No city has had so many desolations as Jerusalem, no land has experienced so many devastations. They are so many that it is not easy to register them all, nor to say which is exactly the fluctus decumanus that submerged most completely the national life and prosperity. We can, however, see that all the series of disasters have a similarity; each of them is written in terms of wholesale slaughter, deportation, and slavery; if at any time a decree of restoration is issued, the document is a palimpsest with the under-writing betraying a decree of exile.