Pillaging

“ Blood is the chief impurity, whether shed deliberately, accidentally, or righteously. The warriors after battle must be purified {125} before they enter the camp.125.1 Murder has indeed become a tribal offence, and this marks a great advance in the social development of human society: no satisfaction such as the were-gilt was allowed for murder; but it is regarded as a sin rather than a crime, and its sinfulness is the uncleanness of the land on which the blood is shed. ”

“ The city of blood will have the shame, which it has inflicted upon the nations, repaid to it by a terrible massacre. The prophet announces this with the woe which opens the last section of this threatening prophecy. Nah 3:1. “Woe to the city of blood! She all full of deceit and murder; the prey departs not.” ‘Ir dâmı̄m, city of drops of blood, i.e., of blood shed, or of murders. This predicate is explained in the following clauses: she all full of lying and murder. ”

“ III. They were obliged to purify themselves, according to the ceremony of the law, and to abide without the camp seven days, till their purification was accomplished. For, 1. They had imbrued their hands in blood, by which though they had not contracted any moral guilt, the war being just and lawful, yet they were brought under a ceremonial uncleanness, which rendered them unfit to come near the tabernacle till they were purified. Thus God would preserve in their minds a dread and detestation of murder. ”

“ As those that escape the sword shall be cut off by pestilence, famine, or captivity, so those that fall by the sword shall be cut off by divine vengeance, which pursues sinners on the other side death; there shall be dogs to tear in the field to devour. ”

“ By whatever means or under whatever circumstances one man kills another, blood is shed; and if blood for blood should hold good, then under this reasoning the slayer must die. If it be argued, that wilful shedding of blood is meant, I point to the words of the text; they refer to “life for life,” they give no exceptions: “Who then, oh man! made thee a judge to tell the signs of the times?”
Once grant an exception to execution, once admit the doctrine of reprieve, and the authority, as a command, in the Bible ceases altogether. ”

“ In the midst of this horrid slaughter, one man among the rear prisoners, with great presence of mind and the most undaunted courage, turned and advanced to the soldiers, amidst the fire of hundreds, and while his fellow-prisoners were falling all around him, and in an humble and suppliant manner, with his hat in his hand, this resolute soul, in the face of danger and death, implored mercy of Capt. Shortland to spare his countrymen. ”

“ They killed the people by thousands with torture, and set up their churches to peace and good-will. They overthrew the temples with murder and slaughter, and reared altars to the Most High on the blood-soaked earth. ”

“ Then men and women, with a certain divine and inexpressible alacrity rushed into the fire. The persecutors, constantly inventing new tortures, vied with one another as if there were prizes offered to him who should invent the greatest cruelties. The men bore fire, sword, and crucifixions, savage beasts, and the depths of the sea, the maiming of limbs and searing with red hot iron, digging out of the eyes and mutilations of the whole body, also hunger, the mines, and prison. ”

“ The execution itself will be very terrible: The sword shall devour flesh in abundance, and the arrows be made drunk with blood, such vast quantities of it shall be shed, the blood of the slain in battle, and of the captives, to whom no quarter shall be given, but who shall be put under military execution. When he begins revenge he will make an end ”

“ The most minute directions were given as to the killing of these animals. Every priest became a butcher, every synagogue a slaughter-house. Nothing could be more utterly shocking to a refined soul, nothing better calculated to harden the heart, than the continual shedding of innocent blood. This terrible system culminated in the sacrifice of Christ. His blood took the place of all other. It is not necessary to shed any more. ”

“ We may probably discover the nature of the instinct underlying much of the cathartic custom-law by taking as our typical example the savage feeling about blood. Evidence from almost every society in the world yields proof that the stain of blood is the primary impurity that needs a purifying ritual: hence arose a body of rules that were a burden upon domestic life, hence the elaborate purifications of warriors after battle or of the individual homicide. ”

“ Many cruelties have been enacted in the past in the name of prison discipline—solitude, darkness, chains, floggings, tread wheels and cranks, even until a comparatively recent period, were regarded as the essential accessories of punishment. In studying the history of punishment, we cannot fail to be struck by the singular inventiveness of the human mind in designing forms of suffering for those who broke the law—crucifixion, mutilation, stoning, drowning, torture. ”

“ It would be superfluous to recount in detail the dreary catalogue of wholesale slaughters which for centuries disgraced Europe, whenever fanaticism or the disappearance of a child gave rise to stories of the murder rite, or a blood-stained host suggested sacrilege committed on the sacrament, or some passing evil, such as an epidemic, aroused the populace to bloodshed and rapine. ”

“ For accidental or justifiable slaying, however, we find that a mode of escape from the avengers of blood was provided: ‘If God delivers a man into his hands, [81] I will appoint thee a place whither he shall flee [82] ... and ye shall not take compensation for him that is fled to the City of Refuge that he should come home before the death of the high-priest. So ye [141] shall not pollute the land wherein ye are.’ [83] We may assume, with some degree of probability, that in this class of homicide, some form of purgation ceremony was customary. ”

“ And they had said: 'How can you, a clergyman's daughter, give your hand to a man who works in blood, for he'll be bound to follow his father's trade? Will you allow your whole life to be a ceaseless bloodshedding? [Pg 90] What! every day to rise and shed blood, and every night to lie down with blood! Every day to trace blood on the hands of him who embraces you! To be bound for life to a man whose very calling it is to lay violent hands on God's innocent creatures!' Alas! ”

“ The people shed blood, and the rulers did not punish them for it; the rulers shed blood, and the people were aiding and abetting, as the elders of Jezreel were to Jezebel in shedding Naboth's blood. Malice is heart-murder, in the account of God; he that hates his brother in his heart, has, in effect, his hands full of blood. ”

