The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 33

Thousands perished from famine and pestilence. Natural affection
seemed to have been destroyed. Husbands robbed their wives, and
wives their husbands. Children would be seen snatching the food from
the mouths of their aged parents. The question of the prophet, “Can a
woman forget her sucking child?” received the answer within the walls
of that doomed city: “The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their
own children: they were their meat in the destruction of the daughter
of my people.” Isaiah 49:15; Lamentations 4:10. Again was fulfilled
the warning prophecy given fourteen centuries before: “The tender and
delicate woman among you, which would not adventure to set the sole of
her foot upon the ground for delicateness and tenderness, her eye shall
be evil toward the husband of her bosom, and toward her son, and toward
her daughter, ... and toward her children which she shall bear: for she
shall eat them for want of all things secretly in the siege and straitness,
wherewith thine enemy shall distress thee in thy gates.” Deuteronomy
28:56, 57.
The Roman leaders endeavored to strike terror to the Jews and thus
cause them to surrender. Those prisoners who resisted when taken, were
scourged, tortured, and crucified before the wall of the city. Hundreds
were daily put to death in this manner, and the dreadful work continued
until, along the Valley of Jehoshaphat and at Calvary, crosses were
erected in so great numbers that there was scarcely room to move among
them. So terribly was visited that awful imprecation uttered before the
judgment seat of Pilate: “His blood be on us, and on our children.”
Matthew 27:25.
Titus would willingly have put an end to the fearful scene, and thus
have spared Jerusalem the full measure of her doom. He was filled with
horror as he saw the bodies of the dead lying in heaps in the valleys. Like
one entranced, he looked from the crest of Olivet upon the magnificent
temple and gave command that not one stone of it be touched. Before
attempting to gain possession of this stronghold,

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