Page:Jerusalem's captivities lamented, or, The history of Jerusalem.pdf/13

 straitened for lodgings, that the croud first brought thcthe [sic] plague into the town, and then quickly made way for a famine, The city not being capable of entertaining that vast body of people, if the calculation of Cestius may at least pass for any thing: As follows.

Nero had so great a contempt for the Jews, that Cestius made it his sult to the high priest to bethink themselves of some way of numbering their peoplcpeople [sic]: And this he did out of a desire to give Nero to understand, that the Jewish nation was not so dispiseable as he imagined; so that they took their time to enter upon the computation, at the celebration of their paschal feast: When offering up sacrifice according to custom, from the ninth hour of the day to the eleventh, and the sacrifice to be eaten afterwards in their families, by ten at least, and sometimes twenty to a lamb: They reckoned upon two hundred and sixty six thousand, fivcfive [sic] hundred oblations; which at the rate of ten to a lamb, amounted to two millions, five hundred and sixty thousand persons, all pure and sound; for neither lepers, scorbutic, men troubled with gonorhoeas, women in their monthly sickness, or people labouring under any malignant distempers, wercwere [sic] admitted to any part in this solemnity; No more were any strangers, but what came thither for religion. So that this mighty concourse of people from abroad before the siege, was afterwards, by the righteous providence of God, cooped up in the city as in a prison: and the number of the slain in that siege was the heaviest judgment of that kind that ever was heard of. Some were killed openly, others kept in custody by the Romans, who searched the very sepulchres and vaults for them, and put all they found alivcalive [sic] to the sword. There were upwards of two thousand that had either laid violent hands on themselves, or killed one another by consent; besides