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The seventh angel pours the last vial, and "It is done!" This is the downfall of the first-chosen, the fall of Judea. It is the rise of the last-chosen, the rise of the church. It is God's vindication over those who rejected God's anointed one.
REVELATION 16:17–19
17 And the seventh angel poured out his vial upon the air, and there came a great voice out
of the temple from the throne, saying: It is done.
18 And there were lightnings, and voices, and thunders, and there was a great earthquake, such
an one as never had been since men were upon the earth, such an earthquake, so great.
19 And the great city was divided into three parts; and the cities of the Gentiles fell. And great
Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give her the cup of the wine of the indignation
of his wrath.
There was an earthquake when Christ was killed, and "The great city was divided into three parts . . . " The bedrock under Calvary split. Even today, pilgrims visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulcher reach down through the opening which anchored Christ’s cross and touch the separations in the rock.
In a metaphorical sense, the covenant God made with Abraham and his descendants split into three parts: Judaism, Christianity, and, at a later date, Islam. There are similarities in the three religions. The followers of all three worship the God Abraham worshiped and claim at least spiritual descent from Abraham. The followers of all three are marked by a covenant sign: circumcision for Judaism and Islam, and Baptism for Christianity. All three accept the Ten Commandments given Moses; indeed all three accept Moses as God's prophet. And all three advocate lives of submission to God's will. But each is divided from the others regarding its understanding of God's will. That division looks like it will persist throughout the Church age.
“. . . and the cities of the Gentiles fell." This is a clear reference to the Gentiles (the Revised Standard Version uses the word "nations" rather than "Gentiles.") This phrase points directly to the end of the Church age when all the Gentile nations will face the consequences of their own rejection of the Messiah. But Judea comes first, and what happens to Judea at the beginning of the Church age is a sign, a preview, of what will happen to all nations at the end of the Church age.
When the angel pours the seventh and final vial, "It is done!" Judea, the first chosen, has fallen. Bar Kochba's disastrous defeat and Rome's destruction of Judea is the logical fulfillment of this vision. Here is how it happened. Severus had just placed Bethar under siege (August 9, 134). August 9 is a fateful day in Judean history. Titus stormed the Temple on August 9, A.D. 70. Before that, on August 9, 586 B.C., the Babylonians destroyed Solomon's Temple. Bethar will endure this siege by Severus for exactly one year. Bethar will fall on August 9, 135 (Mansoor, p. 181).
Just before Bethar's fall, when Hadrian could taste victory, he enforced harsher laws against the noncombatants in the re-conquered areas of Judea. He did this to quench any expression of nationalist hopes the Judeans might still have. Previous laws forbade the public reading of certain books of Scripture, like the book of Ester, which the Romans felt was fanning nationalist hopes. Now Hadrian forbade the Torah. No one could teach the Torah. Rabbi Akiba, who up to this point did not actively support the rebellion, now openly defied this law. As he put it, if the Torah is abolished, there is no further purpose in living (Finklestein, p. 272). The Romans executed him.
Bar Kochba's men in Bethar and their families suffered terribly during the siege. The Romans wanted to kill all the rebels. The rebels, in desperation, fought to the end. The city had already run out of food. By August 9, when the Romans stormed the city, the people were starved. Because the city ran out of food, some people wanted to surrender. Bar Kochba would not allow it. Somehow, Bar Kochba suspected Eleazar the Priest of plotting surrender. No reliable source supports this, but folklore has it that a Roman spy told Bar Kochba that Eleazar was negotiating with them. He lied, but hoped it would divide Bar Kochba and his chief advisors. Bar Kochba believed it. On August 9, Bar Kochba confronted Eleazar, but Eleazar denied it. Unable to control his temper, Bar Kochba kicked Eleazar to death. That was the day Severus stormed Bethar. Bar Kochba died that day. Folklore has it that a scorpion or poisonous snake bit him. He was dead or dying when Severus found him.
