Signs Before the War

Take, then, and read what he has set out in the sixth book of his Histories, in these words: “So at that time deceivers, who told lies in God’s name, led the wretched people astray, while the people neither heeded nor believed the plain portents that foretold the desolation to come. As if thunderstruck, as if they had neither eyes nor mind, they ignored God’s proclamations. [a] There was a time when a star like a broadsword stood over the city, and a comet that lasted a whole year. And there was a time when, before the revolt and the stirring toward war, while the people were gathering for the Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the eighth of the month Xanthicus, at the ninth hour of the night, so great a light shone around the altar and the temple that it seemed to be bright day; and this lasted half an hour. To the inexperienced it seemed a good sign, but the sacred scribes at once read it as a sign of what afterward came to pass. [b] At the same feast a cow brought by the high priest for sacrifice gave birth to a lamb in the middle of the temple. The eastern gate of the inner temple was of bronze and immensely heavy; toward evening twenty men could barely shut it. It was fastened with iron-bound bars and had bolts let down very deep. Yet it was seen at the sixth hour of the night to have opened of its own accord.

Not many days after the feast, on the twenty-first of the month Artemisius, a supernatural apparition was seen, too great to be believed. What I am about to tell would have seemed a mere marvel, had it not been reported by those who saw it, and had the disasters that followed not been worthy of such signs. Before sunset, chariots were seen in the air all over the country, and armed battalions speeding through the clouds and surrounding the cities. [c] And at the feast called Pentecost, when the priests had gone into the temple by night, as their custom was, to perform their service, they said that they first felt a movement and heard a crash, and after that a voice as of a multitude: ‘We are departing from here.’ [d]

More terrible still: four years before the war, when the city was enjoying the deepest peace and prosperity, one Jesus son of Ananias, a peasant of the common people, came to the feast at which it is the custom for everyone to make booths for God, and suddenly began to cry out in the temple: ‘A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds; a voice against Jerusalem and the temple, a voice against bridegrooms and brides, a voice against the whole people!’ Day and night he went about all the alleys crying this. [e] Some of the leading citizens, angered at words of such ill omen, seized the man and beat him severely. But he said nothing in his own defense, nor anything privately to those present, but went on shouting the same cries as before. Then the rulers, supposing, as was the case, that the man was moved by some power beyond the human, brought him to the Roman governor. There, though he was flayed to the bone with whips, he neither begged for mercy nor wept, but, giving his voice the most mournful turn he could, he answered each stroke: ‘Woe, woe to Jerusalem!’” [f]

The same writer tells of something still more remarkable than this. He says that an oracle was found in their sacred writings declaring that at that time someone from their country would rule the world, and he himself took it to have been fulfilled in Vespasian. [g] But Vespasian did not rule the whole world, only the part under the Romans. It could more rightly be referred to Christ, to whom the Father had said, “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession.” At that very time, indeed, the sound of his holy apostles “went out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.” [h]