3. 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