JERUSALEM WAS BURNING.
The fire fused with the dry August heat. A thick mass of sounds and smells signaled the end of the siege—stone and burning timbers crashing, soot and dust everywhere, the screams of victim and victor, the dense mix of sweat, blood, and fear from the bodies of the living, the stench from the unburied dead. Above, the white-blue bowl of heaven arched, remote and unmoved by the huge confusion below. Rome’s legions—furious, implacable—consumed the ravaged Lower City.
For more than three years the Jews had defied the empire. Their hastily improvised defense of their country failed to hold the north, Galilee; but Jerusalem in Judea, to the south, had profited from the turmoil that followed Nero’s death. Within that single year, three emperors had come and gone; the fourth, the general Vespasian, had had to quit the Jerusalem campaign for Egypt in order to secure the purple for himself. Meanwhile, subject peoples at the edges of the empire, encouraged by Rome’s distraction, watched with keen interest the progress of the Judean war. Their attention sealed the city’s fate: It had to be made an object lesson for others nursing similar dreams of revolt.
If the foreign siege outside the city walls pressed hard upon the people trapped inside, so did the civil war between rival Jewish rebel factions raging within. At first, Jerusalem’s priestly aristocrats had directed the revolution, despite their initial opposition to it. They had led the nation for half a millennium, ever since Israel’s return from Babylon: Whether as the designated mediators between their own people and some distant international power—Persia, Greek Syria and Egypt, now Rome—or as native priest-kings after the successful Maccabean revolt, these men had long wielded political as well as religious authority. In the beginning of this conflict they had tried, characteristically, to turn their countrymen from rebellion; but when Eleazar, the son of a high priest, called on those serving in the Temple to cease offering sacrifices for the well-being of Rome, the revolt in effect was declared, and the chief priests assumed responsibility for the defense of the city and the nation.
But the Galilee had crumbled before the Roman response, and Zealots and other ardent antiaristocratic revolutionaries, abandoning the debacle, fled south to the capital. They murdered their priestly competition and seized control. Assassination and intimidation kept the balance of power swinging madly. Even with the Romans at the gates, these nationalists paralyzed the interior, dividing Jerusalem into three warring camps, terrorizing the populace, murdering rivals; finally, suicidally, even burning the city’s enormous stores of grain lest the other factions profit from them. They slaughtered those Jews who tried to flee. The hapless few who evaded the revolutionaries fell into the hands of the Romans. The soldiers crucified them within eyesight of the city, to further demoralize the Jews trapped within.
Even the beautiful white-and-gold Temple to the God of the Universe, the heart of the city and of the far-flung Jewish nation, finally succumbed to the devouring flames. The intense heat melted precious metals; even limestone burned and burst. The huge stone expanse of the Temple courtyards choked on carnage and confusion as priests, soldiers, terrorists, and civilians all surged toward the sanctuary, the Holy of Holies. In the austere emptiness of this innermost chamber abided the earthly presence of God: “He who swears by the Temple,” as Jesus of Nazareth, some forty years earlier, had taught, “swears by it and by Him who dwells in it.” Now it, too, perished; and in their grief, defying Rome to the last, two priests—Meir ben Belgas and Joseph ben Dalaeus—flung themselves into its fires and so perished with it. The entire mountain that it had crowned—Har ha-Bayit, the Mountain of the House, God’s House—was so “enveloped in flames from top to bottom,” an eyewitness later wrote, that it “appeared to be boiling up from its very roots.”
Herod the Great, some three generations earlier, had expanded the Temple area on a vast and lavish scale. Its outermost walls, taken together, ran a total length of nearly five thousand feet, almost nine-tenths of a mile. The space within—some thirty-five acres, or 169,000 square yards—could hold, when necessary, almost 400,000 pilgrims. During the great biblical festivals—Sukkot/Tabernacles in the fall, Pesach/Passover in the spring, Shavuot/Pentecost in early summer—the Temple teemed with myriad Jewish pilgrims and intrigued gentile tourists. From all over the world, in caravans overland from Babylonia, in ships traversing the Mediterranean, foreign Jews joined local Galilean pilgrims and the residents of the city so that the population swelled enormously, and so did the priests’ duties. All action and attention focused on the Temple at these times, and the priests’ chief responsibility was to see that everything ran smoothly and properly.
