Four years prior, the region had been excited into rebellion as a result of religious tensions between the Greeks, who ruled the province of Judea under the auspices of the Roman Emperor, and the Jews. One incident in particular—the sacrificing of birds before a local synagogue—incited the Jews to throw stones and fists at their pagan compatriots, the sacrifice having been judged an abomination.
Rome chose to ignore Judea’s quarrelling, and the Jews responded in kind—Jerusalem’s High Priest ceased prayers to the Roman Emperor. Shortly thereafter, when the vexing issue of Rome’s taxation came up for debate, Jewish cries of outrage and injustice grew louder, and bolder. The Jews began taking out their wrath upon ordinary citizens, and the Roman Emperor retaliated with force, sending troop reinforcements from neighboring lands to squash the Jewish uprising. In this way, the province of Judea was thrust into full violence.
The Roman Army had been ordered to take the capital city of Jerusalem, though victory did not greet them, and they failed to bring down the city’s defenses. The legions set up camp just outside the city walls, busying their hands by polishing their helmets and whetting their spears until, finally, their general hatched a masterful idea.
“Dig! Dig!” chanted the general, having commanded his soldiers to dig a trench around the city walls, which would then be encircled by a new wall. “Any cowards seeking to escape our siege will fall into this trench and be confined by walls on either side,” he boasted. “No rebel will escape his fate!”
When Roman soldiers began building a rampart to access Jerusalem, the Jews foresaw their slaughter. Under the protection of darkness, they began scaling the city walls, swarming like bees, seeking to escape their deaths. But they became entrapped, falling straight into the trench, caught between two sets of walls before being fished out by teams of Roman soldiers clutching them by their collars.
“You solicited your death when you defied Rome!” the general sputtered. “And now you shall meet it,” he said, waving the shackled prisoners toward a long series of vertical, wooden beams pegged against the newly built wall. It was there that they would be hung—crucified—like the vilest of criminals.
“Forget not to strip their clothes!” the general yelled, bringing a huff to the mouths of his soldiers. While urinating and defecating in public added to the shame of crucifixion, the soldiers suffered as well, being forced to endure the stench, and teeming flies that flocked to it.
After stripping them to their bare skin, the soldiers first beat the legs of their prisoners with iron clubs. They either broke their limbs or rendered them unusable so there was no fight left in them. The prisoners were next paired with a large, horizontal beam of Acacia wood, along which each prisoner’s arms were outstretched. Amid screams of pure agony, the soldiers drove tapered, iron nails just above their wrists, between the two bones of the forearm, and into the beam. The beams were then attached to the vertical planks suspended along the wall, and the feet nailed down for good measure. In this way, the Roman Army encircled the holy city of Jerusalem with crucified Jews.
Crucifixion had been practiced in ages of old, long before the Roman Empire, and the empire of the Greeks before it. Some 800 years before, in fact, the Persians were said to have crucified captured pirates, believing the earth was sacred and the burial of tarnished, criminal souls would desecrate the ground. Alexander the Great, who overran the Persian Empire, adopted several Persian customs, crucifixion among them. It was rumored that he crucified a discordant general, as well as a doctor whose treatment failed to restore life to a friend. But his most extravagant display of crucifixion came after a battle at Tyre, a Persian stronghold on the shores of the Mediterranean. Alexander had 2,000 combative Tyrian citizens crucified, their bodies hung with nails along an expansive stretch of sand, punishment for their refusal to surrender after an unusually lengthy and frustrating battle. But it was from the Carthaginians on the northern coast of Africa, where crucifixion was commonly imposed on generals after suffering massive defeat, that the Romans gained their knowledge of this practice, and throughout the Roman Empire, slaves, criminals and rebels—the dregs of society—were often forced to die in this most disgraceful way.
In the eyes of the rebels, the cruelty of their situation was amplified by the fact that Jewish law allowed only four modes of execution—stoning, burning, strangulation and decapitation—with crucifixion being strictly forbidden; their last breaths were drawn while defying their God’s law. The non-Jewish citizens of Judea beheld a cruelty of similar weight, being forced to witness Roman soldiers, who sought to amuse themselves, hang prisoners in different, compromising positions. Some were hung upside down, with their heads to the ground; others were pegged to an X-shaped cross with their legs wide open; and still others had their genitals impaled.
Commotion overtook the city as the crucified issued high-pitched howls, their pain excruciating (literally, “out of crucifying”). All the while, the soldiers reveled in laughter.
“Perhaps they should be thankful they will not be alive to see what is to come,” one soldier quipped. He cuffed his hand to his mouth, as if about to whisper, and then yelled, “Seeing that their Temple is now to be razed!” The howling along the wall grew louder, reaching a deafening pitch, compelling the soldiers to quickly build small fires along their path, the smoke asphyxiating the crucified, quieting their uproar as fast as it rose up.
No comments:
Post a Comment