When the Romans fought their way into Bethar, they killed almost the entire population. They cut down men, women, and children. They lifted infants by their feet and dashed their heads against rocks. The Midrash claims three hundred lay dead near a single rock, the rock covered with spilled brains (Yadin, Bar-Kochba, p. 256). Roman soldiers wrapped school age children in their school-scrolls and set them afire. Other students, as well as their teachers, fell to Roman spears and arrows, as did Bar Kochba's fighting men. Bar Kochba's defeat calls to mind the curses Moses warned the Israelites about if they or their descendants forsake the Lord:
But if thou wilt not hear the voice of the Lord thy God, to keep and to do all his commandments and ceremonies, which I command thee this day, all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee. Cursed shalt thou be in the city, cursed in the field. Cursed shall be thy barn and cursed thy stores. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy ground, the herds of thy oxen, and the flocks of thy sheep. Cursed shalt thou be coming in, and cursed going out. The Lord shall send upon thee famine and hunger, and a rebuke upon all the works which thou shalt do: until he consume and destroy thee quickly, for thy most wicked inventions, by which thou hast forsaken me. May the Lord set the pestilence upon thee, until he consume thee out of the land, which thou shalt go in to possess. May the Lord afflict thee with miserable want, with the fever and with cold, with burning and with heat, and with corrupted air and with blasting, and pursue thee until thou perish. Be the heaven, that is over thee, of brass: and the ground thou treadest on, of iron. The Lord give thee dust for rain upon thy land, and let ashes come down from heaven upon thee, till thou be consumed. The Lord make thee to fall down before thy enemies, one way mayst thou go out against them, and flee seven ways, and be scattered throughout all the kingdoms on the earth (Dt. 28:15–25).
REVELATION 16:20–21
20 And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found.
21 And great hail, like a talent, came down from heaven upon men: and men blasphemed God
for the plague of the hail: because it was exceeding great.
Human nations can be compared to islands and mountains in the sense that they stand out in humanity as islands and mountains do in an inanimate landscape. Prophets spoke this way:
Son of man, set thy face towards the mountains of Israel, and prophecy against them. And say: Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord God: Thus saith the Lord God to the mountains, and to the hills, and to the rocks, and to the valleys: Behold I will bring upon you the sword, and I will destroy your high places (Ezekiel 6:2–3).
Fear not, thou worm of Jacob, you that are dead of Israel: I have helped thee, saith the Lord: and thy redeemer the Holy One of Israel. I have made thee as a new thrashing wain, with teeth like a saw: thou shalt thrash the mountains, and break them in pieces: and shalt make the hills as chaff. Thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall scatter them . . . (Isaiah 41:14–16).
. . . This is the word of the Lord to Zorobabel, saying: Not with an army, nor by might, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts. Who art thou, O great mountain, before Zorobabel? Thou shalt become a plain (Zech. 4:6–7).
"Mountain" was also used this way when Daniel interpreted the King's dream. A stone cut out of a mountain shall break the statue’s clay feet. The stone then will grow into a mountain and fill the whole earth (Dan. 2:34–5). The stone, of course, is Jesus Christ taken from the mountain of Israel and growing into the Church, which will stand like a mountain and fill the whole earth. Even translators understand "mountain" this way. Isaiah 45:2 in the Douay-Rheims is: "I will go before thee and will humble the great ones of the earth." The Revised Standard Version uses "mountains" in place of "great ones".
Enough blood spilled during the assault that the river flowing through the city turned red. The Midrash claims the river became one part blood, two parts water (Yadin, Bar-Kochba, p. 256). The surrounding soil absorbed enough blood that, after the war, it served the Gentiles as fertilizer for their vineyards (Yadin, Bar-Kochba, p. 256). Bodies choked the river. Picture the Roman Calvary charging across the river with blood-red water splashing the horse's bellies. Another source describes the horses up to their nostrils in blood-red water. Rev. 14:20 paints a similar scene: ". . . and the press was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the press, up to the horses' bridles for a thousand and six hundred furlongs."
All that remained now were Bar Kochba's forces barricaded in caves along the Murabba'at. Any survivor who managed to escape Bethar fled to the caves. The caves were accessible through openings in the vertical walls of steep cliffs that rose one thousand feet above the valleys below. Bar Kochba had chosen them as strongholds because the Roman army could not reach the caves without exposing themselves. The cave openings connected into large cavities within the cliffs. These caves once sheltered David and his men from King Saul eleven hundred years earlier (1 Sam. 24:1–7). Bar Kochba's men had stocked the caves with food before the war. They had also built cisterns to collect spring rain. A cistern found near the opening of one cave measured four by sixteen feet (Mansoor, p. 190).
