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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 671. Bernice in the Jewish War
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Bernice in the Jewish War
1. The war began at Cæsarea. The Syrian Greeks in that city did everything in their power to insult the Jews. They all but blocked up the entrance to the chief synagogue by buildings erected in its immediate vicinity, and Florus, while he calmly pocketed the immense bribe of eight talents given him by John the tax-gatherer to secure his interference, went away to Sebaste and did nothing. Collisions daily occurred between the wanton Greeks and the hot-headed young Jews. One Sabbath day a Greek placed an earthen pan near the entrance of the synagogue, and ostentatiously sacrificed small birds on the bottom of it. This was intended as a mockery of the Jewish rites for the purification of a leper, and was understood as a contumelious reference to the pagan scandal that the nation had been driven out of Egypt as a nation of lepers. John went with the chief Jews to implore the interference of Florus; but in spite of the huge bribe which he had received, the procurator simply threw them into prison.
The news of this outrage and injustice spread to Jerusalem. The city was in a state of violent excitement. It was the deliberate purpose of Florus to drive the people to insurrection, both that all inquiry into his former oppressions might be drowned by the din of war, and that he might have better opportunities for plunder. He seized this critical moment to demand seventeen talents from the sacred treasury under pretence of Cæsar's necessities. The people assembled around the Temple with the loudest outcries. The name of Florus was passed from one to another with every epithet of hatred and contempt. Some carried about a basket, entreating alms for the poor beggar, Florus
Florus entered Jerusalem with a large force, and refusing to be appeased by the submission of the people, gave the order for his troops to plunder the upper market and put to death all they met. The soldiery were but too ready instruments of his cruelty. They cleared the market, then broke into the houses, pillaged them, and put to death the inhabitants. The narrow streets were crowded with fugitives; many who escaped the sword were trampled to death. Unoffending citizens were seized, carried before Florus, scourged and crucified. Of men, women, and children-for neither age nor sex was spared-there fell that day 3600. Florus paid no regard to the sacred rights of Roman citizenship; some freedmen of the first distinction-for many of the Jews had attained even the equestrian rank-were scourged and executed with their meaner countrymen.
2. It was then that Bernice did the one redeeming act recorded in her infamous career. She and the principal Jews sent an embassy to Cestius to complain of the iniquities of the procurator. Horrified at the massacres and tortures of her countrymen, she herself, in all her beauty and misery, went before the brutal Florus with dishevelled tresses and naked feet to offer her weeping intercession. He heeded her so little that even in her presence Jews were scourged and murdered. She fled back to her palace, and even there she felt that her scanty bodyguard was so insufficient for her personal protection that she lived in the most intense alarm, her heart torn by pity for the monstrous wrongs and cruelties which she was compelled to witness and was impotent to restrain. Cestius decided to visit Jerusalem, and sent before him the centurion Neapolitanus. Agrippa met Neapolitanus at Jamnia, and they proceeded on their way together.
About seven or eight miles from Jerusalem, Neapolitanus and Agrippa were met by a mournful procession. The people were preceded by the wives of those who had been slain. The women, with wild shrieks and outcries, called on Agrippa for protection, and recounted to Neapolitanus all the miseries they had undergone from the cruelty of Florus. On the entrance of the king and the Roman into the city, they were led to the ruined marketplace, and shown the shops that had been plundered, and the desolate houses where the inhabitants had been massacred. Neapolitanus, having passed through the whole city, and found it in profound peace, went up to the Temple, paid his adorations there in the court of the Gentiles, exhorted the people to maintain their loyal demeanour, and returned to Cestius.
Agrippa added his own entreaties. He summoned the people to meet him in the Xystos, the royal colonnade, which overlooked the city, and, seating himself on a lofty throne with Bernice by his side, he harangued the Jews at length, and held out to them the hope that, in this the extremity of their misery, Nero would send them a milder and juster procurator, and their miseries would be at an end. He pointed out to them the utter madness of a revolt against the Romans, who had subdued so many nations and kingdoms. He warned them that so hopeless an insurrection could have no possible result except the obliteration of their city and their religion and the desolation of their loved land. As he closed his harangue he burst into tears, and remained weeping, while Bernice stood weeping at his side. The people, moved by his eloquence, and the thought of their hopeless present misery and imminent peril, wept with them, and promised to pay the tribute. As a sign of their renewed allegiance, they agreed to restore the passage from the Castle Antonia to the Temple, their destruction of which was, as Agrippa pointed out to them, little short of an open declaration of war.
