eled and dug up, that no one visiting it would believe that it had ever been inhabited."

§ 12. The great interest belonging to Jerusalem as the central scene of Sacred History, and especially in connection with our Lord's prediction of the destruction of the Temple, seems to demand a few words by way of supplement. For more than fifty years after its destruction by Titus, Jerusalem disappears from history. During the revolts of the Jews in Cyrenaica, Egypt, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia, which disturbed the latter years of Trajan, the recovery of their city was never attempted. Of its annals during this period we know nothing. Three towers and part of the western wall alone remained of its strong fortifications, to protect the cohorts who occupied the conquered city; and the soldiers' huts were long the only buildings on its site. But in the reign of Hadrian it again emerged from its obscurity, and became the centre of an insurrection, which the best blood of Rome was shed to subdue. In despair of keeping the Jews in subjection by other means, the Emperor had formed a design to restore Jerusalem, and thus prevent it from ever becoming a rallying point for this turbulent race. In furtherance of his plan he had sent thither a colony of veterans, in numbers sufficient for the defense of a position so strong by nature against the then known modes of attack. To this measure Dion Cassius attributes a renewal of the insurrection, while Eusebius asserts that it was not carried into execution till the outbreak was quelled. Be this as it may, the embers of revolt, long smouldering, burst into a flame soon after Hadrian's departure from the East in A.D. 132. The contemptuous indifference of the Romans, or the secrecy of their own plans, enabled the Jews to organize a wide-spread conspiracy. Bar-Cocheba, their leader, the third, according to Rabbinical writers, of a dynasty of the same name, princes of the captivity, was crowned king at Bether by the Jews who thronged to him, and by the populace was regarded as the Messiah. His armor-bearer, Rabbi Akiba, claimed descent from Sisera, and hated the Romans with the fierce rancor of his adopted nation. All the Jews in Palestine flocked to his standard. At an early period in the revolt they became masters of Jerusalem, and attempted to rebuild the Temple. Hadrian, alarmed at the rapid spread of the insurrection, and the ineffectual efforts of his troops to repress it, summoned from Britain Julius Severus, the greatest general of his time, to take the command of the

96 lxix. 12.

96

army of Judæa. Two years were spent in a fierce guerrilla warfare, before Jerusalem was taken, after a desperate defense in which Bar-Cocheba perished. The courage of the defenders was shaken by the falling in of the vaults on Mount Zion, and the Romans became masters of the position. But the war did not end with the capture of the city. The Jews in great force had occupied the fortress of Bether, and there maintained a struggle with all the tenacity of despair against the repeated onsets of the Romans. At length, worn out by famine and disease, they yielded on the 9th of the month Ab, A.D. 135, and the grandson of Bar-Cocheba was among the slain. The slaughter was frightful. Five hundred and eighty thousand are said to have fallen by the sword, while the number of victims to the attendant calamities of war was countless. On the side of the Romans the loss was enormous, and so dearly bought was their victory, that Hadrian, in his letter to the Senate, announcing the conclusion of the war, did not adopt the usual congratulatory phrase. Bar-Cocheba has left traces of his occupation of Jerusalem, in coins which were struck during the first two years of the war. Four silver coins, three of them undoubtedly belonging to Trajan, have been discovered, restamped with Samaritan characters. But the rebel leader, amply supplied with the precious metals by the contributions of his followers, afterward coined his own money. The mint was probably at Jerusalem during the first two years of the war; the coins struck during that period bearing the inscription, "To the freedom of Jerusalem," or “Jerusalem the holy." They are mentioned in both Talmuds.

Hadrian's first policy, after the suppression of the revolt, was to obliterate the existence of Jerusalem as a city. The ruins which Titus had left were razed to the ground, and the plough passed over the foundations of the Temple. A colony of Roman citizens occupied the new city which rose from the ashes of Jerusalem, and their number was afterward augmented by the Emperor's veteran legionaries. A temple to the Capitoline Jupiter was erected on the site of the sacred edifice of the Jews. A temple to Astarte, the Phoenician Venus, on the site afterward identified with the Sepulchre, appears on coins, with four columns and the inscription C. A. C., Colonia Elia Capitolina, but it is more than doubtful whether it was erected at this time.

