Titus’ entourage was filled with Jewish renegades including three Jerusalemites—a historian, a king and (it seems) a double-queen who was sharing the Caesar’s bed. The historian was Titus’ adviser Josephus, a rebel Jewish commander who had defected to the Romans and who is the sole source for this account. The king was Herod Agrippa II, a very Roman Jew, brought up at the court of the Emperor Claudius; he had been the supervisor of the Jewish Temple, built by his great-grandfather Herod the Great, and often resided in his Jerusalem palace, even though he ruled disparate territories across the north of modern Israel, Syria and Lebanon.
The king was almost certainly accompanied by his sister, Berenice, daughter of a Jewish monarch, and twice a queen by marriage, who had recently become Titus’ mistress. Her Roman enemies later denounced her as “the Jewish Cleopatra.” She was around forty but “she was in her best years and at the height of her beauty,” noted Josephus. At the start of the rebellion, she and her brother, who lived together (incestuously, claimed their enemies), had attempted to face down the rebels in a last appeal to reason. Now these three Jews helplessly watched the “death-agony of a famous city”—Berenice did so from the bed of its destroyer.
Prisoners and defectors brought news from within the city that especially upset Josephus, whose own parents were trapped inside. Even the fighters started to run out of food, so they too probed and dissected the quick and the dead, for gold, for crumbs, for mere seeds, “stumbling and staggering like mad dogs.” They ate cow dung, leather, girdles, shoes and old hay. A rich woman named Mary, having lost all her money and food, became so demented that she killed her own son and roasted him, eating half and keeping the rest for later. The delicious aroma crept across the city. The rebels savoured it, sought it and smashed into the house, but even those practised hatchetmen, on seeing the child’s half-eaten body, “went out trembling.”5
Spymania and paranoia ruled Jerusalem the Holy—as the Jewish coins called her. Raving charlatans and preaching hierophants haunted the streets, promising deliverance and salvation. Jerusalem was, Josephus observed, “like a wild beast gone mad which, for want of food, fell now upon eating its own flesh.”
That night of the 8th of Ab, when Titus had retired to rest, his legionaries tried to douse the fire spread by the molten silver, as he had ordered. But the rebels attacked the fire-fighting legionaries. The Romans fought back and pushed the Jews into the Temple itself. One legionary, seized “with a divine fury,” grabbed some burning materials and, lifted up by another soldier, lit the curtains and frame of “a golden window,” which was linked to the rooms around the actual Temple. By morning, the fire had spread to the very heart of holiness. The Jews, seeing the flames licking the Holy of Holies and threatening to destroy it, “made a great clamour and ran to prevent it.” But it was too late. They barricaded themselves in the Inner Court then watched with aghast silence.
Just a few yards away, among the ruins of the Antonia Fortress, Titus was awakened; he jumped up and “ran towards the Holy House to put a stop to the fire.” His entourage including Josephus, and probably King Agrippa and Berenice, followed, and after them ran thousands of Roman soldiers—all “in great astonishment.” The fighting was frenzied. Josephus claims that Titus again ordered the fire extinguished, but this Roman collaborator had good reasons to excuse his patron. Nonetheless, everyone was shouting, the fire was racing and the Roman soldiers knew that, by the laws of warfare, a city that had resisted so obstinately expected to be sacked.
They pretended not to hear Titus and even shouted ahead to their comrades to toss in more firebrands. The legionaries were so impetuous that many were crushed or burned to death in the stampede of their bloodlust and hunger for gold, plundering so much that the price would soon drop across the East. Titus, unable to stop the fire and surely relieved at the prospect of final victory, proceeded through the burning Temple until he came to the Holy of Holies. Even the high priest was allowed to enter there only once a year. No foreigner had tainted its purity since the Roman soldier-statesman Pompey in 63 BC. But Titus looked inside “and saw it and its contents which he found to be far superior,” wrote Josephus, indeed “not inferior to what we ourselves boasted of it.” Now he ordered the centurions to beat the soldiers spreading the fire, but “their passions were too strong.” As the inferno rose around the Holy of Holies, Titus was pulled to safety by his aides—“and no one forbade them to set fire to it” anymore.