They began the work at once, and for one moment it might have seemed as if Jerusalem were saved. Agrippa and Bernice did their utmost to encourage them; but, in another harangue, Agrippa, while commending their repentance, urged them to continue their allegiance to Florus until Nero should send another procurator. The maddening name of Florus was too much for this strange, excitable people. They broke out into open maledictions. From curses on the name of Florus they passed to insults against Agrippa himself, his sister, his whole house. From insults they proceeded to stone-throwing, and passionately ordered him to leave the city. He did so, with a feeling of indignation and despair.
The slightest passion in most people upsets their judgment.1 [Note: Mark Rutherford, Last Pages from a Journal, 260.]
If thou examine things with hell-fire in thy heart,
How canst thou see distinct the good and bad apart?
Seek by degrees to drown that fire in holy light,
So shalt thou, sinner, soon thy weakness change for might.2 [Note: Jalaluddin Rumi, in A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom, 111.]
3. In the riots which followed, the insurgents burned the palaces of the high priest, Agrippa, and Bernice, and then set fire to the public archives and all bonds in order to cancel all debts.
Throughout the rest of the war Agrippa and his sister were on the side of the Romans. In 75 a.d. he went to Rome, where he lived with his sister, with whom, in spite of her dubious reputation, Titus was so madly in love that, but for the open murmurs of the Romans, he would have made her his Empress. Finding in 79 a.d. that Titus, when he became Emperor, took no further notice of her, she retired to Palestine, and we hear no more about her. On her way she stopped at Athens, where an inscription in her honour still exists.
4. It is difficult for us to read the stories of these four queens-Herodias, and her daughter Salome, and the two sisters Bernice and Drusilla, all of them adulteresses, two of them guilty of foulest murder-and not set them apart from their sex as beneath the nature of womankind. There is no reason to minimize their crimes. We cannot compare them with the poor, miserable, outcast women whom Jesus treated so mercifully because those women, “sinners” as they were called, had become penitents, and probably throughout had been crushed down by poverty and ill-usage. These gay queens had no excuses to plead in defence of their shameless careers of crime. And yet there is much in heredity, and more in the influence of example. The royal sinners had never known a pure home life. They had been cradled in wickedness. We regard them as monsters of sin; but we must remember that there was something monstrous about the circumstances with which they had been surrounded from their childhood. It would have been a miracle if ever a virtuous woman had appeared in the family of the Herods.
Father is a townsman, mother from the far
Green southern uplands where wealthy pastures are:
My kith and my kindred are prosperous and sleek,
Who feed well and work well and thrive all the week.
But somewhere and sometime, many a year ago,
There was a gypsy woman, that right well I know,
A wild dark woman from the moor and wold,
Who bare me an ancestor in days of old.
They hushed up her memory, hid her name away,
Thought they had done with her for ever and a day-
Yet hath she left a heritage that none else shall win,
Whereunto my wandering feet have entered in.
For surely when the dead leaves scatter down the street,
With a rush and rustle, like little flying feet,-
When the sou'-west wakens, and with scared looks askance
The townsfolk hasten from the storm's advance,-
My whole soul sickens with a fierce desire,
Stress of sudden longing sets my blood on fire,
For the wind on the hill-top in a lonely place,
And the cold, soft raindrops blowing on my face;
For the steep-hung hedges of the winding road,
And the forest pathway by the stream o'erflowed;
For the storm-swept heather where the blackcock whirs,
And the salt wind whistles through the stunted firs;
For the brown wood-water, and the brown field's smell,
And the wide sea-marshes where the curlews dwell:
For the moorland black against the last red light,
And the sunk reef's breakers brawling to the night.
Hide within your houses with your glaring gas!
Mine shall be the peat-smoke in the beech-roofed grass:
Count your sordid silver, tell your grimy gain-
Mine shall be the treasures of the wind and rain!1 [Note: May Byron, The wind on the Heath, 83.]
Literature
Conybeare, W. J., and J. S. Howson, The Life and Epistles of St. Paul (1870), 342, 497.
Edmunds, L., Sunday by Sunday (1903), 233.
Garvie, A. E., Romans (Century Bible) (1901), 300, 315.
Howson, J. S., The Companions of St. Paul (1874), 126.
Maclaren, A., Expositions: St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans (1909), 352.
Moule, H. C. G., The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans (Cambridge Bible) (1881), 245.
Moule, H. C. G., The Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans (Expositor's Bible) (1894), 422.
Redlich, E. B., St. Paul and his Companions (1913), 264.
Sanday, W., and A. C. Headlam, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (International Critical Commentary) (1902), 416.
Dictionary of the Apostolic Church, ii. (1916) 231 (T. B. Allworthy).
Dictionary of the Bible, iii. (1900) 855 (A. C. Headlam).