Stories of the Wars of the Jews from the Babylonish captivity, to the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus

The noble family of the Asmoneans, so called from Asmoneus, one of its ancestors, was amongst the most distinguished in Judea, and dwelt at this period in the town of Modin. At...

Hitherto the history of the house of the Asmoneans has been a record of the brave deeds of noble men; but from this point it becomes little but a dark catalogue of crimes. We fe...

In the first year of the reign of Cyrus, the Lord stirred up the spirit of that king, probably through the influence of the aged Daniel, to issue throughout his vast dominions t...

And now, for the first time, there reigned in Judea a king who was not of the race of Jacob—a king who had been placed on the throne by a foreign power, and who was chiefly main...

Into all the details of this most horrible war we will not enter, nor describe how, in Cesarea, Joppa, Damascus, Jews were slaughtered by thousands and tens of thousands. In 67...

We now lose the sure guidance of the sacred writings, and must pursue our way by the dimmer light of uninspired history. “The two books of the Maccabees,” writes Dr. Gray, “were...

A period of extreme distress succeeded the death of Judas. The sky had not appeared darker over Judea even during the bloody persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes. Whereupon all th...

Antiochus the Great died, 187 B.C., and Seleucus Philopater succeeded. It is during the reign of this monarch that some remarkable events are said to have occurred, as related i...

In the first division of Alexander’s empire, Syria devolved to Laomedon, and Egypt to Ptolemy Soter. Between them a war arose, and its result was that all the provinces of Laome...

Many years had passed since the events recorded in the last chapter had taken place. Ahasuerus was dead, and Artaxerxes his son reigned on the throne of Persia. Ezra had for abo...

Artaxerxes,[2] or, as he is termed in the Scriptures, Ahasuerus, sat on the throne of Persia. Lord of the widest kingdom which then existed upon earth—a kingdom which extended f...

Festus did not long hold the reins of government. He yielded them up to Albinus, a man of character so extortionate, that he was said to be the real head of all the robbers in t...

The measure of the tyrant’s iniquities was now nearly full; the earth was not much longer to endure the presence of this monster of cruelty. Herod, as Antiochus Epiphanes had be...

It was not long after the death and resurrection of our Lord, while His infant Church was struggling against its first difficulties, that Philip, brother of Herod Antipas, died....

It was at this period, when the gloom was the heaviest, the night darkest, that the Sun of Righteousness arose with healing on His wings—that the long-expected, much-desired Mes...

That night King Ahasuerus could not sleep. Those peaceful slumbers which the meanest of his subjects could enjoy, fled from the eyelids of the monarch. It does not appear, howev...

The reign of the noble Judas was neither peaceful nor long. The year after that in which Antiochus and Lycias had besieged the temple, they were both defeated and slain by Demet...

And what is Judea now, after the lapse of eighteen centuries? Still an oppressed and desolate land—a land which has been ruled by Saracen, Christian, Turk; but never since that...

While the Roman Procurator Pilate governed in Jerusalem, Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, reigned in Galilee under the title of Tetrarch. It was this prince who, on be...