Prior to the Jewish uprising, Gamala had been a wealthy little city in the hills in the south of the Golan Heights, looking west out over the Sea of Galilee. The surrounding hillsides were filled with olive groves that produced reputedly the best olive oil in the entire region and made the city an active trading hub. Gamala, or Gamla as it is known today, gained its name from the conical hill on which it spread—Gamala means “camel” in Aramaic, and the hill resembled a camel’s hump. The site was fed by a freshwater spring, and it was this that had attracted the original settlers in the third century BC.
With a predominantly Jewish population, and previously subject to King Herod Agrippa II’s rule, Gamala had welcomed a flood of Jewish refugees from Galilee, the Decapolis, and Judea, bringing its population to some nine thousand people. The refugees had filled every vacant space in the little hillside city. Even the Gamala synagogue had been pressed into use as a refugee accommodation center—excavation of the synagogue in modern times would find the north wall of the synagogue’s prayer hall lined with the cooking utensils of those refugees.
Gamala’s old circumventing walls had long ago tumbled down, so when Josephus was given rebel command in Galilee he had demolished some houses on the city outskirts and built walls between others to create a makeshift defensive wall around Gamala. The rebel leaders he left in charge in Gamala, Chares and Joseph, had maintained a thriving economy in the crowded city even while Agrippa’s commander Mobius lay siege to it. They had even minted Gamala’s own coinage. Those coins were inscribed “Deliverance to Holy Jerusalem,” for, the rebel leadership saw the holding of Gamala as contributing to the much more important goal, to them, of maintaining the freedom and independence of the holy city of Jerusalem.
At the revolt’s outset Gamala had become Josephus’s headquarters and recruiting center for all of rebel Galilee. It was also the hometown of Menahem, late conqueror of Masada and butcher of a 3rd Gallica Legion cohort. And Gamala still harbored thousands of armed partisans. So, Agrippa was able to offer plenty of reasons for Vespasian to march against the city, reasons that motivated the Roman general even though it was well into the fall and the official end of the marching season was fast approaching. Now, retribution and revenge marched up to the walls of Gamala behind the eagles of the legions of Vespasian.
It was the second week of October when the Roman army reached the Golan Heights. On October 12, Vespasian’s three legions pitched separate camps in the hills around Gamala. A natural ridge that dropped steeply away from the western side of the city made it unassailable from that direction, so Vespasian assigned the 15th Apollinaris Legion to the eastern side of Gamala, where the city’s highest round defensive tower rose. Most of the 15th’s men swapped shields and helmets for entrenching tools and immediately commenced work on an earth ramp against the eastern wall.
At the same time, the Moesians of the 5th Macedonica Legion set up camp opposite the center of the city to the south and also began work on a ramp. The Syrians of the 10th Fretensis Legion camped north of the city and began filling in a valley and defensive ditches before beginning their own assault ramp. To cover these operations, Vespasian had each legion set up its artillery.
While this construction work was commencing, Agrippa rode to one of the walls and called out to the rebels manning them, seeking a peace conference that might do away with the need for a siege. The Jewish response was a well-aimed sling stone, let loose from the walls, which struck the king a painful blow on the elbow. Agrippa’s own men hurriedly surrounded him, and under cover of their shields he was escorted away. This treatment of a man who had gone to parley only enraged the Romans, and they set about their work with even more vigor, says Josephus.59
The rebels, low on food and water, with so many mouths to feed and feeling the need to improve morale in the city, made a sally outside one of the city walls, planning to harry the workmen. But the Roman artillery opened up such a withering fire of anti-personnel ballista bolts, darts, arrows, and, particularly, stone balls, partisans were cut down in swathes. The remaining rebels were driven back inside the city before they could reach the Roman earthworks.
In recent times, archaeologists working at the remains of one of ancient Gamala’s outer walls unearthed 100 Roman iron ballista bolts, 1,600 iron arrowheads, and 2,000 ballista stones—all remnants of this very repulse of the rebel sally in October of AD 67. The ballista stones found here, mostly standard sixty-pounders, had been fashioned by hand from local basalt. They were perfectly round, like basketballs, as if made by machine. Yet basalt is notoriously difficult to shape.