The fighting raged among the flames: dazed, starving Jerusalemites wandered lost and distressed through the burning portals. Thousands of civilians and rebels mustered on the steps of the altar, waiting to fight to the last or just die hopelessly. All had their throats cut by the exhilarated Romans as though it were a mass human sacrifice, until “around the altar lay dead bodies heaped one upon another” with the blood running down the steps. Ten thousand Jews died in the burning Temple.
The cracking of vast stones and wooden beams made a sound like thunder. Josephus watched the death of the Temple:
The roar of the flames streaming far and wide mingled with the groans of the falling victims and owing to the height of the hill and the mass of the burning pile, one would have thought the whole city was ablaze. And then the din—nothing more deafening or appalling could be conceived than that. There were the war cries of the Roman legions sweeping onward, the howls of the rebels encircled by fire and swords, the rush of the people who, cut off above, fled panic-stricken only to fall into the arms of the foe, and their shrieks as they met their fate, blended with lamentations and wailing [of those in the city]. Transjordan and the surrounding mountains contributed their echoes, deepening the din. You would have thought the Temple hill was boiling over from its base, being everywhere one mass of flame.
Mount Moriah, one of the two mountains of Jerusalem, where King David had placed the Ark of the Covenant and where his son Solomon had built the first Temple, was “seething hot full of fire on every part of it,” while inside, dead bodies covered the floors. But the soldiers trampled on the corpses in their triumph. The priests fought back and some threw themselves into the blaze. Now the rampaging Romans, seeing that the inner Temple was destroyed, grabbed the gold and furniture, carrying out their swag, before they set fire to the rest of the complex.6
As the Inner Courtyard burned, and the next day dawned, the surviving rebels broke out through the Roman lines into the labyrinthine Outer Courtyards, some escaping into the city. The Romans counter-attacked with cavalry, clearing the insurgents and then burning the Temple’s treasury chambers, which were filled with riches drawn from the Temple tax paid by all Jews, from Alexandria to Babylon. They found there 6,000 women and children huddled together in apocalyptic expectation. A “false prophet” had earlier proclaimed that they could anticipate the “miraculous signs of their deliverance” in the Temple. The legionaries simply set the passageways alight, burning all these people alive.
The Romans carried their eagles on to the Holy Mountain, sacrificed to their gods, and hailed Titus as their imperator—commander-in-chief. Priests were still hiding out around the Holy of Holies. Two plunged into the flames, and one succeeded in bringing out the treasures of the Temple—the robes of the high priest, the two golden candelabra and heaps of cinnamon and cassia, spices that were burned every day in the Sanctuary. When the rest surrendered, Titus executed them as “it was fitting for priests to perish with their Temple.”
Jerusalem was—and still is—a city of tunnels. Now the rebels disappeared underground while retaining control of the Citadel and the Upper City to the west. It took Titus another month to conquer the rest of Jerusalem. When it fell, the Romans and their Syrian and Greek auxiliaries “poured into the alleys. Sword in hand; they massacred indiscriminately all whom they met and burned the houses with all who had taken refuge within.” At night when the killing stopped, “the fire gained mastery of the streets.”
Titus parleyed with the two Jewish warlords across the bridge that spanned the valley betwee
n the Temple and the city, offering them their lives in return for surrender. But still they refused. He ordered the plundering and burning of the Lower City, in which virtually every house was filled with dead bodies. When the Jerusalemite warlords retreated to Herod’s Palace and Citadel, Titus built ramparts to undermine them and on the 7th of Elul, in mid-August, the Romans stormed the fortifications. The insurgents fought on in the tunnels until one of their leaders, John of Gishala, surrendered (he was spared, though he faced lifelong imprisonment). The other chieftain Simon ben Giora emerged in a white robe out of a tunnel under the Temple, and was assigned a starring role in Titus’ Triumph, the celebration of the victory in Rome.
