prepare for a grand siege of Jerusalem. Here he received intelligence of the death of the emperor Nero. This led him to suspend for the present the execution of his plan against the Jews. This respite to that devoted people continued about two years, and but encouraged them to deeds of greater enormity.
A spirit of faetion now appeared in Jerusalem. Two parties first, and afterwards three, raged there; each contending with deadly animosity for the precedence. A part of one of these factions having been excluded from the city, entered it by force during the night; and to such madness were they abandoned, that they butchered on that fatal night not less than eight thousand five hundred men, women and children, whose mangled bodies appeared the next morning, strewed in the streets of Jerusalem. These abandoned murderers plundered in the city, murdered the high priests, Ananus and Jesus, and insulted their dead bodies. They slew their brethren of Jerusalem as though they had been wild animals. They scourged and imprisoned the nobles, in hopes to terrify them to become of their party; and many who could not be thus won, they slew In this reign of terror, twelve thousand of the higher orders of the people thus perished; and no relative dared to shed a mourning tear, lest this should bring on them a similar late.
Accusation and death became the most common events. Many fled, but were intercepted and slain. Piles of their carcasses lay on the public roads; and all pity, as well as regard for human or divine authority, seemed extinguished.
To add to the horrid calamities of the times occasioned by the bloody factions, Judea was infested by bands of robbers and murderers, plundering their towns and cutting in pieces such as made any resistance, whether men, women or children. Here were exhibited the
most horrid pictures of what fallen man is capable of perpetrating when restraints are taken off; that they would turn their own towns and societies into scenes of horror like kennels of wild animals.
One Simon became commander of one of the factions; John of another Simon entered Jerusalem at the head of forty thousand banditti. A third faction rose: and
