THIS BROTHER IS SINCERE AND HE COMES WITH SCRIPTURES THAT ARE ON POINT. BUT HE NEEDS TO DENOUNCE THE PROFANITY AND THAT TITLE SICARII. SICARII IS AND WAS A GROUP OF WICKED SO-CALLED BLACK MEN THAT MURDERED. THEY CARRY THEIR DAGGER IN THE GARMENT AND WENT INTO FESTIVALS TO SLAUGHTER WHO THEY CONSIDERED THEIR ENEMY. Sicarii (Latin plural of Sicarius dagger-men, in Modern Hebrew rendered siqariqim סיקריקים) is a term applied, in the decades immediately preceding the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, to an extremist splinter group of the Jewish Zealots, who attempted to expel the Romans and their partisans from the Roman province of Judea. The Sicarii carried sicae, or small daggers, concealed in their cloaks, hence their name. At public gatherings, they pulled out these daggers to attack Romans or Roman sympathizers, blending into the crowd after the deed to escape detection. Etymology The Latin word sicarii translates to dagger-wielders, from the root secare Latin for to slice; in Roman legal Latin it is the standard plural form of the term for a murderer, or for putting a murderer on trial (see e.g. the Lex Cornelia de Sicariis et Veneficiis) during that period of legal Latin. History Victims of the Sicarii included Jonathan the High Priest, although it is possible that his murder was orchestrated by the Roman governor Antonius Felix. Some murders were met with severe retaliation by the Romans on the entire Jewish population of the country. On some occasions, the Sicarii could be bribed to spare their intended victims. Once, Josephus relates, after kidnapping the secretary of Eleazar, governor of the Temple precincts, they agreed to release him in exchange for the release of ten of their captured assassins. At the beginning of the Jewish Revolt of 66 CE, the Sicarii, and (possibly) Zealot helpers (Josephus differentiated between the two but did not explain the main differences in depth), gained access to Jerusalem and committed a series of atrocities, in order to force the population to war. In one account, given in the Talmud, they destroyed the citys food supply so that the people would be forced to fight against the Roman siege instead of negotiating peace. Their leaders, including Menahem ben Yehuda and Eleazar ben Yair were important figures in the war, and Eleazar ben Yair eventually succeeded in escaping the Roman onslaught. Together with a small group of followers, he made his way to the abandoned fortress of Masada where he continued his resistance to the Romans until 73 CE, when the Romans took the fortress and, according to Josephus, found that most of its defenders had committed suicide rather than surrender. In Josephus The Jewish War (vii), after the fall of the Temple in 70 CE, the sicarii became the dominant revolutionary Jewish party, scattered abroad. Josephus particularly associates them with the mass suicide at Masada in 73 CE and to the subsequent refusal to submit to the taxation census when Cyrenius was sent to Judea to make one (Josephus) as part of their religious and political scheme as resistance fighters: Some of the faction of the Sicarion...not content with having saved themselves, again embarked on new revolutionary scheming, persuading those that received them there to assert their freedom, to esteem the Romans as no better than themselves and to look upon God as their only Lord and Master —quoted by Eisenman, p 180 According to Josephus, the Sicarii were antagonistic to a larger grouping of Jews referred to as the Zealots, who carried the main burden of the rebellion. Josephus emphasizes that the Sicarii were considered more extreme than the Zealots, to which group Josephus belonged until defecting to the Roman side. Josephus said that the Sicarii raided nearby Jewish villages including Ein Gedi, where they massacred 700 women and children. Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus according to the New Testament, was believed to be a sicarius. This opinion is objected to by modern historians, mainly because Josephus in The War of the Jews (2:254–7), mentions the apparition of the Sicarii as a new phenomenon during the procuratorships of Felix (52–60 CE), having no apparent relation with the group called Sicarii by Romans at times of Quirinius. The Wars Of The Jews Or The History Of The Destruction Of Jerusalem Book VI CHAPTER 7. WHAT AFTERWARD BEFELL THE SEDITIOUS WHEN THEY HAD DONE A GREAT DEAL OF MISCHIEF, AND SUFFERED MANY MISFORTUNES; AS ALSO HOW CAESAR BECAME MASTER OF THE UPPER CITY, 2. On the next day the Romans drove the robbers out of the lower city, and set all on fire as far as Siloam. These soldiers were indeed glad to see the city destroyed. But they missed the plunder, because the seditious had carried off all their effects, and were retired into the upper city; for they did not yet at all repent of the mischiefs they had done, but were insolent, as if they had done well; for, as they saw the city on fire, they appeared cheerful, and put on joyful countenances, in expectation, as they said, of death to end their miseries. Accordingly, as the people were now slain, the holy house was burnt down, and the city was on fire, there was nothing further left for the enemy to do. Yet did not Josephus grow weary, even in this utmost extremity, to beg of them to spare what was left of the city; he spake largely to them about their barbarity and impiety, and gave them his advice in order to their escape; though he gained nothing thereby more than to be laughed at by them; and as they could not think of surrendering themselves up, because of the oath they had taken, nor were strong enough to fight with the Romans any longer upon the square, as being surrounded on all sides, and a kind of prisoners already, yet were they so accustomed to kill people, that they could not restrain their right hands from acting accordingly. So they dispersed themselves before the city, and laid themselves in ambush among its ruins, to catch those that attempted to desert to the Romans; accordingly many such deserters were caught by them, and were all slain; for these were too weak, by reason of their want of food, to fly away from them; so their dead bodies were thrown to the dogs. Now every other sort of death was thought more tolerable than the famine, insomuch that, though the Jews despaired now of mercy, yet would they fly to the Romans, and would themselves, even of their own accord, fall among the murderous rebels also. Nor was there any place in the city that had no dead bodies in it, but what was entirely covered with those that were killed either by the famine or the rebellion; and all was full of the dead bodies of such as had perished, either by that sedition or by that famine. THIS BROTHER HAS TO DENOUNCE THIS TITLE CALLING HIMSELF THE SICARII. The Wars Of The Jews Or The History Of The Destruction Of Jerusalem Book VII CHAPTER 8. CONCERNING MASADA AND THOSE SICARII WHO KEPT IT; AND HOW SILVA BETOOK HIMSELF TO FORM THE SIEGE OF THAT CITADEL. ELEAZARS SPEECHES TO THE BESIEGED. 