of the Acra, laden with booty, had joined Simon's men. Eighteen days were devoted to the preparation of the aggeres (mounds) to the northwest and northeast of the fortress, but scarcely had the battering-rams breached the walls when John and Simon fled secretly with their troops. On the eighth day of Elul (1 August) the city was definitively in the power of the Romans, after a siege of 143 days. To those who congratulated him Titus replied:"It is not I who have conquered. God, in His wrath against the Jews, has made use of my arm".

The walls of the Temple and those of the city were demolished. But Titus wished to preserve the fortress of the upper city, with the three magnificent towers of Herod's palace. Besides, the upper city was needed as a fortified station for the Tenth Legion, which was left to garrison Jerusalem. During this siege-one of the most sanguinary recorded in history-600,000 Jews, according to Tacitus, or, according to Josephus, more than a million, perished by the sword, disease, or famine. The survivors died in gladiatorial combats or were sold into slavery. "David took the castle of Sion" and "dwelt in the castle, and called it, the city of David:and built round about from Mello and inwards" (2Samuel 5:7,9). When Solomon had completed the Temple and the House of the Forest of Lebanon, 100 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high, with a porch 30 cubits by 50, he erected the palaces and other buildings. Lower down, towards the south, in the locality which figures in the post-Exilic texts as the Ophel, we find the Gabaonites (Joshua 9:22) and other Nathinites-foreign races placed at the service of the Levites to furnish wood and water for the sacrifices (Ezra 2:58; Nehemiah 3:26).

Sion, the City of David, before the exile, the Jews could not have been ignorant of the location, for the boundary wall of Sion enclosed the sepulchres of the prophet-king and fourteen of his successors; the last two Books of Kings repeat this thirteen times (1Kings 2:10; 2Kings 8:24), and Paralipomenon bears similar witness. On their return from exile, the old men (Ezra 3:12) must have remembered in what quarter of the city the burial-places of David and his descendants were situated; in point of fact, Nehemias does not hesitate to use them as a landmark (Nehemiah 3:16). Hyrcanus I and Herod the Great even opened these tombs of the kings to find treasure in them. The white marble monument erected by the latter seems to have remained standing until A.D.133. At any rate the tomb of David was well known among the Jews and the disciples of Christ in the time of St. Peter (Acts 2:29). Now Josephus, an eyewitness, says that the Jebusite city, which became the City of David, occupied the high western plateau of the southwestern hill, which is now known as Mount Sion. In his time it was called "the upper city", and again the upper agora, or market (1Maccabees 12:36). The word Millo is always translated Acra in the Septuagint and Josephus, and, according to the latter, the Millo, or Mello, occupied the high plateau on the northeast side of the same hill, and was in his time called Acra, "lower city" and "lower market" (1Maccabees 1:38). It was this hill, commanding the Temple, that was levelled by the Hasmoneans. The Talmudists agree with the Jewish historian as to the position of the two markets. Eusebius of Caesarea ("Golgotha"), St. Jerome ("Ad Eustoch."), St. Epiphanius ("De mens."), and all later writers, Jewish and Christian, locate Sion, the City of David, upon the southwestern hill, which has never borne any other name than that of Mount Sion.

Jerusalem old city

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