Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada, and the Fall of Judea

by Seward, Desmond

  “We are in the middle of a war with Rome—I am not going to speculate whether it’s likely to do us any good and be to our benefit—but I am asking you to try and remember the whole point of the war,” he continued. “Surely it’s about freedom? Then why are we refusing to let ourselves be ruled by the masters of the known world when we are putting up with these thugs in our own backyard?”

  “Now that I’ve mentioned the Romans, I might as well say everything that came into my mind on the subject while I was talking and what I really think of them. It is this. Even if they somehow succeed in conquering us—and may God forbid that it should all end in such a way—we cannot be asked to suffer anything much worse than what these wretched men have been doing to us.”

  Subtly, Ananus went on to suggest some of the advantages that might result from making peace. “The Romans have never overstepped the boundaries that are laid down for those who don’t share our religion, they have never outraged our sacred customs, and they have always kept well away from our Holy of Holies, showing not only respect but genuine awe. In contrast, these men who were born in our country and brought up in our customs, these men who call themselves Jews, dare to walk around hallowed precincts when their hands are still stained with the blood of fellow countrymen. . . . In plain language, I’m telling you that the Romans might even turn out to be the real upholders of our Law instead of the enemies who are within our walls.”10

  He ended by begging the crowd to fight to the death to save the Temple, for the sake of their wives and children, and for the honor of God. Josephus comments sympathetically that Ananus was a realist who knew how difficult the struggle would be but was prepared to risk everything. His speech was a rousing success, his listeners shouting that the Temple must be recovered at once and demanding a leader. Immediately, Ananus started to collect weapons and to arm his new followers.

  Learning that Ananus was organizing an army, the Zealots suddenly charged out of the Temple and attacked his supporters. An increasingly vicious battle ensued in the streets outside, first with stones and javelins, then at close quarters with swords. Although the moderates were badly armed, rage gave them the strength they needed to beat back their opponents. Finally, they stormed the outer court of the Temple, blockading the Zealots in the inner court. However, the devout Ananus refused to break down the sacred doors. Instead, he had 6,000 men chosen by lot, who mounted guard in the colonnade. Josephus notes grimly that many of the richer moderates hired substitutes to mount guard in their place. Yet for a moment it looked as if the moderates had won the day and that the Zealots would soon be starved into surrender.

  The man who destroyed the moderates was John of Gischala who, Josephus reports inaccurately and ungenerously, “ran away from Gischala.”11 In retrospect, it is clear that ever since his arrival in the city, John must have been plotting to overthrow the junta because he realized they were planning to make peace with the Romans. Convinced that the war was just, he was no less certain that he was the one man to win it. He identified the Zealots as the only party who, despite their shortcomings, were committed to the war and decided to become their leader. He saw his chance in the struggle with Ananus.

  Pretending to be on the moderates’ side, John made a point of spending every hour of the day with Ananus, especially while discussing matters with his officers, in addition to passing much of the night with him when he was inspecting the watch. John then sent secret messages to warn the Zealots inside the Temple of any schemes to attack them. Eventually, Ananus and his advisers grew suspicious and wondered whether he was the source of the enemy’s uncanny knowledge of all their plans. There was no proof of his guilt, however, and he had many friends in high places who trusted him. Instead of being arrested, he was made to take an oath of loyalty, which he did so convincingly that he was subsequently allowed to attend the meetings of Ananus’s council. He was even entrusted with negotiating with the Zealots and offering them terms.

  Once inside the Temple, John reminded the Zealots how often he had risked his life to save them, by sending information about Ananus’s plans. He told them that they were in great danger. Ananus, he lied, had persuaded his party to send an embassy to Vespasian, inviting him to come and take possession of Jerusalem. In the meantime, Ananus was arranging a purification ceremony for the following day, so that his men could get into the Temple and attack them. There were so many of the moderates, said John, that he did not see how the Zealots could possibly hold out. They had only two choices—to beg for mercy or find help from elsewhere. If they chose the first, they could expect to be slaughtered by Ananus’s followers in revenge for their own killings.

  John’s speech in the Temple, as recorded in The Jewish War is unimpressive, but it is only Josephus’s unenthusiastic reconstruction and based on hearsay or even guesswork.12 It is likely that he spoke very differently, and indeed brilliantly. Elsewhere, even Josephus admits that he was a most effective orator, for his speech achieved everything he wanted. It was now that John of Gischala became the Zealot leader and was able to start, if not a revolution, at least a reorganization, which he hoped would win the war.

  12

  The Zealot Revolution

  “Princes are hanged up by their hand; the faces of elders were not honored.”

  LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH, V, 12

  IT WOULD BE FASCINATING to know precisely how Josephus was able to find out so much about what was happening at Jerusalem. It is reasonable to suppose that the Romans had spies all over the city, working undercover, whose reports he must have helped to assess, and almost certainly he was already interrogating defectors—we know that he did so at a later date—since his own experience made him ideally qualified to judge their motives. His re-creation of what went on inside the Jewish capital is built around his old enemy, John of Gischala, whom, as always, he portrays in an unflattering light.

