The treatment of persons taken in war among ancient nations
throws great light upon many passages of Scripture. The eastern
conqueror often stripped his unhappy captives naked, shaved their heads,
and made them travel in that condition, exposed to the burning heat of a
vertical sun by day, and the chilling cold of the night. Such barbarous
treatment was to modest women the height of cruelty and indignity;
especially to those who had been educated in softness and elegance, who
had figured in all the superfluities of ornamental dress, and whose
faces had hardly ever been exposed to the sight of man. The Prophet
Isaiah mentions this as the hardest part of the sufferings in which
female captives are involved: “The Lord will expose their nakedness.”
The daughter of Zion had indulged in all the softness of oriental
luxury; but the offended Yahweh should cause her unrelenting enemies to
drag her forth from her secret chambers into the view of an insolent
soldiery; strip her of her ornaments, in which she so greatly delighted;
take away her splendid and costly garments, discover her nakedness, and
compel her to travel in that miserable plight to a far distant country,
a helpless captive, the property of a cruel lord. Arrived in the land of
their captivity, captives were often purchased at a very low price. The
Prophet Joel complains of the contemptuous cheapness in which the people
of Israel were held by those who made them captives: “And they have cast
lots for my people; and have given a boy for a harlot, and sold a girl
for wine, that they might drink.” The custom of casting lots for the
captives taken in war appears to have prevailed both among the Jews and
the Greeks. The same allusion occurs in the prophecy of Obadiah:
“Strangers carried away captive his forces, and foreigners entered into
his gates, and cast lots upon Jerusalem,” Obadiah 11. With respect to
the Greeks, we have an instance in Tryphiodorus:--
“Shared out by lot the female captives stand,
The spoils divided with an equal hand;
Each to his ship conveys his rightful share,
Price of their toil, and trophies of the war.”
2. By an inhuman custom which is still retained in the east, the eyes of
captives taken in war were not seldom put out, sometimes literally
scooped or dug out of their sockets. This dreadful calamity Samson had
to endure from the unrelenting vengeance of his enemies. In a posterior
age, Zedekiah, the last king of Judah and Benjamin, after being
compelled to behold the violent death of his sons and nobility, had his
eyes put out, and was carried in chains to Babylon. The barbarous custom
long survived the decline and fall of the Babylonian empire; for by the
testimony of Mr. Maurice, in his history of Hindostan, the captive
princes of that country were often treated in this manner by their more
fortunate rivals; a red hot iron was passed over their eyes, which
effectually deprived them of sight, and at the same time of their title
and ability to reign. To the wretched state of such prisoners, the
Prophet Isaiah alludes in a noble prediction, where he describes in very
glowing colours the character and work of the promised Messiah: “He hath
sent me to heal the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the
captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them
that are bruised,” as captives too frequently were by the weight of
their fetters.
3. It seems to have been the practice of eastern kings, to command their
captives taken in war, especially those that had, by the atrociousness
of their crimes, or the stoutness of their resistance, greatly provoked
their indignation, to lie down on the ground, and then put to death a
certain part of them, which they measured with a line, or determined by
lot. This custom was not, perhaps, commonly practised by the people of
God, in their wars with the nations around them; but one instance is
recorded in the life of David, who inflicted this punishment on the
Moabites: “And he smote Moab, and measured them with a line, casting
them down to the ground; even with two lines measured he to put to
death, and with one full line to keep alive: and so the Moabites became
David’s servants, and brought gifts,” 2 Sam. viii, 2. But the most
shocking punishment which the ingenious cruelty of a haughty and
unfeeling conqueror ever inflicted on the miserable captive, is
described by Virgil in the eighth book of the Æneid; and which even a
Roman, inured to blood, could not mention without horror:--
“_Quid memorem infandas cædes? quid facta tyranni_,” &c.
Line 483.
“What words can paint those execrable times,
The subjects’ sufferings, and the tyrant’s crimes!
That blood, those murders, O ye gods! replace
On his own head, and on his impious race:
The living and the dead at his command
Were coupled face to face, and hand to hand,
Till, choked with stench, in loathed embraces tied,
The lingering wretches pined away, and died.”
DRYDEN.
