which had grown out of Judas's teaching, the zealots. These Sicarii mingling with the crowd of those who went up to worship, carrying daggers concealed under their garments, fell upon Jonathan the High Priest, and murdered him.* This done they went on slaying all those who were obnoxious to them, even in the Temple itself. " And this," says the historian, " seems to me the reason why God, out of his hatred to the wickedness of these men, rejected our city : and as for the Temple, he no longer esteemed it sufficiently pure for him to inhabit therein, but brought the Eomans upon us, and threw a fire upon the city to purge it : and brought upon us, our wives, and children, slavery,—as desirous to make us wiser- by our calamities." And now the voice of discord was heard even among the priests themselves, who had hitherto preserved a certain sobriety. Between the chief priests and " the principal men of the multitude of Jerusalem," a feud broke out. Each side had its followers : they cast, we are told, not only reproachful words, but also stones at each other. And the chief priests, robbing the threshingfloors and appropriating all the tithes to themselves, caused many of the poorer priests to die of want. Then occurred the first outbreak in Caasarea. This town was about equally divided between the Syrians and the Jews, the former claimed the pre-eminence on the ground that Herod the founder, though himself a Jew, had built the splendid temples and statues by which the city was evidently intended to be a Grecian city, upon the site of Strato's Tower ; while the Jews argued that as the founder was a Jew, the city was evidently Jewish, and ought not to be ruled except by Jews. The dispute, as was always the case, came to the arbitrament of arms, in which the Jews got the best of it. Then * Milman says, in the Temple itself, which does not appear from the account of Josephus, who expressly says that, after this, they had the boldness to murder men in the Temple itself.