The fate of the righteous in the destruction of Jerusalem

Since the journey was occurring, it became known and manifest to men that I would guide the people in the journey from Egypt as sheep led by Moses and Aaron. Thus indeed the psalm is a parable...

[Others have interpreted these things thus:] The aforementioned psalm ended in silence, neither seeking nor stating the causes for which the people were so greatly lifted up against their guardian God; but this indicates the cause of the turning away from God from above, which God also later through Isaiah expressed by saying: 'Is not the hand of the Lord too weak to save? Or was the ear too heavy to hear?' (Isa 59:1). But your sins divide you between yourselves and God, and because of your sins He turned His face from you so as not to show mercy, and the following things. Therefore, there is a memory in the psalm of the distrust and contention in the wilderness of Israel, so as to show those turning away from God the evil causes becoming to themselves, as David clearly narrates the things. And it begins royally, immediately commanding his own people to attend to the proper law, or to private instructions, as an Ally interprets; for, he says, such a law is to bring forth a ready exhortation.

And if he says that not the philanthropy and pity of God and much propitiation preserved their succession, but with all passion He struck them, they would have perished, and they became anonymous; he says not having accepted their choice, but pitying their weakness as if flesh were rotting and spirit was departing.

[The interpreters have set forth the hypothesis of this psalm differently. For one says that the prophet is stripped simply of captivity and the things that happened to Jerusalem, without specifying which; another says it makes manifest the captivity under the Romans which happened after the betrayal of our Savior Jesus Christ; others say the one under Antiochus Epiphanus. Therefore, having done this, let us examine some of the sayings.] The intercession against the nations is that, having been impious and unclean, they despoiled a holy land and defiled a holy temple; but against Jerusalem, the contrary, that a city called holy has become a heap of dust and stones.

Which Theodotion says is regarding lithology. And these things can be a remembrance of the election concerning Jerusalem that has occurred. Furthermore, regarding their inhabitants, the Psalmist says 'the merciful', that even after death the unburied were given as food to the birds, which proves much and something raw regarding the enemies of the defeated and the slaves of God who suffered these things, which can be brought near to God and for supplication to the Lord.

For even if complaints against the slaves be just, it is unhuman for mercy regarding one's own to be administered by a stranger. And he says also that the bodies of the holy became food for beasts and their blood was poured out without mercy like water before Jerusalem; perhaps indeed because of the election from the beginning, he calls those who fell away holy, just as also the Apostle says of the holy vine that those cut off through impiety are also holy (because they were of the holy root), perhaps he also indicates the holy ones as being perished together with the wicked to the unrighteous, which happens in the capture and the destruction of both a city and a nation, and this has been revealed through Ezekiel; for he says: 'The Lord says, Behold, I am with you, and I will stretch out my hand from its cradle and will destroy from you, the just and the impious, and I will cut off from you the just and the impious' (Ezekiel 7:9).

Which was also foretold more allegorically thus: 'Behold, I kindle fire in you, and every wood shall be consumed in you, the moist and every dry wood' (Ezekiel 20:33); the moist being allegorically the wood of the righteous man, and the dry the impious, just as the Lord himself revealed the true righteous wood saying, 'If these are doing such things in the moist wood, what happens in the dry?'

And if the Lord shared in those things coming upon the world according to the flesh, yet shared in no sin, it is not wonderful that righteous men, being partakers of sin, should become partakers of the misfortunes which come through sins, to suffer equally with the unrighteous being murdered, just as he himself was reckoned among the lawless (Hebrews 2:9), yet was judged by God; such as was the case with Jeremiah, being taken among the impious captives, yet having some distinction also among men after the captivity in the honor from the one who had captured him. And the righteous one would continue to share with the sinners even unto death.