It was not, however, till the following year, A.D. 136, that Hadrian, on celebrating his Vicennalia, bestowed upon the new city the name of ÆLIA CAPITOLINA, combining with his

own family title the name of Jupiter of the Capitol, the guardian deity of the colony. Christians and pagans alone were allowed to reside in the city. Jews were forbidden to enter it on pain of death, and this prohibition remained in force in the time of Tertullian. About the middle of the 4th century the Jews were allowed to visit the neighborhood, and afterward, once a year, to enter the city itself, and weep over it on the anniversary of its capture. Jerome has drawn a vivid picture of the wretched crowds of Jews who in his day assembled at the wailing-place by the west wall of the Temple to bemoan the loss of their ancestral greatness. On the ninth of the month Ab might be seen the aged and decrepit of both sexes, with tattered garments and disheveled hair, who met to weep over the downfall of Jerusalem, and purchased permission of the soldiery to prolong their lamentations (" et miles mercedem postulat ut illis flere plus liceat"). So completely were all traces of the ancient city obliterated, that its very name was in process of time forgotten. It was not till after Constantine built the Martyrion on the site of the crucifixion, that its ancient appellation was revived. In the 7th canon of the Council of Nicæa the bishop of Elia is mentioned; but Macarius, in subscribing to the canons, designated himself bishop of Jerusalem. The name of Ælia occurs as late as A. D. 697, and is even found in Edrîsi and Mejr ed-Din about

1495.

After the inauguration of the new colony of Ælia the annals of the city again relapse into an obscurity, which is only represented in history by a list of twenty-three Christian bishops, who filled up the interval between the election of Marcus, the first of the series, and Macarius in the reign of Constantine. Already in the third century the Holy Places had become objects of enthusiasm, and the pilgrimage of Alexander, a bishop in Cappadocia, and afterward of Jerusalem, is matter of history. In the following century such pilgrimages became more common. The aged Empress Helena, mother of Constantine, visited Palestine in A.D. 326, and, according to tradition, erected magnificent churches at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives. Her son, fired with the same zeal, swept away the shrine of Astarte, which occupied the site of the Resurrection, and founded in its stead a chapel or oratory. On the east of this was a large court, the eastern side being formed by the Basilica, erected on the spot where the cross was said to have been found. The latter of these build

97 On Zeph. i. 15.

ings is that known as the Martyrion; the former was the church of the Anastasis, or Resurrection. In the reign of Julian (A.D. 362) the Jews, with the permission and at the instigation of the Emperor, made an abortive attempt to lay the foundations of a temple. From whatever motive, Julian had formed the design of restoring the Jewish worship on Mount Moriah to its pristine splendor, and during his absence in the East the execution of his project was entrusted to his favorite, Alypius of Antioch. Materials of every kind were provided at the Emperor's expense, and so great was the enthusiasm of the Jews, that their women took part in the work, and in the laps of their garments carried off the earth which covered the ruins of the Temple. But a sudden whirlwind and earthquake shattered the stones of the former foundations; the workmen fled for shelter to one of the neighboring churches, the doors of which were closed against them by an invisible hand, and a fire issuing from the Temple mount raged the whole day and consumed their tools. Numbers perished in the flames. Some who escaped took refuge in a portico near at hand, which fell at night and crushed them as they slept. Whatever may have been the coloring which this story received as it passed through the hands of the ecclesiastical historians, the impartial narrative of Ammianus Marcellinus, the friend and companion in arms of the Emperor, leaves no reasonable doubt of the truth of the main facts that the work was interrupted by fire, which all attributed to supernatural agency. In the time of Chrysostom the foundations of the Temple still remained, to which the orator could appeal. The event was regarded as a judgment of God upon the impious attempt of Julian to falsify the predictions of Christ: a position which Bishop Warburton defends with great skill in his treatise on the subject; but other writers of high authority regard it as a legend invented by superfluous and short-sighted zeal."

98

98 xxiii. 1.

99 The preceding account of the siege of Jerusalem by Titus and its

subsequent history is taken, with a few additions, from the article JERUSALEM in the Dictionary of the Bible.