omans were not only willing,
but very desirous, to grant those Jews in Jerusalem both their lives and
their liberties, and to save both their city and their temple. But the
zealots, the rubbers, and the seditious would hearken to no terms
of submission. They voluntarily chose to reduce the citizens to that
extremity, as to force mothers to this unnatural barbarity, which,
in all its circumstances, has not, I still suppose, been hitherto
paralleled among the rest of mankind.

[16] These steps to the altar of burnt-offering seem here either an
improper and inaccurate expression of Josephus, since it was unlawful to
make ladder steps; [see description of the temples, ch. 13., and note on
Antiq. B. IV. ch. 8. sect. 5;] or else those steps or stairs we now
use were invented before the days of Herod the Great, and had been here
built by him; though the later Jews always deny it, and say that even
Herod's altar was ascended to by an acclivity only.

[17] This Perea, if the word be not mistaken in the copies, cannot
well be that Perea which was beyond Jordan, whose mountains were at a
considerable distance from Jordan, and much too remote from Jerusalem to
join in this echo at the conflagration of the temple; but Perea must
be rather some mountains beyond the brook Cedron, as was the Mount
of Olives, or some others about such a distance from Jerusalem; which
observation is so obvious, that it is a wonder our commentators here
take no notice of it.

[18] Reland I think here judges well, when he interprets these spikes
[of those that stood on the top of the holy house] with sharp points;
they were fixed into lead, to prevent the birds from sitting there,
and defiling the holy house; for such spikes there were now upon it, as
Josephus himself hath already assured us, B. V. ch. 5. sect. 6.

[19] Reland here takes notice, that these Jews, who had despised the
true Prophet, were deservedly abused and deluded by these false ones.

[20] Whether Josephus means that this star was different from that comet
which lasted a whole year, I cannot certainly determine. His words most
favor their being different one from another.

[21] Since Josephus still uses the Syro-Macedonian month Xanthicus for
the Jewish month Nisan, this eighth, or, as Nicephorus reads it, this
ninth of Xanthicus or Nisan was almost a week before the passover, on
the fourteenth; about which time we learn from St. John that many used
to go "out of the country to Jeru