The Idumeans at the Gates

With tales like these John played on all their fears at once. He did not dare to name openly the outside help he had in mind, but he hinted at the Idumeans. And to stir up the leaders of the zealots in particular, he slandered Ananus as bent on some cruelty, and said that he was threatening them above all. These leaders were Eleazar son of Gion, who was thought the most capable of them all both at seeing what needed to be done and at carrying out what he had decided, and one Zacharias son of Amphicalleus. Both were of priestly descent. These two heard, besides the threats made against them all, the threats aimed at themselves; they heard too that Ananus and his party were calling in the Romans to secure power for themselves, for John had added this lie as well. For a long time they were at a loss what to do, hemmed in as they were by so sharp a crisis. The people, they believed, were prepared to attack them before long, and the suddenness of the plot had cut off any help from outside, for they would have suffered everything before any of their allies so much as heard of it. Still, they decided to call in the Idumeans. They wrote a short letter: Ananus had deceived the people and was betraying the mother city to the Romans; they themselves had broken away for the sake of liberty and were being held under guard in the temple; only a little time was left on which their safety hung; and unless the Idumeans came quickly to their help, they would soon be in the hands of Ananus and their enemies, and the city in the hands of the Romans. Much more they told the messengers to say to the rulers of the Idumeans by word of mouth. Two energetic men were chosen for the errand, good speakers who could persuade men about affairs, and, what was more useful still, exceptionally fast runners. For they knew the Idumeans would be persuaded at once, a turbulent and disorderly nation, always on the alert for any upheaval and delighting in change, who take up arms at a little flattery from those who ask them and rush into battle as if to a festival. The message needed speed, and the men who were sent lacked nothing in eagerness. Both were named Ananias, and they soon stood before the rulers of the Idumeans. [a]

The rulers were astounded at the letter and at what the messengers told them. They ran around the nation like madmen, proclaiming the campaign. The crowd gathered faster than the summons, and every man snatched up his arms to set the mother city free. Twenty thousand of them formed ranks and came to Jerusalem under four commanders: John, and Jacob son of Sosas, and with them Simon son of Thaceas and Phinehas son of Clusoth. [c]

The messengers’ departure had escaped Ananus, as it had escaped the guards, but the approach of the Idumeans did not. He learned of it in advance, shut the gates against them, and kept the walls under guard. Yet he did not think it right to make outright war on them; he would try persuasion before arms. So Jesus, the eldest of the high priests after Ananus, stood on the tower facing them and spoke: “Many troubles of many kinds have taken hold of this city, but in none of them have I wondered at fortune as I do now, when she works even wonders on the side of the wicked. For here you are, come to help the most abandoned of men against us, and with an eagerness one could hardly expect even if the mother city had called you against barbarians. If I saw that your army was made up of men like those who called you, I would not think your rush unreasonable, for nothing binds men’s goodwill together like kinship of character. But as it is, if one examined these men one by one, each of them would be found to deserve ten thousand deaths. They are the scum and refuse of the whole city. They squandered their own property in debauchery, practiced their madness first on the villages and towns around them, and in the end slipped secretly into the holy city: robbers, whose monstrous impieties defile even the hallowed ground. You can see them now, getting drunk without fear in the sanctuary and spending the spoils of the men they have murdered on their insatiable bellies. Your numbers, meanwhile, and the splendor of your arms are just what would befit you if the mother city had called you by public decree as allies against foreigners. What can anyone call this but an insult of fortune, when he sees a whole nation in arms standing shield to shield with a picked band of villains? [d]

