“577. ANCIENT CRUELTIES—JEREMIAH 6:23”
Ancient Cruelties—Jer_6:23
The prophet, in the course of his description of the intended invaders of the land, emphatically declares, that “they are cruel, and have no mercy.”
It was the lot of Jeremiah to live to record the fulfillment of some of his predictions, and of this among the rest. It is clear from his account, as well as from the harrowing detail, in the Lamentations, that the capture of Jerusalem was attended with the utmost barbarities that ancient warfare inflicted upon the inhabitants of a city taken by storm. It may be said, however, that these cruelties were committed in hot blood, and are not materially different in kind from those which have in all ages been the doom of a town taken in the like circumstances. If, under the perfect discipline of modern armies, it has often been found beyond the power of the officers, even when they earnestly desired it, to restrain the infuriated soldiers from giving full vent to their most brutal passions and destructive impulses, how must it have been in the case of ancient oriental armies, with their looser discipline, their habitual disregard of human life, and their customary delight in human suffering; their naturally fiercer passions, and fainter habits of self-restraint!—and with all these propensities, not only unopposed, but usually, in the case of a conquered town, sanctioned and even stimulated by their commanders! We cannot call to mind an instance in ancient oriental warfare of any attempt made by the officers to restrain the soldiers in the case of a city taken by storm. We may find Roman instances; but even the rigorous discipline of the Roman armies seldom sufficed to put any effectual restraint upon the troops. It is well known, for instance, that Titus was most anxious to preserve the temple at Jerusalem, but that, in the face of his strictest injunctions and urgent entreaties, it was wilfully fired by the soldiers.
The temper of a nation is not to be tested by the proceedings of its warriors on such occasions, so much as by the indications of character and habit, which are offered in times of peace, of cool blood, of deliberate action; or by the details of preparation and purpose before war commences, or the treatment of captives after it is over. Judged by these tests, the Babylonians, as well as the Assyrians, may be easily shown to have been a people cruel and without mercy.
Whatever be the atrocities of modern European warfare in hot blood, there is probably no state which would deliberately arrange for the infliction of needless pain and suffering upon the enemy. We lately saw some correspondence in the papers about new guns and new shot; and an officer wrote with the evident feeling of one expecting the general concurrence of military authorities in an objection which he took to the latter, that the wound inflicted by such shot must be incurable—and, he urged, it could be the desire of no one to inflict incurable wounds upon those of the enemy who might survive an action. Now, we have no hesitation in declaring, that this quality of a weapon, which is adduced as a ground for its exclusion from our warfare, would have been the highest recommendation of it to the ancient nations we have in view, and, indeed—we fear that we must say—to most existing nations of the East. Again, we can call to mind that nothing in early life shocked us so much, in the accounts we read of the Spanish Armada, as the deliberate predetermined purpose of after-persecution and cruelty, implied in the presence of the instruments of torture found on board the captured vessels. But this, at which the mind revolts so strongly, is quite in unison with ancient oriental habits and character. In fact, the conception is oriental, and might be traced to the influence which the long-enduring dominion of the Arabs in Spain imparted no less to the ideas and habits than to the language of the people.
To substantiate, in the principles we have indicated, the character which the prophet gives to the Chaldeans, it might suffice to call to mind the refinement of barbarity with which the king Zedekiah was treated by Nebuchadnezzar, some time after the capture of Jerusalem. He slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, with no other object, apparently, than to rend his heart; and his own eyes were then torn out, that this blasting sight might be his last and most enduring visual remembrance. This scene has been vividly presented to our senses by the sculptured representations of similar circumstances in the remains of Nineveh. In one instance, to which we have already referred, Note: Evening Series: Fifteenth Week—Saturday. Illustration: Captives with Hook in Lips and Nose. the king, with his own spear, thrusts out the eyes of a kneeling captive, and holds with his own hand the cord, which is inserted into the lip and nostrils of this and two other prisoners. Thus afflicted, ruined, and shorn of life’s uses, the poor king, with bleeding eyes, was sent off, bound in fetters of brass, to Babylon, where he was kept in prison to the day of his death.
Flaying Alive, from Assyrian Sculptures
This also is brought before us by the Assyrian sculptures, where we find a person, manifestly of rank, thus fettered and manacled; and the very same slab exhibits a still greater atrocity in a captive being actually represented as flayed alive! The executioner has begun with a curved knife to remove the skin from the back of the man’s arm; and this takes place in the presence of the king, to whom the sufferer’s face is turned as if imploring pardon. This fact of the king’s presence is probably always to be understood when any kind of punishment is said to have been ordered by the king, or executed by him. This is the case at the present day in Persia, for instance, where every sentence pronounced; whether of death, mutilation, or bastinado, is executed upon the spot in his presence. This practice is deemed by the Persians essential to the maintenance of the royal authority. It adds, they contend, very materially to the impression of terror which they think should be made upon the turbulent and refractory classes of the community. This no doubt forms part of the education which renders the best of kings revoltingly indifferent to human life and suffering. It is reported of the king (Futteh Ali Shah) who reigned in Persia during the greater part of the present century, that he was naturally a humane man, and when he first came to the throne, felt himself obliged to turn aside his head when an execution took place. But as this is regarded by the Persians not only as unkingly, but as an unmanly weakness, the monarch strove to conquer it, and custom soon inured him to look calmly on.
Persia, indeed, the only one of the ancient eastern kingdoms which still subsists, does, more than any other country, exhibit usages of state and aspects of regal life analogous to those ascribed in Scripture to eastern kings, as well as to those which the sculptures of the Assyrian and other eastern nations offer. The chief difference is in war, the use of fire-arms having necessarily effected there, as everywhere else, great changes in military operations. The treatment which Zedekiah experienced from the Babylonians, as well as the Assyrian analogies to which we have referred, may, for instance, be compared with that of the emperor Valerian by the Persian king Shapur, who is reported not only to have detained his royal captive in hopeless bondage, but to have paraded him in chains, invested with the imperial purple, as a constant spectacle of fallen greatness, to the multitude; and it is added, that whenever the proud conqueror mounted his horse, he placed his foot upon the neck of the Roman emperor. Nor is this all; for when Valerian sank under the weight of his shame and grief, his corpse was flayed, and the skin, stuffed with straw, was preserved for ages in the most celebrated temple of Persia. Gibbon relates these facts with some expression of incredulity. But they were in good part confirmed by the sculptures (at Shapur in Persia), in which the triumph of this king over the Romans is commemorated; and still more by the light which has been cast upon the savagery of ancient eastern nations, by the atrocities represented in their sculptures, and in none more than in those of Assyria, and such as we shall probably soon find in those of Babylon. In fact, nothing is in itself more illustrative of the truth of the character given to the eastern conquerors by the prophet than the existence of such representations. To perpetuate in marble, and to parade in palaces of state, barbarities at which nature shudders, and which, if committed even in hot blood, a right-minded people would seek to bury in oblivion—do most emphatically mark the state of civilization which had been attained by any nation that could suffer its glory to be thus perpetuated.
Autor: JOHN KITTO