  There is no reason to doubt that the Zealots were convinced by John’s speech. For a time, their leader remained the thuggish Eleazar ben Simon, whom they followed because of his unjustified reputation for shrewdness. His second-in-command was Zacharias ben Phalek, another Jerusalem man of priestly family. John told these two that Ananus had singled them out for particularly savage punishment—another lie. Terrified by John’s warning that Ananus was planning to hand the city over to the Romans, the Zealots—probably at John’s suggestion—called in Idumeans from the desert country south of Palestine. A letter was sent off at once to their rulers, saying that unless they came quickly, Jerusalem would soon be in Roman hands again.

  The Idumeans, those wild sons of Ishmael, reacted “like madmen,” gathering 20,000 men—no doubt an exaggeration—and racing to Jerusalem.1 Ananus’s followers saw them coming and barred the gates of the city, so that when they arrived they found themselves shut out. They yelled abuse from outside the walls, accusing Ananus of rank treachery and of selling Jerusalem to the Romans.

  Joshua ben Gamala, the high priest next in seniority to Ananus, answered the Idumeans from a wall tower with a lengthy speech, saying that the accusations were a lie put about by the Zealots, whom he denounced. “There is groaning and wailing everywhere in this place because we suffer so much from the activities of these wretched men, who have been impertinent enough to move their banditry from the countryside and remote little towns into our city, the heart of the nation. They have moved not just into the capital but into the Temple, which they have turned into their headquarters.”2 Joshua refused to let the Idumeans inside the walls unless they laid down their weapons.

  The Idumean leaders were affronted by his insisting that they should lay down their arms, while in any case their men were angry at not being admitted at once. An Idumean general shouted back, “I am not surprised that the defenders of freedom are locked up in the Temple when people like you keep their kindred out of a city that belongs to all of us while they prepare to let in the Romans.” He ended his tirade by promising that until they were admitted, he and his troops would camp outside.3


  The Idumeans grew angrier still when a violent storm blew up during the night. Torrents of rain swamped them in their bivouacs, where they had to shelter under their shields. Many in Jerusalem saw the storm as an omen of disaster. They were justified. While the sentries in the Temple colonnades and at the city’s gateways were busy keeping dry, Zealots stole past them and sawed through the bars of one of the gates, the noise muffled by the wind, rain, and thunder. Then they opened the gates to the Idumeans, who ran through the city to the Temple.

  Together, Idumeans and Zealots launched a joint attack on the area around the Temple, as its inhabitants ran for their lives. A frightful shrieking broke out among the women nearby, while the Zealots joined in yelling the Idumean war cry. “The shouting on all sides was made still more terrifying by the howling of the storm.”4 Naturally ferocious, the Idumeans gave no quarter. When day broke, the outer court of the Temple was flooded with blood. There were already 8,500 dead, but the Idumeans went further afield, rampaging through the city, looting houses, and killing everybody they saw. The high priests who had led the moderates were hunted down, and the bodies of Ananus and Joshua were thrown over the walls.

  “I am not mistaken when I say that the city’s destruction began with the death of Ananus, when the Jews saw their high priest, guardian of their safety, murdered in the middle of Jerusalem and that from this day on may be dated the overthrow of her walls and the total ruin of the Jewish state,” is Josephus’s mournful comment.5

  The death of Ananus did not end the bloodshed. The Zealots and Idumeans continued to butcher people “as though they were a herd of unclean beasts,” the poor being cut down on the spot.6 After the massacre was over, for days young noblemen were routinely arrested, fettered, thrown into prison, and then murdered in what The Jewish War portrays as a purge of the upper classes, stating that they were offered their lives “in the hope that some of them would go over to the Zealots, but that they preferred to die rather than join these criminals.”7 For the moment they were spared and then, after being scourged and racked until nearly dead, they were hacked to death. Those arrested during the day were killed at night, their bodies thrown out to make room for fresh prisoners. Relatives dared not mourn for them. Josephus claims wildly that at least “12,000” young nobles died in this way.

  This is almost certainly a distortion of what took place; probably a mere handful were killed. Although there was an element of class resentment during the war, Josephus takes every opportunity to exaggerate it. A selfish aristocrat, he believed that the only real Jews were the nobles—nobody else mattered—and his biased version of events claims that all of them wanted peace with Rome. He tries to convince us that it was impossible to be both a patrician and a Zealot, when there is plenty of evidence that this was not the case.

