The first known critic is the Christian historian Sulpicius Severus, who wrote in the late fourth century and who insists that Titus gave orders for the shrine to be torched, as a blow against both Judaism and Christianity—an anachronistic suggestion that weakens Sulpicius’s credibility, even if Orosius in the fifth century seems to agree with him. Since the nineteenth century, numerous scholars have nonetheless accepted Sulpicius’s version, on the grounds that he may have had access to the account of the siege of Jerusalem in Tacitus’s lost Histories. A recent biographer of Vespasian has expressed doubts about Josephus’s account as well.18
There is also a passage in the Talmud that insists that Titus was determined to profane the Sanctuary. It claims that the Roman commander went into the Holy of Holies and copulated with a prostitute on an unrolled scroll of the Torah. Yet this is too crude and lurid a tale to carry conviction.19
However, one of the most authoritative modern historians of Josephus, Tessa Rajak, disagrees with the critics, arguing that the Temple was of such importance in Josephus’s life that he would never have forgiven even Titus had he been guilty of such a crime. She observes, rightly, that the story of the burning of the Sanctuary is a test of the author’s veracity as a whole; if we cannot accept his account of how the Holy of Holies perished, then we must question a lot more of what he tells us in The Jewish War and in his other books. In Rajak’s view, Josephus’s story is the best we have and, as it cannot be convincingly demolished, should be accepted.20 Certainly, a wish to save the beautiful, mysterious shrine was not out of keeping with what we know of Titus’s imaginative and often—if not invariably—generous character.
In addition, there is a theory that Queen Berenice was living in the camp, and she begged Titus to save the Sanctuary. He had already begun his long affair with this fascinating Jewess, whom he may have first met at Ptolemais in early 67 when preparing for the Judean campaign.21 Tacitus thought that one reason why Titus failed to complete his journey to Rome during the dangerous year of 68 was because he wanted to go back to the seductive Berenice.22 If she really had been in the camp, he might conceivably have done his best to spare the Holy of Holies in order to please her. Yet Josephus makes no mention of Berenice’s presence, although this could be explained by a wish to say nothing that might damage his patron’s reputation. But it was unheard of for a Roman general to live with his mistress on campaign. However intriguing, the suggestion is rejected by every modern historian.
Josephus’s account of the burning of the Sanctuary is a testimony to his belief that everything that happens does so because it is the will of God. This explains the strange detachment with which he describes the burning of the Holy of Holies. He was convinced it was a divine punishment, because in his view, those who fought the Romans had betrayed the Law.23 Even so, the sight of the Temple going up in flames must have horrified him, and he suffered with every other Jew. (Even today, the grief they felt is commemorated by an annual day of mourning, Tish B’av.) Yet he was sure that another Temple would arise, where his people would again worship God in the ancient way.
21
A Holocaust
“And many nations shall pass by this city, and they shall say every man to his neighbor, ‘Wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this great city?’”
JEREMIAH, XXII, 8
IN FORMER TIMES the prophets had exulted over the fall of Niniveh and Babylon, but now it was Jerusalem’s turn. There was no need for the Romans to mount a full-scale assault on the Temple. They simply overran the entire compound, the defenders being by now too demoralized by the fate of the Sanctuary to put up a proper fight. No pity was shown to children or the old, no distinction made between rich and poor, between those begging for mercy and those with swords. The Jews’ throats were cut wherever they were caught. The din was ear-splitting—clashing weapons, war cries, women screaming, the groans of the dying. Even those expiring from hunger found strength to bewail the Holy of Holies. Whipped up by heat from the flames, the clamor echoed from the surrounding hills.
“The suffering was still more terrible than the noise,” recalls Josephus who had watched it. “You would have thought the hill on which the Temple stood was boiling from the bottom upwards, that everywhere was a mass of flames, that there lay a sea of blood deeper than the fire, that there were more killed than killers. You could not see a single piece of ground anywhere because it was so thickly covered with bodies, forcing the soldiers to climb over them in order to reach further victims.”1
In the end, a large number of the Zealots in the Temple broke through the Romans, forcing a way out of the inner court into the outer and from there into the city. Most of the noncombatants in the precincts stayed behind, however, climbing up onto the outer colonnade, which was twelve feet wide, some priests among them tearing railings from the Sanctuary to hurl down at their enemies.
As the Sanctuary had been destroyed, the legionaries could see little point in preserving the Temple’s other buildings so they torched the lot, including what was left of the colonnades and the gates. They lit fires beneath the terrified people cowering on top of the outer colonnade, mainly women and children, many of whom jumped to their deaths to escape the flames; Josephus says that about 6,000 perished in this way. They had taken refuge here because earlier in the day yet another so-called prophet had told them, “Go up onto the Temple where you will receive a sign of your deliverance.”2
The troops also burned down the Temple’s treasure chambers after plundering them. These had been used as strong rooms by Jerusalem’s richer citizens, and they contained immense amounts of coin, gold and silver plate, jewelry, robes, and other valuables, together with goods stolen from the houses of murdered magnates. According to The Jewish War, the plunder taken in the city by the Romans was so great that its sale halved the price of gold throughout Syria.3 Later, they would systematically raze the entire precincts of the Temple above foundation level.
