Nation shall rise against nation. — Some of the more memorable of these are recorded by Josephus: one at Seleucia, in which 50,000 Jews are said to have perished (Ant. xviii. 9, §§ 8, 9); others at Cæsarea, Scythopolis, Joppa, Ascalon, and Tyre (Wars 2:18); and the memorable conflict between Jews and Greeks at Alexandria, under Caligula, A.D. 38, of which we learn from Philo. The whole period was, indeed, marked by tumults of this kind.
Famines. — Of these we know that of which Agabus prophesied (Acts 11:28), and which was felt severely, in the ninth year of Claudius, not only in Syria, but in Rome (Jos. Ant. xx. 2). Suetonius (Claud. c. 18) speaks of the reign of that emperor as marked by “continual scarcity.”
Pestilences. — The word is not found in the best MSS., and has probably been inserted from the parallel passage in Luke 21:11. It was, however, the inevitable attendant on famine, and the Greek words for the two (λιμὸς, and λοιμὸς, limos and loimos) were so like each other that the omission may possibly have been an error of transcription. A pestilence is recorded as sweeping off 30,000 persons at Rome (Sueton. Nero, 39; Tacitus, Ann. xvi. 13).
Earthquakes, in divers places. — Perhaps no period in the world’s history has ever been so marked by these convulsions as that which intervenes between the Crucifixion and the destruction of Jerusalem. Josephus records one in Judæa (Wars, iv. 4, § 5); Tacitus tells of them in Crete, Rome, Apamea, Phrygia, Campania (Ann. xii. 58; xiv. 27; xv. 22); Seneca (Ep. 91), in A.D. 58, speaks of them as extending their devastations over Asia (the proconsular province, not the continent), Achaia, Syria, and Macedonia.