At Passover in particular, the press could be overwhelming. Priests and pilgrims would come together the week before the feast for the necessary rites of purification mandated by the Torah; and in a few hours on the afternoon leading into the fifteenth day of the month of Nisan, immediately before the holiday of Unleavened Bread began, a huge number of priests—perhaps as many as ten thousand—and an even greater number of worshipers would slaughter and prepare the Passover offering, the lamb or goat required for the sacred meal. So many Jews crowded into Jerusalem annually for these holidays that Roman prefects, who had controlled Judea since shortly after Herod’s death, would march their troops from Caesarea, on the coast, up to the city, to control the holiday mob. Ringed round the Temple’s perimeter, staring down from its porticoes at the surging crowds, the Roman armed presence encouraged prudence.
Nevertheless, excitement often turned to violence during these festivals. Once, after Herod’s death, Jews who had gathered to celebrate Shavuot attacked an avaricious prefect’s troops, and general slaughter ensued. At Sukkot seven years before the siege, one Jesus ben Hanan had disturbed other worshipers by suddenly, loudly declaiming the impending destruction of the sanctuary. Disciplined and punished by both Jewish and Roman authorities, he was released to continue his mournful prophecy, which he did most especially on the feast days. Only in the course of the siege was he finally silenced, killed by a Roman missile. But especially at Passover, given its great themes of redemption and national liberation, potential for political agitation was high, Roman nerves taut: It was during a Passover that Pilate, then prefect, had executed some Jews—nobodies, really—as political bandits and insurrectionists. The Roman presence could be as much a provocation as an inducement to order; and it ultimately, again, fell to the chief priests to keep everything moving, safeguarding the troubled peace between the wary Roman governor with his resentful troops and the excited holiday crowds.
Disease, starvation, slaughter—despite the huge numbers of Jews that had perished, huge numbers still remained. This, too, was due to Passover: These people had come to Jerusalem for the feast and been trapped there by the war. With its sanctuary crumbling and its defenses down, the ruined Temple mesa now served as a collecting point for what remained of the city’s inhabitants. The Romans oversaw the postbattle triage. Those who had fomented rebellion they summarily executed. Others were sent off to slower deaths, in the mines by hard labor or in the arenas of urban centers, there by wild beasts or gladiatorial combat, for the amusement of the watching public. The tallest, best-looking young survivors were put aside for display in the triumphal procession back in Rome. Slave traders accompanying the army picked over those remaining, aged seventeen and under, for their stock.
The religious convictions that had nourished Jewish dreams of freedom seemed, in retrospect, sadly misconstrued. “Their chief inducement to go to war,” wrote the historian Josephus of his own people, “was an equivocal oracle found in their sacred writings, announcing that at that time a man from their country would become the ruler of the whole world.” Looking back on these things, Josephus knew that the prophecy actually referred to Vespasian, whose troops had acclaimed him emperor while he was still in Judea. But for those Jews who had put their faith in it, the prophecy had hailed the coming of the Messiah. And Josephus had seen a remarkable and wrenching example of the tenacity of this conviction. In the heat of the Roman assault, with frenzied legions surging about them and the Temple collapsing in ruin, some six thousand Jews—a mixed crowd of men, women, and children—managed to climb to the roof of the last colonnade in the outer court. They had been encouraged by a “false prophet” (so Josephus, with the certainty of retrospect): This man claimed to have received a call from God himself to gather the group and mount the Temple, “to receive the signs of their deliverance.” The soldiers, undeterred, fired the columns. None escaped.
Arch of Titus in Rome celebrating his victory over Jerusalem
“Most of the spoils that were carried were heaped up indiscriminately, but more prominent than all the rest were those captured in the Temple at Jerusalem—a golden table weighing several hundredweight, and a lampstand similarly made of gold but differently constructed from those we normally use,” Josephus, Jewish War, 7.149. Josephus here describes Titus’ victory procession back in Rome, which celebrated his defeat of Jerusalem. This relief panel from Titus’ Triumphal Arch, put up to commemorate that engagement, captures the moment that Josephus describes.
The Upper City capitulated. Titus ordered everything razed to the ground. One legion remained behind; the rest moved off. Survivors trickled away in their different directions to slow death or servitude in Egypt, Asia Minor, or Italy. The massive gold table and menorah from the sanctuary, together with a captured scroll of the Law, made their way to Rome, spoils of the war. What was once Jerusalem stood at the smoking epicenter of a blasted landscape: The surrounding territory, devoured by Titus’ need for war machines, had been stripped of trees for miles around. Hill and countryside, once green, now denuded, gave way to inevitable erosion. It was Rome’s way with rebels. They make a desert, a Roman historian commented later, and they call it peace.