The people had assembled in Jerusalem for the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and the Roman cohort stood on guard over the Temple colonnade, armed men always being on duty to forestall any rioting by the vast crowds. One of the soldiers pulled up his garment and bent over indecently, turning his backside to the Jews and making a noise as indecent as his attitude.
This infuriated the whole crowd, who noisily appealed to [the Roman governor] Cumanus to punish the soldier, while the less restrained of the young men and the naturally tumultuous section of the people rushed into battle, and snatching up stones hurled them at the soldiers. Cumanus, fearing the whole population would rush at him, sent for more heavy infantry. When these poured into the colonnades the Jews were seized with uncontrollable panic, turned tail and fled from the Temple into the city.
So violently did the dense mass struggle to escape that they trod on each other, and more than 30,000 were crushed to death. Thus the Feast ended in distress to the whole nation and bereavement to every household.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, July 31, 2005
Fart Kills 30,000
Josephus, The Jewish War 2.223 (tr. G.A. Williamson):