It didn’t take long for the Roman ramps to grow against the comparatively low walls, and before much more time had passed, mantlets were being run up against the wall, and battering rams went to work. Soon, the dry stone walls shook, and at a weakened point a Roman grappling hook was fired at the top of the wall. Called a harpax, this type of iron grappling hook had been adapted from Roman naval warfare for use in siege warfare on land. It was fired by catapult, after which the rope attached to the harpax unraveled and was mechanically winched in. Using this harpax, a section of the Gamala wall was quickly hooked and brought tumbling down. That breach can still be seen at the Gamala ruins today, while the harpax used to make it was found by archaeologists in the rubble of the fallen wall, below the breach.
Roman legionaries now formed up in their cohorts, probably assigned their positions for the assault by drawing lots. As they worked themselves up to storm the city, they rhythmically clashed their swords against their shields. Then the appointed hour arrived. Legion trumpets sounded “Charge,” and with a roar the legionaries surged in through the gap in the broken wall and entered the lower part of the city. Getting into the city proved the easy part. Once inside, legionaries found themselves in narrow streets that inclined steeply up the hill. Slowly driving defenders back, Roman troops were able to push their way uphill to reach the upper city.
Partisans regrouped, and battling their opponents and gravity, Romans were driven back down into fellow soldiers coming behind. Some legionaries pushed their way into city houses to find refuge, or clambered onto roofs. But as these houses were built one against the other up the hill, the crush of soldiers caused wooden floors and tiled roofs to give way, and like a house of cards, whole residential sections collapsed in clouds of dust, killing, injuring, and burying numerous Roman troops. Several legionaries lost limbs in the destruction.
Cheering partisans took advantage of this Roman calamity, some using bricks and stones from the wrecked houses as weapons while others grabbed the weapons of legionaries trapped in the rubble, first using them to finish off their former owners and then charging the Roman troops who were trying to come to the aid of their comrades. In modern archeological digs, pieces of Roman legionary helmets, the brow and cheek-piece of an officer’s helmet, pieces of Roman segmented armor, and Roman short swords would all be unearthed from this rubble.
Vespasian had personally entered the city for this assault, armed with shield and sword like his men, and with just a small bodyguard. He quickly found himself under heavy attack from higher up the hill. Vespasian had never run in his life, and he didn’t intend doing so now. Calling the men around him to form a testudo, he and his comrades stood their ground protected by their raised shields until the rain of rebel missiles against them abated. Then, retaining the tortoise formation and without turning their backs to the enemy, the general and his men backed all the way to the city wall and out through the breach.
Among the many Romans killed on this disastrous day for Vespasian’s army was Decurion Ebutius, the cavalry officer who’d gained a reputation for unequaled dash and courage during operations of the past months. He’d probably been a volunteer for the Gamala assault. The officer’s helmet remnants since found in the ruins of Gamala may well have been his.
Another junior Roman officer, a Centurion Gallus, made his name this same day by living, not dying. Gallus, a native of Gaul if his name is a guide, had taken refuge inside a house in Gamala with ten of his men, and as night fell they found themselves trapped there, with rebels unwittingly on the floor either above or below them. Gallus and his men listened through the wooden floor as the owner of the house boasted over supper to his compatriots about what they were going to do to the Roman army the following day. Waiting until the early hours of the morning, Gallus and his legionaries crept out, cut the throats of their unwitting host and his sleeping friends, then slipped out of the city and returned to their own camp, where they were no doubt greeted as men who’d risen from the dead.
Vespasian went around his troops in camp the day following their reverse in Gamala, consoling them on their injuries and on the loss of friends and comrades, telling them that it was inevitable that the Roman army must suffer casualties in this war. Fate was to blame, he said, not any lack of Roman skill or superiority of Jewish valor.