  Josephus paints a picture of a city from which every man of breeding and substance wanted to escape. Yet whatever The Jewish War may tell us, modern scholarship has revealed that many of the upper class joined the Zealot Revolution and did so with fanatical enthusiasm.8 The sheer number of well-born defenders whom he names during the siege leads one to suspect that his picture is a deliberate distortion. If magnates were persecuted, it was more from a desire to lay hands on their wealth than from class enmity. Mock tribunals were set up, including an imitation Sanhedrin of seventy judges. A “show trial” was conducted at the Temple, accusing the wealthy Zacharias ben Baris of corresponding with Vespasian and plotting to betray Jerusalem.9 No proof was produced, the real reason for the charges being a wish to destroy a dangerous opponent and get hold of his money. Zacharias demolished the case against him and then listed the crimes of his accusers amid howls of rage. When he was acquitted by the “president,” two men immediately cut him down and threw his body into the ravine below the Temple, shouting, “You’ve had our verdict too, with a better result!” After this, the so-called Sanhedrin was chased out of the courtroom with blows from the backs of swords.

  The Idumeans soon learned that the alleged plot to surrender Jerusalem to the Romans had never existed and that Ananus and his friends had been innocent of any collaboration with the Romans. In private, a Zealot revealed the origin of the slander, explaining that the “defenders of freedom” were eliminating opponents in order to consolidate their control. Not too proud of themselves after their own bloodthirsty behavior, most of the Idumeans soon left the city and returned to their homes, much to everybody’s surprise. Before leaving, they freed about 2,000 prisoners, the majority immediately taking the opportunity to escape from the city.

  The Idumeans might have become a restraining influence had they stayed. Now that they had gone, the Zealots had a free hand. They stepped up their purges, liquidating not only every man of noble birth they distrusted but any potential opponent with an outstanding record as a soldier who did not share their views. According to The Jewish War, “they killed the first sort out of envy, the second from fear.”10 One of the magnates whom they murdered was Gorion ben Joseph, an outspoken critic of their activities, while among the warriors was Niger of Perea, who had distinguished himself fighting against Cestius and then become the hero of Ashkelon. Niger, too, may have died for speaking out too freely. While he was dragged through the city on his way to the place of execution, he showed his scars to the crowd and, as he was being slaughtered, called down the vengeance of the Romans on his murderers, together with famine, plague, and war—besides shouting that he hoped they would all end by killing each other.

  The Zealots had unleashed a class war that some modern historians compare to the Jacobin terror in France during 1793.11 People were executed for the slightest reason. Those who tried to escape attention by avoiding their new masters were charged with arrogance, those who treated them too familiarly were charged with contempt, and those who fawned on them were charged with being plotters. The most trivial accusation brought the same penalty as the most serious—death. Only the poor were free from the daily fear of execution.

  The death of Ananus and the attacks on Judea’s ruling class confirmed Josephus in his view that the Zealots were murderous fanatics and that the Jewish people’s only hope lay in a Roman reconquest. “The city was prey to the three greatest of all evils, war, tyranny and faction, so that its citizens . . . ran away from their own fellow countrymen to look for protection among foreigners, finding safety with the Romans instead of with their kindred,” is how he describes Jerusalem at this stage.12

  This is the picture Josephus chooses to give, because he wants to convince readers of The Jewish War that, like himself, every member of his class rejected a war against Rome, which was stirred up by a handful of lowborn fanatics. Yet it cannot be an altogether accurate picture. By his own account many members of the magnate families stayed behind to fight the Romans. Although many of Judea’s nobles were killed by their fellow countrymen, research indicates that a surprisingly large number of them became enthusiastic Zealots.

  Josephus is convincing, however, when he says that each day people tried to escape from Jerusalem, despite the fact that the gates were watched and anyone caught was executed on suspicion of going over to the Romans. Not everyone wanted to be trapped in a besieged city. The dead were piled in heaps along the roads just outside, their bodies left to putrefy beneath the sun. However, the rich were usually able to bribe the guards.

  Outside the capital, the sicarii who had occupied Masada since the start of the war began raiding far and wide. During Passover they attacked the little city of Engedi, storming in to kill 700 women and children after their menfolk had fled, looting the houses and carrying off the crops—if The Jewish War can be believed. In addition, they supposedly plundered every village within reach of the fortress, reducing the entire area to a desert. Recruits flocked to them from all over the country. Elsewhere brigandage had broken out all over Judea, with gangs hiding in the desert after robbing their own villages. They pooled their strength and joined forces to attack cities, inflicting casualties of a sort that were normal
ly experienced only in wartime, before vanishing into the wilderness with their loot. Almost certainly, most of those who died were killed because they were lukewarm in the fight against Rome.

  Meanwhile, John of Gischala had become dictator of Jerusalem, gathering around him what Josephus portrays—or caricatures—as a private army of murderous psychopaths. Ignoring the wishes of fellow Zealots, he reached decisions and gave orders without consulting anyone and seems to have been obeyed because everybody was terrified of him. According to The Jewish War, his haughtiness alienated a substantial number of his followers, who feared that he was planning to make himself a king on the model of the Maccabees or even of the Herods. Predictably, he soon quarreled with the ferocious Eleazar ben Simon, who was not willing to take orders from him. The movement split into two mutually hostile factions, Eleazar’s installing itself in the inner courtyard of the Temple. Both sides watched each other suspiciously, sometimes coming to blows, although for the moment they managed to avoid outright civil war.