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[22]
Yet were not the spirits of the Jews broken by so great a calamity,
but the losses they had sustained rather quickened their resolution for
other attempts; for, overlooking the dead bodies which lay under their
feet, they were enticed by their former glorious actions to venture on
a second destruction; so when they had lain still so little a while that
their wounds were not yet thoroughly cured, they got together all their
forces, and came with greater fury, and in much greater numbers, to Ascalon.
But their former ill fortune followed them, as the consequence of their
unskilfulness, and other deficiencies in war; for Antonius laid ambushes
for them in the passages they were to go through, where they fell into
snares unexpectedly, and where they were encompassed about with horsemen,
before they could form themselves into a regular body for fighting, and
were above eight thousand of them slain; so all the rest of them ran away,
and with them Niger, who still did a great many bold exploits in his flight.
However, they were driven along together by the enemy, who pressed hard
upon them, into a certain strong tower belonging to a village called Bezedeh
However, Antonius and his party, that they might neither spend any considerable
time about this tower, which was hard to be taken, nor suffer their commander,
and the most courageous man of them all, to escape from them, they set
the wall on fire; and as the tower was burning, the Romans went away rejoicing,
as taking it for granted that Niger was destroyed; but he leaped out of
the tower into a subterraneous cave, in the innermost part of it, and was
preserved; and on the third day afterward he spake out of the ground to
those that with great lamentation were searching for him, in order to give
him a decent funeral; and when he was come out, he filled all the Jews
with an unexpected joy, as though he were preserved by God's providence
to be their commander for the time to come.
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