“For myself,” he went on to declare, “I’ll continue to endeavor to go first before you against your enemies in every engagement, and to be the last to retire from it.”60
For the time being, Vespasian resumed the siege, intending to starve out the rebels. But in late November, three legionaries of the 15th Apollinaris took it upon themselves to creep to the city wall where a large tower rose. In the early morning hours, during the night’s last watch, they steadily worked on large stones at the base of this tower with crowbars. With no mortar to hold these stones in place, the legionaries succeeded in pulling out five of them. The base of the tower began to rumble, and the trio scurried back to Roman lines. And then with an almighty crash the entire tower tumbled down.
The rebel commander, Joseph, had come to investigate the ominous sounds from the tower, and along with the tower’s Jewish sentries, he was brought down with it. As the injured Joseph struggled to escape the tower ruins, he was spotted by a Roman artilleryman, who let fly with a dart that claimed a direct hit and killed him. The rebels were now left without a recognized commander; Joseph’s colleague, Chares, had been ill for some time—possibly suffering from dysentery in the unhygienic crowded city—and he passed away in his bed that same morning.
By this time Titus had returned from his flying visit to Syria for the meeting with Proconsul Mucianus, and he received his father’s permission to lead two hundred of the best Roman cavalry, dismounted, plus a band of select legionaries, in a surprise night attack. This was to be launched via the new breach in the wall, where the toppled tower had stood. Titus and his men succeeded in creeping to the breach after dark, and were only spotted by Jewish sentries as they clambered through the breach. When Titus quickly met stiff opposition inside the city, Vespasian kept his word to his troops and personally led a much larger force to reinforce his son’s party.
The two conflated Roman forces steadily forced partisan fighters back up the hill, as a violent windstorm blew up at the Romans’ back. As if the Roman gods had come to the attackers’ aid, this storm seemed to blow Titus, Vespasian, and their men up the sloping streets, at the same time blinding defenders and blowing them from their precarious vantage points in the upper city. Losing heart in the face of this combination of wind and Roman steel, many partisans threw their wives and children off the highest precipices of the upper city, then made suicidal jumps after them. The Romans now raged through the city, and they, too, their blood lust raised, threw Jewish children to their deaths. Only two young women were spared. Dragged from their hiding place, they proved to be the daughters of Philip bar Jacimus, King Herod Agrippa II’s cavalry general.
Josephus was to say that five thousand Jews perished by jumping or being thrown to their deaths, while four thousand had died during the fighting for Gamala, although some scholars feel the combined total of nine thousand Jewish dead another Josephus inflation. Vespasian ordered the city demolished so that it could be of no use to rebels again. The Roman army apparently didn’t feel the need to retrieve war matériel used in the siege of Gamala for later use, for, as Vespasian’s troops leveled the city, they made no attempt to gather up the two thousand ballista balls or the grappling hook that lay in the rubble. Gamala would never be rebuilt. The ruins of Gamala’s synagogue, where rebel families sheltered during Vespasian’s siege, have been unearthed by archaeological digs in modern times. The oldest surviving synagogue in Israel, it is the site of special Jewish religious services today.
With the Roman destruction of Gamala completed by early December, in all of Galilee only one small town, Gischala, or Gush Halav as the Jews called it, remained in rebel hands. Today the predominantly Christian/Muslim town of Jish, Gischala lay west of the Sea of Galilee and just to the north of Tiberias and Taricheae, on the slopes of Mount Meron, which was bedecked with olive groves and was another well-known olive oil production center. Despite its Greek name, Gischala contained several synagogues and a sizable Jewish population. According to Christian tradition, Saul of Tarsus, the future Apostle Paul, had lived with his parents in the town as a child.