Severus, when he saw the openings in the cliffs, recognized the impossibility of a frontal attack. By pitching camps in the valleys below the caves and on the highlands above the caves, he insured that no one could escape. He hoped hunger would drive them to surrender. The Judeans did go hungry, but they would not surrender. However, the siege confined them to an area that could not support their numbers. They gradually lost their ability to take any initiative. Many died of starvation, others died in desperate raids against the Roman camps; but they refused to surrender. They and their descendants lived in the caves for several generations. The caves were still occupied one hundred years later when Severus Alexander was emperor.
Conditions in the caves were terrible at first; too many people sought shelter there. Some, driven by hunger, ate anything that seemed edible. The Midrash reports that some even ate the remains of their fallen comrades. One story tells of a young man sent to find a nearby corpse. He found the body of his father, but could not bring himself to desecrate his father's corpse. He concealed it and went back empty handed. A second man went out, and, by smell alone, found the concealed corpse. He cut parts of flesh from it and returned. After the men had eaten, the first young man asked where the body was. When he heard the answer and realized what they had done, it sickened him (Yadin, Bar-Kochba, p. 65).
The Romans finally left the survivors alone in their caves. The survivors no longer attacked the Romans. The war was over. Fifty Judean forts and 985 Judean towns and villages lay ruined, and 580,000 Judeans were killed (Mansoor, p. 167). Hunger and disease raised the toll to 700,000. Almost half the Judean population of 1.5 million perished (Klein, Israel, Land of the Jews, p. 107). The Judeans killed at Bethar remained where they lay, their bodies rotting in the sun. The surviving Judeans were not allowed to bury them. Rome did this to punish the survivors and to warn other provinces against revolt. Rome sold a great many survivors into slavery in other parts of the Empire, so many that the price for slaves dropped throughout the Empire. Many other Judeans, if they could afford it, left Judea and settled elsewhere.
After this mass slaughter and loss of people, Rome encouraged foreign peoples to settle in Judea. Rome wanted the remaining Judeans to be a minority among other racial stocks. From then until the nineteenth century, the Jewish people remained a minority. In 1856, for example, there were only 10,500 Jews in Palestine (Harel, in Oesterreicher, p. 147). In the late 1860's, Jewish people in Europe began to return, but at a slow pace. In 1897 there were 50,000 Jewish people in Palestine. In 1914, there were 90,000 (Grayzel, p. 683).
Freed of Judean pressure, Hadrian could now make his own decisions about rebuilding Jerusalem. He decided to make Jerusalem a pagan city. He appointed Aquilla, a Greek interpreter related to him by marriage, to supervise the work. Workmen cleared the ruins as best they could, and plowed the exposed ground to level it. On August 9, 136, the first anniversary of Bethar's defeat, Hadrian used the same plow to mark the outlines of his new city. Judeans could not enter the new city under pain of death. They could not even approach the city. They could only stare at it from afar. Later they received permission to buy safe passage to visit the Wailing Wall. But they could do this only once a year.
Rome annexed Judea, Galilee, and Samaria (all of Israel) into the province of Syria. It was called "Syria Phillistina" or, later, "Palestine." Jerusalem was renamed "Aelia Capitolina" after Hadrian's middle name "Aelius" and after Jupiter, whose temple in Rome was called "Capitolinus." Where the Judean Temple once stood now stands a pagan temple. Inside, where the Holy of Holies once stood, now stands Jupiter.
The name "Aelia" caught on. By the fourth century the city was seldom called by its old name (Finklestein, p. 271). By the seventh century, when the Moslems conquered the city, they arabacized the name into "Iliya." So total had been the defeat of Judea that, for hundreds of years, the name "Iliya" rather than "Jerusalem" echoed through the streets of the ancient homeland. The third woe is completed. Judea has fallen.
A footnote: This is not the end of this people, however. God warned the Israelites that their children would betray the covenant, and God would make an example of them (Dt. 31:24–9). However, God will call them again when the Gentiles have had their day. It will be a great day then. In that day the nations shall no longer say: "The Lord liveth, who brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt: But, The Lord liveth who hath brought out, and brought hither the seed of the house of Israel from the land of the north, and out of all the lands, to which I had cast them forth: and they shall dwell in their own land" (Jer. 23:7–8). Our generation has seen this happen.
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