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for whose cause the evil was upon them.

They were more than a hundred and twenty families, and had thought they
were therefore entitled to elect a Synhedrin. This was in defiance
of ceremonial law, for they knew full well that the formation of a
Synhedrin and the right to try a capital charge had long been forbidden.
But they were face to face with death, and hence the anachronism had
been adopted, and they had fallen back on the custom of their fathers.
So three-and-twenty judges they had appointed, without usurers, or
slave-dealers, or gamblers, or aged men or childless ones.

The judges had sat in session the same night, and their judgment had
been unanimous. The lot of Jonah had fallen on Israel. He had sold
himself to their masters and enemies, the Moors, against the hope and
interest of his own people; he had driven some of the sons of his race
and nation into exile in distant cities; he had brought others to the
Kasbah, and yet others to death: he was a man at open enmity with God,
and God had given him, as a mark of His displeasure, a child who was
cursed with devils, a daughter who had been born blind and dumb and
deaf, and was still without sight and speech.

Could the hand of God's anger be more plain if it were printed in fire
upon the sky? Israel was the evil one for whose sin they suffered this
devastating plague. The Lord was rebuking them for sparing him, even as
He had rebuked Saul for sparing the king and cattle of the Amalekites.
Seventeen years and more he had been among them without being of them,
never entering a synagogue, never observing a fast, never joining in a
feast. Not until their judgment went out against him would God's anger
be appeased. Let them cut him off from the children of his race, and the
blessed rain would fall from heaven, and the thirsty earth would drink
it, and the eggs of the locust would be destroyed. But let them put
off any longer their rightful task and duty before God and before the
people, and their evil time would soon come. Within eight-and-twenty
days the eggs would be hatched, and within eight-and-forty other
days the young locust would have wings. Before the end of those
seventy-and-six days the harvest of wheat and barley would be yellow to
the scythe and ripe for the granary, but the locust would cover the face
of the earth, and there would be no grain to gather. The scythe would be
idle, the granaries would be empty, the tillers of the ground would come