“A large number of false prophets had been hired by the tyrants to delude the people, by telling them to wait for help from God, so that there would be less desertions, and that those who could not be frightened or controlled would respond to hope instead,” says Josephus.4 Yet it is more than likely that Simon and John had themselves believed fervently in “these impostors and pretended messengers of heaven.”5
The Jewish War castigates such prophets for not heeding the “obvious portents that had foreshadowed the coming desolation.”6 It lists a sword-shaped star hanging over Jerusalem, a comet staying in the sky above for a whole year, a light hovering around the Holy of Holies, a sacrificial cow giving birth to a lamb in the Temple, and a bronze door into the Sanctuary that took normally twenty men to open doing so of its own accord, besides chariots and an armed host in the sky that encircled the city on a day in May 66—“a phenomenon so amazing as to stagger belief.” One night before an important feast the priests had gone into the inner court of the Temple to make their customary preparations, when they felt the ground moving and heard a ringing noise, and then the sound of many voices that seemed to cry, “Let us go hence.” (Tacitus repeats this story, perhaps told to him by someone who had read The Jewish War, a book that was not among his sources.)
Josephus also tells of an illiterate peasant farmer and holy man, Jesus ben Ananus, who had stood outside the Temple crying, “A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the Sanctuary, a voice against bride and bride-groom, a voice against the people!” Everyday he went through the streets of Jerusalem shouting this message. People grew so angry that they had him arrested and whipped, but he went on. Believing he was under some demonic influence, they dragged him before the procurator Albinus. Scourged until the bones showed, the man neither wept nor begged for mercy, but whispered at every stroke, “Woe! Woe unto Jerusalem!” The procurator demanded that he explain who he was and what he meant, but he did not answer, only continuing his lament. Albinus decided he was a lunatic and let hi
m go. When the war broke out, Jesus went on crying his lament every day, speaking to no one. He never cursed anybody who hit him, never thanked anybody who fed him, his only reply being, “Woe! Woe unto Jerusalem.” When the siege intensified, he changed his cry to, “Woe! Woe once more to the city, to the people and to the Sanctuary!” When he added to his litany the words, “Woe! Woe to myself as well,” he was killed by a stone from a ballista.7
Another of the portents that Josephus describes must have been highly satisfactory to his Roman patrons. He explains that one reason why the Jews went to war so eagerly in 66 CE was an ambiguous prophecy in their sacred writings, which predicted that at about this time someone from their country was going to become ruler of the entire world. Many Jewish scholars thought it applied to their own race, but obviously the prophecy had referred to Vespasian.
Now, the triumphant Romans carried their eagles into the Temple, placing them opposite the east gate. Then they sacrificed to them, cheering Titus, whom they hailed as “Imperator!” “Victorious General!”
A few priests still held out on top of what was left of the walls of the Sanctuary, without food or water. After four days they were forced to come down by hunger and were taken into Titus’s presence. When they begged him to spare their lives, he told them that the time for pardon was over and that since the one thing that might have given him a reason for sparing them had been destroyed, it was fitting they should die with their Temple. Then he gave orders for their execution. This seems out of keeping with his usual clemency toward upper-class Jews, but Josephus may have explained to him that, far from being members of the nobility, these were men from the ranks of the lower clergy. As such, they are likely to have been committed Zealots.
Now that they had been defeated and were completely surrounded, Simon bar Giora and John of Gischala tried to make terms. Accordingly, Titus went to a place at the west of the outer Temple, where a bridge joined the Temple to the Upper City. The Zealot leaders stood at the far end of the bridge, on the other side of the Tyropoeon Valley, surrounded by their followers, hoping against hope for a pardon. Titus had some difficulty in making his troops restrain their anger and keep their swords in their scabbards, and only did so by issuing the strictest orders. His interpreter was almost certainly Josephus, who must have relished the abasement of the two men he hated most in the world.
Titus spoke first.
So, are you at last satisfied with your country’s misery? You never bothered to think about how strong we were or your own weakness, but through your reckless impetuosity and madness you’ve destroyed your people, your city and your Holy House. Because of it, you’re going to die as you deserve! Your nation had never stopped rebelling against the Romans since the time Pompey’s troops crushed you, until you finally declared open war. Was it because you were so confident about your numbers? Well, only a tiny part of the Roman army has been more than able to cope with you. Or was it because you thought you might have allies, although what nation outside our empire prefers Jews to Romans? Did you rely on your physical strength, despite our having made slaves of the Germans, or on the thickness of your walls? No walls can be more of an obstacle than an ocean, yet the Britons have had to surrender to the Roman army! Or were you intoxicated by your leaders’ determination and cleverness? Yet you must have heard how we defeated even the Carthaginians.8
Titus’s speech contains some very interesting information. The reference to “allies” is highly significant, since it reveals that the Romans had been more worried than they liked to admit about the possibility that Parthia might join the Zealots’ side, especially during Rome’s recent civil wars. The comparison of the Jews’ physique with that of the Germans shows that they must have been a big and well-built race, because we know that contemporaries always thought of the Teutons as giants.