In the mayhem and the methodical destruction afterwards, a world vanished, leaving a few moments frozen in time. The Romans butchered the old and the infirm: the skeletal hand of a woman found on the doorstep of her burnt house reveals the panic and terror; the ashes of the mansions in the Jewish Quarter tell of the inferno. Two hundred bronze coins have been found in a shop on the street that ran under the monumental staircase into the Temple, a secret stash probably hidden in the last hours of the fall of the city. Soon even the Romans wearied of slaughter. The Jerusalemites were herded into concentration camps set up in the Women’s Court of the Temple itself where they were filtered: fighters were killed; the strong were sent to work in the Egyptian mines; the young and handsome were sold as slaves, chosen to be killed fighting lions in the circus or to be displayed in the Triumph.
Josephus searched through the pitiful prisoners in the Temple courtyards, finding his brother and fifty friends whom Titus allowed him to liberate. His parents had presumably died. But he noticed three of his friends among the crucified. “I was cut to the heart and told Titus,” who ordered them to be taken down and cared for by doctors. Only one survived.
Titus decided, like Nebuchadnezzar, to eradicate Jerusalem, a decision which Josephus blamed on the rebels: “The rebellion destroyed the city and the Romans destroyed the rebellion.” The toppling of Herod the Great’s most awesome monument, the Temple, must have been an engineering challenge. The giant ashlars of the Royal Portico crashed down onto the new pavements below and there they were found nearly 2,000 years later in a colossal heap, just as they had fallen, concealed beneath centuries of debris. The wreckage was dumped into the valley next to the Temple where it started to fill up the ravine, now almost invisible, between the Temple Mount and the Upper City. But the holding walls of the Temple Mount, including today’s Western Wall, survived. The spolia, the fallen stones, of Herod’s Temple and city are everywhere in Jerusalem, used and reused by all Jerusalem’s conquerors and builders, from the Romans to the Arabs, from the Crusaders to the Ottomans, for over a thousand years afterwards.
No one knows how many people died in Jerusalem, and ancient historians are always reckless with numbers. Tacitus says there were 600,000 in the besieged city, while Josephus claims over a million. Whatever the true figure, it was vast, and all of these people died of starvation, were killed or were sold into slavery.
Titus embarked on a macabre victory tour. His mistress Berenice and her brother the king hosted him in their capital Caesarea Philippi, in today’s Golan Heights. There he watched thousands of Jewish prisoners fight each other—and wild animals—to the death. A few days later, he saw another 2,500 killed in the circus at Caesarea Maritima and yet more were playfully slaughtered in Beirut before Titus returned to Rome to celebrate his Triumph.
The legions “entirely demolished the rest of the city, and overthrew its walls.” Titus left only the towers of Herod’s Citadel “as a monument of his good fortune.” There the Tenth Legion made its headquarters. “This was the end which Jerusalem came to,” wrote Josephus, “a city otherwise of great magnificence and of mighty fame among all mankind.”
Jerusalem had been totally destroyed six centuries earlier by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon. Within fifty years of that first destruction, the Temple was rebuilt and the Jews returned. But this time, after AD 70, the Temple was never rebuilt—and, except for a few brief interludes, the Jews would not rule Jerusalem again for nearly 2,000 years. Yet within the ashes of this calamity lay the seeds not only of modern Judaism but also of Jerusalem’s sanctity for Christianity and Islam.
Early during the siege, according to much later rabbinical legend, Yohanan ben Zakkai, a respected rabbi, had ordered his pupils to carry him out of the doomed city in a coffin, a metaphor for the foundation of a new Judaism no longer based on the sacrificial cult in the Temple.7
The Jews, who continued to live in the countryside of Judaea and Galilee, as well as in large communities across the Roman and Persian empires, mourned the loss of Jerusalem and revered the city ever after. The Bible and the oral traditions replaced the Temple, but it was said that Providence waited for three and a half years on the Mount of Olives to see if the Temple would be restored—before rising to heaven. The destruction was also decisive for the Christians.