The small number of rebels remaining at Gischala in December of AD 67 consisted of what Josephus described as a robber band. Yet their leader was no bandit. He was a wealthy local olive oil merchant, Yohanan bar Levi, who was to become known as Yohanan mi-Gush Halav, or John of Gischala. He was “a cunning knave,” in the words of Josephus, who considered him at times rash while at other times wise.61
Vespasian now withdrew the bulk of the Roman army to encamp once more for the winter, sending the 10th Fretensis Legion to Scythopolis and taking the 5th Macedonica and 15th Apollinaris with him to Caesarea. He left Titus in Galilee to deal with Gischala, and Titus diverted there with a thousand cavalry. On a December Saturday, Titus rode up to one of the town walls to offer peace terms to the rebels. Josephus says that Titus could see that the town would easily fall to him if he pressed forward with an assault, but he had tired of the often wanton bloodshed of the past months. Nowhere near as severe in his outlook as his father, Titus genuinely wanted to spare the people in the town, knowing that only a minority were rebels, while also knowing that once he let his troops loose on the town he would not be able to restrain them from killing guilty and innocent alike.
Titus called to the rebels on the walls that he offered a pardon—but for the pardon to be extended, all in Gischala must surrender, and the town must be handed over to him. John of Gischala called back that he was all for accepting Titus’s offer and was prepared to force everyone else in the town to do the same. However, he said, it was the Jewish Sabbath, a day on which Jews neither took up arms nor discussed treaties. Titus, agreeing to return the following day to wrap up peace negotiations, withdrew with his cavalry to the walled village of Cydessa, or Kedesh as the Jews called it, which came within the administrative control of the port of Tyre, twenty miles away. Like Tyre, Cydessa had remained loyal to Rome.
Titus failed to leave a single Roman guard outside Gischala, and John took advantage of this to slip out of the town that night and head overland for Jerusalem. He not only took all his armed men with him, he took their wives and children as well—upward of nine thousand of them according to Josephus, although this is possibly another exaggerated figure. This band had not gone three miles when the fearful wailings of women and children in the party caused John to call a halt. The civilians were slowing him down, and he feared that their noise would attract their enemies and result in the deaths of them all. So, he convinced his men to go on without their families, who were left to fend for themselves.
As the heartbroken women and children attempted to return to Gischala, many became lost. John and his fighters, meanwhile, reached Jerusalem. They were welcomed into the holy city by a crowd of ten thousand, which thronged around them asking to hear of the state of affairs in Galilee. John didn’t tell his fellow Jews that he and his men had fled Gischala and deserted their families. Instead, he boasted that he had bested the Romans and outwitted Vespasian’s son and had come to add strength to the defense of Jerusalem. The Romans, he said, were struggling to take even the smallest villages in Galilee. As for Jerusalem, with its mighty walls, it was more than a match for the Romans and their engines of war, which, he said, were being broken against the walls of Galilean cities.
“Even if the Romans were to sprout wings,” he declared, “they could not fly over the walls of Jerusalem!” Young men flocked around him, idolizing him and vowing to follow him in war. In this way, through lie and boast, John of Gischala became one of the leaders of the resistance at Jerusalem.62
When Titus returned with his troops to Gischala by the middle of the following day, it was to find the remaining people in the town opening the gates, receiving him as a savior, and informing him that John had tricked him and escaped to Jerusalem. Kicking himself for allowing John to dupe him, Titus sent part of his force galloping in pursuit of the rebel party and entered Gischala with the rest. Titus’s cavalry failed to overtake the rebel fighters, but they did come upon their wandering families. The cavalrymen, who were likely to have been tough, mustachioed Gauls or bearded Germans, professional soldiers from the other side of the world with no time for fractious Jews of any age or sex, and who made up the bulk of Rome’s cavalry, callously killed close to six thousand women and children, then drove another three thousand back to Gischala like cattle.
Giving these returnees and the remaining people of Gischala their lives, and leaving part of his force as a permanent Roman garrison in the town, Titus returned to Caesarea in time to join his father for the annual Saturnalia Festival. With all of Galilee now in Roman hands, Vespasian prepared for the campaign of the following year, AD 68, a campaign aimed at the ultimate prize, Jerusalem.