“ The law of blood vengeance, though in terms it authorized murder, yet in effect powerfully restrained the violence of that rude age, and gave a chance for the development of that idea of the sacredness of life which to us is a moral commonplace, but which had scarcely dawned upon the minds of those old Hebrews. ”

“ Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? (as it is written, For Thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.) ”

“ The method is simply the following, which I give as I received it first-hand from an eye-witness:—The prisoner is tied to a rude cross: he is invariably deeply under the influence of opium. The executioner, standing before him, with a sharp sword makes two quick incisions above the eyebrows, and draws down the portion of skin over each eye, then he makes two more quick incisions across the breast, and in the next moment he pierces the heart, and death is instantaneous. ”

“ The clauses in the actual war articles deserve to be quoted, that it may appear, by the provisions against it, to what lengths the arts of self- [Pg 233] mutilation are carried by despairing men. The 81st Article of War provides punishment against any soldier in Her Majesty’s army ‘who shall malinger, feign or produce disease or infirmity, or shall wilfully do any act or wilfully disobey any orders whether in hospital or otherwise, thereby producing or aggravating disease or infirmity or delaying his cure, ... ”

“ Experience has shown these attempts ever to have been futile. All kinds of punishment have been tried — hanging, beheading, burning, mutilating, disemboweling, quartering, gouging out the eyes, cutting out the tongue, cropping the ears, branding, standing in the stocks, drowning, using the rack and the thumbscrew and many others which ingenuity in this direction could devise. ”

“ It is evident that the wide-spread popular belief in nature-absorption through blood-appropriation, has included the idea of a tribal absorption of new life in vicarious blood. Alcedo, a Spanish-American writer, has illustrated this in his description of the native Araucanians of South America. When they have triumphed in war, they select a representative prisoner for official and vicarious execution. ”

“ These men, who only thought of their body as a target for torture, in order to give themselves up exclusively to penitentiary practices and the contemplation of a future life, attracted general attention. ”

“ And at last, the chirurgion [71] that was there certifying that I could bear no more and live, they unloosed me and carried me back to my cell, bleeding in many places from those wounds, whereof I shall carry the scars to my dying day.
’Tis the custom of the Inquisition, when those that come under their hands refuse to confess at the first application of the torture, to tend them carefully and recover them so far as may be, in order that they may entreat them even worse in the future, and this not a second time only, but also a third, if they can endure so long. ”

“ But if they will not pay, I will that all the kindred be free from the feud except the murderer, provided they do not afterwards give him food and protection.’ In such laws as these we catch a glimpse of a system of blood-vengeance which once prevailed amongst tribal peoples, but which soon became a mere echo, a phantom shadow of its former self, in the march of mightier movements, in the onward course of civilisation. ”

“ That innocent blood may not be shed in the midst of the land which the Lord thy God will give thee to possess, lest thou be guilty of blood.
19:11. But if any man hating his neighbour, lie in wait for his life, and rise and strike him, and he die, and he flee to one of the cities aforesaid,
19:12. The ancients of his city shall send, and take him out of the place of refuge, and shall deliver him into the hand of the kinsman of him whose blood was shed, and he shall die. ”

“ Judge, then, of my horror, when I went out to the scene of the pillage and saw men lying, some dead, with ghastly faces glaring up at the hot sun, others with gaping wounds, and others moaning pitifully on the road-way, with sand on their faces and in their hair. ”

“ To kill or injure one of them is to endure the penalty of death. On certain days they are taken out by the priests or doctors, and paraded about the streets, the bearers allowing them to coil themselves around their arms, necks, and bodies, and even to put their heads into the carriers’ bosoms. ”

“ Every being within the prison was massacred except the women, and one or two who were saved by their intercession. Goblets of blood—the blood of aristocrats—were handed to daughters and wives, as the test of safety to a parent or a husband ”

“ And we may join with this the fact that where, by amputating the hand, there is repeated in full the original mutilation of slain enemies, it is. where the usefulness of the subject person is not a consideration, but where the treatment of the external enemy is extended to the internal enemy—the criminal. The Hebrews made the loss of a hand a punishment for one kind of offense, as shown in Deuteronomy xxv. ”

“ To which we reply, that the issuing of fresh and crimson blood from the wound or the nostrils of the persons body that hath been murthered, is always a certain sign that the 307Corps that doth so bleed was murthered, because those that die naturally or violently by chance, man-slaughter or in the war, do not bleed, as hath been proved before. ”

“ In the ancient world, and in a large part of that in which we live, the practice of infanticide was, or is, a regular and legal custom; famine, pestilence, and war were and are normal factors in the struggle for existence, and they have served, in a gross and brutal fashion, to mitigate the intensity of the effects of its chief cause. ”

“ Blood shall be imputed unto that man - Having poured out the blood improperly, he shall be considered as guilty of murder, because that blood, had it been properly and sacrificially employed, might have made atonement for the life of a man. ”

“ His lordship then, in a solemn and awful manner, passed the following sentence:—
“That the prisoner be taken from the bar to prison, and from thence to the place of execution; there to be hanged, but not until he be dead, to be cut down while yet alive, and then to have his heart and bowels taken out and burnt before his face ”

“ A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood.
Prov. XXVIII, 17. A man that doeth violence to the blood of any person shall flee to the pit; let no man stay him.
Jer. II, 34. Also in thy skirts is found the blood of the souls of the poor innocents: I have not found it by secret search, but upon all these.
Jer. XIX, 3. And say, hear ye the Word of the Lord, O kings of Judah, and inhabitants of Jerusalem; Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will bring evil upon this place, the which whosoever heareth, his ears shall tingle. ”