He went on to rebuke the Jews for turning against the Romans after they had treated them with so much kindness, allowing them to observe the laws of their fathers and levy taxes for their God. However, they were untamable reptiles, biting the hand that fed them. His father had come to Judea not to punish but to caution them, but they had despised his benevolence as weakness. He accused them of taking advantage of the Roman civil war and sending embassies to fellow Jews on the other side of the Euphrates, implying that the envoys had not merely asked them to come and fight but tried to persuade the Parthians to send an army.
He claimed he had been exceptionally merciful and had tried to make peace every time he won a victory, that he had begged them to save the Sanctuary, their Holy House, that he had invited them to leave Jerusalem with permission to resume the war elsewhere. They had spurned every one of his offers. They themselves had set fire to the Sanctuary “with their own hands,” insisted Titus, a charge he must have known was untrue. The fact that he made it reveals his sensitivity on the subject, besides showing that he genuinely regretted the destruction of the Holy of Holies; he may even have felt a certain guilt.
After all this, you miserable men, you actually invite me to a conference! What is the point when you’ve destroyed your Sanctuary? Why do you hope to survive your Temple when it lies in ruins? Yet here you are, in your armor, unable to bring yourselves to beg for mercy when you’re at your last gasp. You abominable animals, what makes you so deluded? Aren’t your people dead? Haven’t you lost your Holy House? Isn’t your city in my power? Aren’t your lives in my hands? And yet you still believe it’s glorious to fight to the death? But there is no reason for me to share your madness. Throw down your weapons and surrender unconditionally, and I will let you keep your lives. I shall act like the master of a household with a name for kindness, punishing the real sinners among you and sparing the rest of you for my own uses.9
Intoxicated by his victory, Titus was scarcely magnanimous. Yet Josephus could see nothing wrong with his harangue, since he includes it in The Jewish War. Never a forgiving man, he himself plainly felt the same way, and no doubt he inserted a few extra insults while interpreting Titus’s words.
The Zealots replied that they could not accept Titus’s demand for surrender because they had all taken an oath that they would never surrender under any circumstances, however desperate. Instead, they asked to be allowed to go out through the wooden wall into the desert, taking their women and children with them, and leaving the city to him. They must have known that their request was bound to be refused by a people so merciless as the Romans, but despite their hopeless situation, they had not lost their dignity.
Enraged that men whom by now he regarded as no better than prisoners of war should dare to try and make terms with him, Titus had a proclamation read out. The gist of it was that deserters would no longer find a welcome among the Romans, since he had no intention of sparing anybody but was preparing to attack them all with his entire army. Would-be refugees must fend for themselves as best they could, since from now on he was going to treat everyone according to the rules of war, without any exceptions. His troops would receive orders to burn down and plunder what was left of Jerusalem.
The next morning the legionaries overran the whole of the Lower City. They set fire to the building that housed the magistrates and the archives, to the council chamber in the part known as Acra where the Sanhedrin had met, and to the area called Ophel. Soon the blaze spread to the palace of the late Queen Helena of Adiabene, which was in the center of Acra. The streets went up in flames as well, destroying many houses that were full of dead bodies, filling the air with the smell of burning human flesh.
On the day their grandmother’s palace was burned down, the sons of King Azates of Adiabene and their uncles, who had been fighting with the fury of converts at the side of the Zealots, came with a group of leading citizens to beseech Titus to give them his protection. Despite his proclamation and although very angry, he spared their lives. All were kept under guard, however, and the king’s sons and kinsmen were put in chains and later taken as hostages to Rome, to ensure their countrymen’s loyalty.
In the U
pper City the Zealots used the Royal Palace as a last-ditch bastion because it was so strongly built and because a considerable number of rich citizens had stored their valuables in it. They drove out the Roman troops who had occupied it and then murdered “8,400” people who had taken refuge inside, besides looting the place. (The figure that Josephus gives for those killed looks like yet another of his exaggerations.)
The Jews captured a legionary and a Roman cavalryman, cutting the legionary’s throat and then dragging his body through the streets, kicking and cursing it. However, the cavalryman said he had a wonderful idea that might save the defenders’ lives, so they took him to Simon, who quickly discovered he was lying and handed him over for execution to Ardalas, one of his officers. Intending to cut off his head, Ardalas blindfolded the man and took him in front of the Romans, but while he was drawing his sword, the trooper broke free and ran, reaching his comrades in safety. Titus had him stripped of his weapons and dismissed from his legion, however, saying that it was a disgrace for a Roman soldier to let himself be taken prisoner. Josephus, who after months on the staff had absorbed the army’s harsh ethos, comments that being expelled from a legion was worse than death for a man with self-respect.
Meanwhile, the Romans methodically drove the Zealots out of the Lower City, which they torched all the way down to the Pool of Siloam. They were delighted to see it go up in flames, but very disappointed at finding such a small amount of loot, since everything of value had been moved into the Upper City. Here, the defenders put on a brave face, declaring bravely if unconvincingly that they were overjoyed by the sight of so many buildings burning, since it showed how little would be left standing for their enemies.
Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada, and the Fall of Judea Page 28