1. WHEN Bassus was dead in Judea, Flavius Silva succeeded him as procurator there; who, when he saw that all the rest of the country was subdued in this war, and that there was but one only strong hold that was still in rebellion, he got all his army together that lay in different places, and made an expedition against it. This fortress was called Masada. It was one Eleazar, a potent man, and the commander of these Sicarii, that had seized upon it. He was a descendant from that Judas who had persuaded abundance of the Jews, as we have formerly related, not to submit to the taxation when Cyrenius was sent into Judea to make one; for then it was that the Sicarii got together against those that were willing to submit to the Romans, and treated them in all respects as if they had been their enemies, both by plundering them of what they had, by driving away their cattle, and by setting fire to their houses; for they said that they differed not at all from foreigners, by betraying, in so cowardly a manner, that freedom which Jews thought worthy to be contended for to the utmost, and by owning that they preferred slavery under the Romans before such a contention. Now this was in reality no better than a pretense and a cloak for the barbarity which was made use of by them, and to color over their own avarice, which they afterwards made evident by their own actions; for those that were partners with them in their rebellion joined also with them in the war against the Romans, and went further lengths with them in their impudent undertakings against them; and when they were again convicted of dissembling in such their pretenses, they still more abused those that justly reproached them for their wickedness. And indeed that was a time most fertile in all manner of wicked practices, insomuch that no kind of evil deeds were then left undone; nor could any one so much as devise any bad thing that was new, so deeply were they all infected, and strove with one another in their single capacity, and in their communities, who should run the greatest lengths in impiety towards God, and in unjust actions towards their neighbors; the men of power oppressing the multitude, and the multitude earnestly laboring to destroy the men of power. The one part were desirous of tyrannizing over others, and the rest of offering violence to others, and of plundering such as were richer than themselves. They were the Sicarii who first began these transgressions, and first became barbarous towards those allied to them, and left no words of reproach unsaid, and no works of perdition untried, in order to destroy those whom their contrivances affected. Yet did John demonstrate by his actions that these Sicarii were more moderate than he was himself, for he not only slew all such as gave him good counsel to do what was right, but treated them worst of all, as the most bitter enemies that he had among all the Citizens; nay, he filled his entire country with ten thousand instances of wickedness, such as a man who was already hardened sufficiently in his impiety towards God would naturally do; for the food was unlawful that was set upon his table, and he rejected those purifications that the law of his country had ordained; so that it was no longer a wonder if he, who was so mad in his impiety towards God, did not observe any rules of gentleness and common affection towards men. Again, therefore, what mischief was there which Simon the son of Gioras did not do? or what kind of abuses did he abstain from as to those very free-men who had set him up for a tyrant? What friendship or kindred were there that did not make him more bold in his daily murders? for they looked upon the doing of mischief to strangers only as a work beneath their courage, but thought their barbarity towards their nearest relations would be a glorious demonstration thereof. The Idumeans also strove with these men who should be guilty of the greatest madness! for they [all], vile wretches as they were, cut the throats of the high priests, that so no part of a religious regard to God. might be preserved; they thence proceeded to destroy utterly the least remains of a political government, and introduced the most complete scene of iniquity in all instances that were practicable; under which scene that sort of people that were called zealots grew up, and who indeed corresponded to the name; for they imitated every wicked work; nor, if their memory suggested any evil thing that had formerly been done, did they avoid zealously to pursue the same; and although they gave themselves that name from their zeal for what was good, yet did it agree to them only by way of irony, on account of those they had unjustly treated by their wild and brutish disposition, or as thinking the greatest mischiefs to be the greatest good. Accordingly, they all met with such ends as God deservedly brought upon them in way of punishment; for all such miseries have been sent upon them as mans nature is capable of undergoing, till the utmost period of their lives, and till death came upon them in various ways of torment; yet might one say justly that they suffered less than they had done, because it was impossible they could be punished according to their deserving. But to make a lamentation according to the deserts of those who fell under these mens barbarity, this is not a proper place for it; - I therefore now return again to the remaining part of the present narration. https://youtube/watch?v=V4rnIiER2mY&list=UU1XFCNjXEDAQhgtzBKKNnhA
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 21:51:04 +0000
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