“For a long time I have been at a loss what it was that moved you so quickly, for you would not take up full armor for robbers and against a people of your own kin without some great cause. But when we heard the words ‘Romans’ and ‘betrayal’—for some of your men were shouting about this just now, and saying they had come to set the mother city free—we were amazed, more than at all their other outrages, at these wretches’ lie on that point. Men who love liberty by nature, and for that very reason are most ready to fight foreign enemies, could be roused to fury against us in no other way than by inventing a tale that we were betraying the liberty they long for. But you ought to consider who are making the accusation and against whom, and to gather the truth not from made-up stories but from the public facts. What could possibly lead us to sell ourselves to the Romans now, when it was open to us either not to revolt in the first place or, once we had revolted, to go back over quickly while the country around was still unravaged? Now it is not easy to make terms even if we wished, since the conquest of Galilee has made the Romans contemptuous, and to court them now that they are close at hand would bring on us a disgrace worse than death. For my own part I would have preferred peace to death; but once war has been made on us and we have joined battle, I prefer a glorious death to living as a captive. Do they claim that we, the leaders of the people, sent to the Romans in secret, or that the people did it by a common vote? If it was we, let them name the friends who were sent, the servants who carried out the betrayal. Was anyone caught going out? Seized on the way back? Have they got hold of letters? How did we escape the notice of so many citizens, among whom we move every hour of the day, while what was done in secret out in the country became known to a few men under guard, who cannot even come out of the temple into the city? Is it only now that they have found this out, when they must pay the penalty for their crimes? As long as they themselves had nothing to fear, none of us was suspected of being a traitor. If they lay the blame on the people, then the people deliberated in the open, and no one stayed away from the assembly, so that the report would have reached you, and more plainly, sooner than any informer. And then? Would they not have had to send envoys to ratify the terms they had voted? Who was elected for that? Let them tell us. No: this is the excuse of men who are loath to die and are trying to fend off the punishments hanging over them. If it were fated that this city should be betrayed, only our accusers would dare even that, for of all crimes their outrages lack just one: treason.

“Now that you are here in arms, the most just thing is to defend the mother city and help us destroy the tyrants who have abolished the courts, trampled on the laws, and made their swords the judges. They have seized distinguished men, against whom no charge was laid, out of the middle of the marketplace, maltreated them in chains, and without listening to a word they said or a plea they made, put them to death. You may come inside, not by the law of war, and see the proofs of what I say: houses emptied by their plundering, the wives and families of the murdered dressed in black, wailing and lamentation all over the city. For there is no one who has not tasted the raids of these impious men. They have gone so far in madness that they have carried their banditry not only from the countryside and the outlying towns into this city, the face and head of the whole nation, but from the city into the temple. That is now their base and refuge and the storehouse of their preparations against us. The place that the whole inhabited world reveres, honored by foreigners from the ends of the earth who know it only by report, is trampled underfoot by wild beasts bred here among us. Already, in their despair, they make sport of dashing people against people and city against city, and of raising an army of the nation against its own heart. In return for all this, the noblest and most fitting thing, as I said, is for you to help us destroy these wretches, and to take revenge on them for this very deceit, that they dared to call as allies the men they ought to have feared as avengers. But if you have some regard for the summons of such men, you may still lay down your arms, come into the city as kinsmen, take a name halfway between allies and enemies, and become judges. And yet consider what these men will gain by being tried before you for crimes so open and so great, men who would not grant even a word to those against whom there was no charge. Well, let them have this favor from your coming. But if you will neither share our anger nor sit as judges, the third course is to leave us both alone, neither trampling on our calamities nor joining the plotters against the mother city. For even if you strongly suspect that some of us have been in talks with the Romans, you can watch the approaches; and if any of these charges is shown by the facts to be true, then come and guard the mother city and punish those found guilty. The enemy could not get ahead of you, living as you do so close to the city. But if none of these proposals seems to you fair or moderate, do not be surprised at the bars on the gates for as long as you carry arms.”

