4. Short hints of the condition of the second Temple.

Josephus tells us, that he foretold it to Vespasian, that he should be emperor. Vespasian commanded that Josephus should be kept with all the diligence imaginable, that he might be conveyed safely to Nero; which when Josephus understood, he requested that he might be permitted to impart something of moment to Vespasian himself alone. Vespasian having commanded all out of the room, except Titus and two other of his friends, Josephus accosts him thus, "Are you sending me to Nero? Thou thyself, O Vespasian, shalt be Caesar and emperor, thou and this thy son," &c.

The Talmudists attribute such a prediction to Rabban Jochanan Ben Zaccai, in the tracts before quoted; viz. "Rabban Jochanan Ben Zaccai was carried out in a coffin, as one that is dead, out of Jerusalem. He went to Vespasian's army and said, Where is your king? They went and told Vespasian, There is a certain Jew desireth admission to you. Let him come in, saith he. When he came in, he said, Live, O king, live, O king." [So in Gittin; but in Midrash, Live my lord the emperor.] "Saith Vespasian, You salute me as if I were king, but I am not so; and the king will hear this, and judge such a one to death. To whom he, Although you are not king yet, you shall be so, for this Temple must not be destroyed but by a king's hand; as it is written, 'Lebanon shall fall by a mighty one,'" Isaiah 10:34.

To which of these two, or whether indeed to both, the glory of this prediction ought to be attributed, I leave it to the reader to judge; returning to the times of the Greeks.

The army and forces of the enemy being defeated under the conduct of Judah the Maccabee, the people begin to apply themselves to the care and the restoration of the Temple, and the holy things. The story of which we meet with 1 Maccabees 4:43, &c. and in Josephus, whose words are worth our transcribing; "He found the Temple desolated, the gates burnt; and the grass, through the mere solitude of the place, springing up there of its own accord: therefore he and his followers wept, being astonished at the sight."

They, therefore, apply themselves to the purging of the Temple, making up the breaches; and, as Middoth in the place above speaks, "Those thirteen breaches, which the Grecians had made, they repaired; and, according to the number of those breaches, they instituted thirteen adorations."

The altar, because it had been profaned by Gentile sacrifices, they pull it wholly down, and lay up the stones in a certain chamber near the court.

"Towards the northeast there was a certain chamber where the sons of the Asmoneans laid up the stones of that altar, which the Grecian kings had profaned": and that (as the Book of the Maccabees hath it) "till there might come a prophet that should direct them what to do with them."

Nor did it seem without reason: for, whereas those stones had once been consecrated, they would by no means put them to any common use; and since they had been profaned, they durst not put them to any holy use.

The rest of the Temple they restored, purged, repaired, as may be seen in the places above quoted; and, on the five-and-twentieth of the month Cisleu, they celebrated the feast of the Dedication, and established it for an anniversary solemnity, to be kept eight days together. Of the rites of that feast I shall say more in its proper place; and, for the sake of it, I have been the larger in these things.