The Eliminator; or, Skeleton Keys to Sacerdotal Secrets — John Shaqi
The Eliminator; or, Skeleton Keys to Sacerdotal SecretsWestbrook, Richard B. (Richard Brodhead)
Religion
The Eliminator; or, Skeleton Keys to Sacerdotal Secrets
Westbrook, Richard B. (Richard Brodhead)
Free thought
“‘In all the sallies it cannot be discovered that at any time the Jews
could bring into the field 10,000 men, if so many.... Titus enclosed the
city with a line four and a half miles in extent, which, with his small
army, was so weak a disposition that a small body of the Jews could
easily have broken through it; but they never seem to have had numbers
sufficient to be able to attempt it.’
“The author guesses that the Jews might have mustered at the beginning
of the siege about 10,000 men, and that the city might have contained
altogether about 40,000 inhabitants, permanent and transient, in a space
which in no other city in the world could accommodate 30,000 souls. But
the wall of Agrippa was built, as the same author states, twelve or
thirteen years after the Crucifixion; hence prior to that time the area
of Jerusalem was only 756,000 yards, and it was capable of containing
only 23,000 inhabitants at most, but probably never did contain more
than 15,000.
“Allowing to Jerusalem, in the period of the greatest prosperity of the
Jews, a population of even 20,000, is it at all probable that the whole
country could have contained anything like even the lowest estimate to
be gathered from the Scripture record? In 1 Chron. 21: 5, 6 we read that
the number of ‘men that drew the sword of Israel and Judah amounted to
1,570,000, not counting the tribes of Levi and Benjamin. In 2 Sam. 24:
9, the number given at the same census is 1,300,000, and no omission is
mentioned. Assuming the larger number to be correct, and adding only
one-eighth for the two tribes of Levi and Benjamin, which may have been
the smallest, we have 1,766,000 fighting-men. This would give, at the
rate of one fighting-man to four inhabitants, a total population of over
7,000,000 souls. But if we adopt a more reasonable ratio, of one to six,
we have a population of over 10,500,000 souls. And then we omit the
aliens. These numbered 153,600 working-men only two years later (2
Chron. 2: 17), and the total alien population, therefore, must have been
about 500,000, which, added to the census, would make the total
population from 7,500,000 to 11,000,000, or more. Can any intelligent
man believe that a mountainous, barren country, no larger than
Connecticut, without commerce, without manufactures, without the
mechanical arts, without civilization, ever did or could subsist even
two millions of people? Much less can it be believed that it subsisted
‘seven nations greater and mightier than the Israelitish nation itself’
(Deut. 7: 1)—i e. not less than 14,000,000.
“That the Jews were a very barbarous people is undeniable. Slavery
necessarily makes a people barbarous. Not only were the Israelites a
nation of slaves, according to their own record, but after their entry
into Canaan they were six times reduced to bondage in their own land of
promise. During a period of 281 years they were in slavery 111 years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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