So spoke Jesus. But the mass of the Idumeans paid no attention; they were furious at not finding a ready entrance, and their generals were indignant at the proposal to lay down their arms, thinking it captivity to throw them away at anyone’s command. Simon son of Caathas, one of their commanders, with difficulty quieted the uproar among his own men, and standing where the high priests could hear him, he said: “I am no longer surprised that the champions of liberty are held under guard in the temple, now that some men are shutting the common city against the nation itself. They are getting ready, it seems, to welcome the Romans, perhaps even crowning the gates with garlands, while they talk to the Idumeans from their towers and order them to throw down the arms they took up for liberty. They will not trust their kinsmen with guarding the mother city, yet they make them judges of their quarrels. They accuse certain men of putting others to death without trial, while they themselves condemn the whole nation to dishonor. The city that stood open for worship to every foreigner you have now walled off from your own people. Oh yes, we came hurrying to slaughter and to war against our own countrymen—we who made all this haste for no other reason than to keep you free! No doubt the men you hold under guard have wronged you in just the same way, and you have gathered, I suppose, equally plausible suspicions against them. Then, holding prisoner all inside who care for the public good, shutting the city wholesale against the nations most closely related to you, and giving such insulting orders, you say that you are the ones under tyranny, and you hang the name of despotism on those whom you yourselves tyrannize. Who could bear the irony of your words, looking at the contradiction of your deeds? Unless it is the Idumeans who are now shutting you out of the mother city, when it is you who bar them from the ancestral rites! One might fairly blame those besieged in the temple for this: that when they had the courage to punish the traitors—whom you, as their partners, call distinguished men against whom no charge lies—they did not begin with you, and so cut off beforehand the most vital parts of the treason. But if they were softer than the need required, we Idumeans will guard the house of God and fight for our common fatherland, resisting both the enemies who attack from outside and the traitors within. Here before the walls we will stay in arms, until either the Romans grow tired of waiting on you or you change your minds and think like free men.” [g]

The mass of the Idumeans shouted approval of this, and Jesus withdrew in dejection, seeing that the Idumeans would accept nothing moderate and that the city was under attack from two sides. But the Idumeans’ minds were not at rest either. They were furious at the insult of being shut out of the city, and when they saw that the zealots, whose strength they had counted on, were doing nothing to help them, they were at a loss, and many regretted having come. But shame at going home with nothing at all accomplished overcame their regret, so that they stayed where they were before the wall, though they camped there miserably. For in the night a monstrous storm broke out: violent winds with torrents of rain, continuous lightning, terrifying thunder, and extraordinary bellowings of the shaking earth. It was plain that the whole frame of the universe had been thrown into confusion for the destruction of men, and anyone would guess that these portents foretold no small calamity.

The Idumeans and the people in the city came to one and the same opinion. The Idumeans thought God was angry at their campaign and that they would not escape punishment for bearing arms against the mother city; Ananus and his party thought they had won without a battle and that God was commanding on their side. But they proved poor guessers of the future, and foretold for their enemies what was about to fall on their own people. The Idumeans huddled close together, warmed one another with their bodies, and locked their shields over their heads, and so suffered less from the rain. The zealots, for their part, were more tormented by the danger these men were in than by their own, and they met to consider whether they could devise some way to help them. The hotter heads among them thought they should force their way past the guards with their arms, then burst into the middle of the city and open the gates to their allies in plain sight. The guards, they argued, would be thrown into confusion by the surprise and give way, especially since most of them were unarmed and without experience of war, and the people of the city would be hard to gather, shut up in their houses by the storm. And if there were any danger, it was right for them to suffer anything whatever rather than look on while so great a multitude perished shamefully on their account. The more sensible rejected the use of force. They saw that the guard set over themselves was strong in numbers, and that the city wall too was carefully watched because of the Idumeans. They also thought Ananus would be everywhere, inspecting the guards every hour. So indeed it had been on other nights; but on that night it was relaxed—not through any slackness of Ananus, but because fate was in command, so that he himself and the whole body of guards might perish. As the night wore on and the storm reached its height, fate put to sleep the guards on the colonnade, and put into the zealots’ minds the plan of taking the sacred saws of the temple and cutting through the bars of the gates. The howling of the winds and the peal upon peal of thunder helped them, so that the noise was not heard. [j]

Unseen, they went out of the temple to the wall and, using the same saws, opened the gate that faced the Idumeans. At first alarm fell on the Idumeans, who thought Ananus and his men were attacking, and every man put his right hand on his sword to defend himself; but they quickly recognized who had come, and went in. Had they then turned on the city, nothing could have stopped them from destroying the whole people, such was their rage. But first they hurried to free the zealots from the guard. The men who had let them in begged them earnestly not to abandon, in the midst of their danger, the very men they had come for, nor to bring a worse danger on them. Once the guards were taken, they said, it would be easy to go on against the city; but if they once roused the city first, they could no longer overcome the guards, for at the alarm these would form up and block the way up to the temple.