The small Christian community of Jerusalem, led by Simon, Jesus’ cousin, had escaped from the city before the Romans closed in. Even though there were many non-Jewish Christians living around the Roman world, these Jerusalemites remained a Jewish sect praying at the Temple. But now the Temple had been destroyed, the Christians believed that the Jews had lost the favour of God: the followers of Jesus separated forever from the mother faith, claiming to be the rightful heirs to the Jewish heritage. The Christians envisaged a new, celestial Jerusalem, not a shattered Jewish city. The earliest Gospels, probably written just after the destruction, recounted how Jesus had foreseen the siege of the city: “ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies”; and the demolition of the Temple: “Not one stone shall remain.” The ruined Sanctuary and the downfall of the Jews were proof of the new revelation. In the 620s, when Muhammad founded his new religion, he first adopted Jewish traditions, praying towards Jerusalem and revering the Jewish prophets, because for him too the destruction of the Temple proved that God had withdrawn his blessing from Jews and bestowed it on Islam.
It is ironic that the decision of Titus to destroy Jerusalem helped make the city the very template of holiness for the other two Peoples of the Book. From the very beginning, Jerusalem’s sanctity did not just evolve but was promoted by the decisions of a handful of men. Around 1000 BC, a thousand years before Titus, the first of these men captured Jerusalem: King David.
PART ONE
Judaism
The city of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel … Awake, awake; put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city.
—ISAIAH 60.14, 52.1
My native city is Jerusalem, in which is situated the sacred shrine of the most high God. The holy city is the mother city not of one country, Judaea, but of most of the other neighbouring lands, as well as lands far away, most of Asia, [and] similarly Europe, to say nothing of the countries beyond the Euphrates.
—HEROD AGRIPPA I, KING OF JUDAEA, quoted in PHILO, De Specialibus Legibus
He who has not seen Jerusalem in her splendour has never seen a desirable city in his life. He who has not seen the Temple in its full construction has never seen a glorious building in his life.
—BABYLONIAN TALMUD, Tractate of the Tabernacle
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
—PSALM 137.5–6
Jerusalem is the most famous city of the East.
—PLINY THE ELDER, Natural History, 5.70
CHAPTER 1
The World of David
THE FIRST KING: CANAANITES
When David captured the citadel of Zion, Jerusalem was already ancient. But it was scarcely a city, just a small mountain stronghold in a land that would have many names—Canaan, Judah, Judaea, Israel, Palestine, the Holy Land to Christians, the Promised Land to Jews. This territory, just 100 by 150 miles, lies
between the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. Its lush coastal plain offered the best path for invaders and traders between Egypt and the empires of the East. Yet the isolated and remote town of Jerusalem, 30 miles from the nearest coast, far from any trade routes, stood high amid the golden-rocked desolation of the cliffs, gorges and scree of the Judaean hills, exposed to freezing, sometimes even snowy, winters and to witheringly hot summers. Nonetheless, there was security atop these forbidding hills; and there was a spring in the valley beneath, just enough to support a town.
The romantic image of David’s city is far more vivid than any facts of verifiable history. In the fog of Jerusalem’s pre-history, fragments of pottery, ghostly rock-cut tombs, sections of wall, inscriptions in the palaces of faraway kings and the holy literature of the Bible can provide only fleeting glints of human life in an invincible gloom, separated by hundreds of years. The sporadic clues that emerge cast a flickering light on some random moment of a vanished civilization, followed by centuries of life of which we know nothing—until the next spark illuminates another image. Only the springs, mountains and valleys remain the same, and even they have been redirected, resculpted, refilled by millennia of weather, debris and human endeavour. This much or little is certain: by the time of King David, holiness, security and nature had combined to make Jerusalem an ancient fastness that was regarded as impregnable.
Jerusalem Page 4