It is to this deplorable condition of a captive that the Apostle refers,
in that pathetic exclamation, “O wretched man that I am! who shall
deliver me from the body of this death?” Who shall rescue me, miserable
captive as I am, from this continual burden of sin which I carry about
with me; and which is cumbersome and odious, as a dead carcass bound to
a living body, to be dragged along with it where-ever it goes?
throws great light upon many passages of Scripture. The eastern
conqueror often stripped his unhappy captives naked, shaved their heads,
and made them travel in that condition, exposed to the burning heat of a
vertical sun by day, and the chilling cold of the night. Such barbarous
treatment was to modest women the height of cruelty and indignity;
especially to those who had been educated in softness and elegance, who
had figured in all the superfluities of ornamental dress, and whose
faces had hardly ever been exposed to the sight of man. The Prophet
Isaiah mentions this as the hardest part of the sufferings in which
female captives are involved: “The Lord will expose their nakedness.”
The daughter of Zion had indulged in all the softness of oriental
luxury; but the offended Yahweh should cause her unrelenting enemies to
drag her forth from her secret chambers into the view of an insolent
soldiery; strip her of her ornaments, in which she so greatly delighted;
take away her splendid and costly garments, discover her nakedness, and
compel her to travel in that miserable plight to a far distant country,
a helpless captive, the property of a cruel lord. Arrived in the land of
their captivity, captives were often purchased at a very low price. The
Prophet Joel complains of the contemptuous cheapness in which the people
of Israel were held by those who made them captives: “And they have cast
lots for my people; and have given a boy for a harlot, and sold a girl
for wine, that they might drink.” The custom of casting lots for the
captives taken in war appears to have prevailed both among the Jews and
the Greeks. The same allusion occurs in the prophecy of Obadiah:
“Strangers carried away captive his forces, and foreigners entered into
his gates, and cast lots upon Jerusalem,” Obadiah 11. With respect to
the Greeks, we have an instance in Tryphiodorus:--
“Shared out by lot the female captives stand,
The spoils divided with an equal hand;
Each to his ship conveys his rightful share,
Price of their toil, and trophies of the war.”
2. By an inhuman custom which is still retained in the east, the eyes of
captives taken in war were not seldom put out, sometimes literally
scooped or dug out of their sockets. This dreadful calamity Samson had
to endure from the unrelenting vengeance of his enemies. In a posterior
age, Zedekiah, the last king of Judah and Benjamin, after being
compelled to behold the violent death of his sons and nobility, had his
eyes put out, and was carried in chains to Babylon. The barbarous custom
long survived the decline and fall of the Babylonian empire; for by the
testimony of Mr. Maurice, in his history of Hindostan, the captive
princes of that country were often treated in this manner by their more
fortunate rivals; a red hot iron was passed over their eyes, which
effectually deprived them of sight, and at the same time of their title
and ability to reign. To the wretched state of such prisoners, the
Prophet Isaiah alludes in a noble prediction, where he describes in very
glowing colours the character and work of the promised Messiah: “He hath
sent me to heal the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the
captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them
that are bruised,” as captives too frequently were by the weight of
their fetters.
3. It seems to have been the practice of eastern kings, to command their
captives taken in war, especially those that had, by the atrociousness
of their crimes, or the stoutness of their resistance, greatly provoked
their indignation, to lie down on the ground, and then put to death a
certain part of them, which they measured with a line, or determined by
lot. This custom was not, perhaps, commonly practised by the people of
God, in their wars with the nations around them; but one instance is
recorded in the life of David, who inflicted this punishment on the
Moabites: “And he smote Moab, and measured them with a line, casting
them down to the ground; even with two lines measured he to put to
death, and with one full line to keep alive: and so the Moabites became
David’s servants, and brought gifts,” 2 Sam. viii, 2. But the most
shocking punishment which the ingenious cruelty of a haughty and
unfeeling conqueror ever inflicted on the miserable captive, is
described by Virgil in the eighth book of the Æneid; and which even a
Roman, inured to blood, could not mention without horror:--
“_Quid memorem infandas cædes? quid facta tyranni_,” &c.
Line 483.
“What words can paint those execrable times,
The subjects’ sufferings, and the tyrant’s crimes!
That blood, those murders, O ye gods! replace
On his own head, and on his impious race:
The living and the dead at his command
Were coupled face to face, and hand to hand,
Till, choked with stench, in loathed embraces tied,
The lingering wretches pined away, and died.”
DRYDEN.
It is to this deplorable condition of a captive that the Apostle refers,
in that pathetic exclamation, “O wretched man that I am! who shall
deliver me from the body of this death?” Who shall rescue me, miserable
captive as I am, from this continual burden of sin which I carry about
with me; and which is cumbersome and odious, as a dead carcass bound to
a living body, to be dragged along with it where-ever it goes?