City Under Siege
The Divided House
Josephus, Jewish War 5:1-38/i.I-5
While Vespasian and Titus were distracted with the Roman civil war, inside Jerusalem's walls continued unabated. Three Zealot leaders contended for control of the city. Simon son of Giora held the majority of the city. John of Gischala occupied the Temple Mount. Eleazar son of Simon controlled the Temple itself. Simon son of Giora continually attempted to conquer the Temple Mount by attacking John's men from below while Eleazar's men attacked them from atop the walls of the Temple's inner courts. John's men repelled the attackers below by casting down spears and stones on their heads, and they assaulted Eleazar's men in the Temple by turning their siege engines against the men defending the Temple's walls. Spear shafts, darts, and catapult shots sailed into the Temple's inner courts. All the while, the dutiful priesthood continued to carry out the daily sacrifices. The Zealots also admitted worshipers brave enough to pass through the war zone with their sacrifices. In the midst of open conflict, the regular Temple ceremonies proceeded. More than once it happened that stray missiles struck down priests ministering at the altar. Worshipers sometimes became victims of the crossfire:
Men came to the Temple from the ends of the earth, so great was their zeal to offer sacrifices at this famous place which all mankind regarded as sacred, but many fell dead before their own sacrifices and splashed the altar (esteemed by both Greeks and Barbarians) with their own blood, until the corpses of strangers mingled together with those of their own country, and those of common men with those of priests. The blood of carcasses stood in pools in the holy courts themselves. (Josephus, Jewish War 5:17-18/i.3)
The conflict also set the neighborhoods around the Temple Mount ablaze. The Zealots burned the food supplies to thwart one another. The utter madness displayed by the Zealots and the rebels in their fratricidal war with one another and the citizens of Jerusalem answers to the curse in the Torah that says, "The LORD will smite you with madness" (Deuteronomy 28:28).
The arrival of pilgrims for the Festival of Passover exacerbated the food shortages. Despite the calamity and the imminent likelihood of Roman siege, thousands of pilgrims flowed to Jerusalem to keep the holy festival. In the last days before the festival began, word began to spread through the city that the legions had been sighted on the move. The first cavalry detachment appeared outside the city walls during the last few days before the festival began:
The majority of the people [under siege in the city] were of the same nation, but they were not residents of Jerusalem. They had come up from all over the land to keep the festival of unleavened bread when they were suddenly besieged by an army. From the outset, this placed them in tight quarters and brought a pestilential destruction upon them, and after that, a famine. (Josephus, Jewish War 6:421/ix.3)
References
This lesson is adapted from Daniel Lancaster's teachings in The Sent Ones, as presented by First Fruits of Zion for the Torah Club.
Four Legions (Nisan, 70 CE)
Josephus, Jewish War 5:39-97/1.6-ii.5
Moses said, "The LORD will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, as the eagle swoops down" (Deuteronomy 28:49). Every legion of Rome marched beneath the standard of a golden eagle, the symbol of Zeus (Jupiter) and the whole empire:
[The eagle] shall besiege you in all your towns until your high and fortified walls in which you trusted come down throughout your land, and it shall besiege you in all your towns throughout your land which the LORD your God has given you. (Deuteronomy 28:52)
In the spring of 70 CE, Vespasian's son Titus set out from Alexandria, Egypt, at the head of several thousand picked troops from the Egyptian legions. Nearly three years had elapsed since Vespasian's legions overran the Galilee. More than a year had passed since Vespasian's last operations in Judea. The full army at Titus' disposal was even larger than the initial force Vespasian led into the war. Titus had four legions, including the reconstituted twelfth legion, which was eager to avenge the wounding it received at the Battle of Beth-horon. Auxiliary forces compiled from the allied client-kings of Syria and the whole east supported the legions. In total, Titus commanded more than seventy thousand men. Titus assembled his forces at Caesarea and then set out for Jerusalem at the head of the four legions: the fifth, the tenth, the twelfth, and the fifteenth.
Titus and his army arrived on time for Passover. The tenth legion took up its position on the Mount of Olives. Forty years earlier, Rabbi Yeshua and His closest disciples sat on the same hill overlooking the Temple and the holy city. Yeshua predicted that, within a generation, armies would surround the city, breach its walls, and leave not one stone on top of another. He said to His disciples, "Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all things take place" (Luke 2I:32). He made those prophecies just a few days before Passover and from the very hill where the tenth legion dug in to prepare for the assault of Jerusalem, forty years later, just a few days before Passover.
References
This lesson is adapted from Daniel Lancaster's teachings in The Sent Ones, as presented by First Fruits of Zion for the Torah Club.
Passover (Nisan 14-16, 70 CE)
Josephus, Jewish War 5:98-273/iii.I-iv.3
As Titus assessed the terrain and prepared to move his men closer to the city walls, the Festival of Passover began. Thousands of pilgrims found themselves trapped inside a city under siege. When the time for the Passover sacrifice came, those who had acquired a lamb or goat suitable for the seder went to the Temple. It seemed safe to do so. The Zealot factions had called a truce. John of Gischala and his Zealots allowed the worshipers to cross through the outer courts. They passed through the midst of armed encampments in the Court of the Gentiles. They took note of siege weapons aimed at the holy house and even siege towers built from cedars of Lebanon that John and his men had stolen from the Temple treasuries.
When they arrived at the gate to the inner courts, the Zealots under Eleazar son of Simon partially opened the gates to admit them for the Passover sacrifice and then closed the gates behind them. No one realized that many of John's men had disguised themselves as pilgrims to obtain entrance into the inner courts. When the time for the sacrifice arrived, John's men threw off their outer garments, revealing their swords and knives, and attacked Eleazar's men. In the ensuing chaos, many innocent victims fell dead, struck down in the fracas. Eleazar's men abandoned the gates. The battle ended quickly. Eleazar son of Simon surrendered, and John of Gischala took control of the Temple.
References
This lesson is adapted from Daniel Lancaster's teachings in The Sent Ones, as presented by First Fruits of Zion for the Torah Club.
Woe to Yerushalayim
Josephus, Jewish War 6:300-309/V.3.
As the city attempted to observe the holy days, the Roman army leveled the terrain around the city. They threw down all the hedges and garden walls, filled in gulleys and trenches, toppled monuments and structures, chopped down orchards, cut down fruit trees, hilled in pools and fountains, and flattened the entire stretch from Mount Scopus to the serpent's pool.
While this work was underway, Titus and Josephus rode the circumference of the city walls as the general sought out the weak points in Jerusalem's defenses. When they saw a cluster of defenders on the walls above, they rode close enough for Josephus to address them with terms of peace. Calling out in Aramaic, Josephus announced that, if the rebels would put down their weapons and surrender the city, Titus would spare their lives and their Temple. The men on the walls jeered at the sight of the traitor and replied with arrows. One of Titus' friends took an arrow in the shoulder.
The incident so angered Titus that he ordered the siege to commence at once. The tenth legion brought up their heavy catapults. They loaded the catapults with enormous blocks of white limestone, a commodity abundant around Jerusalem. It took the combined effort of several soldiers to load a single stone into the catapult, but the heavy catapults could hurl the stones a distance of a quarter mile.
No one in the vicinity of the impact survived the strike of one of those stones. The watchmen on the walls grew accustomed to watching for the approaching stones. As the white boulders sailed through the air, they would call out, "Ba HaBen!" which means, "The Son Comes!" The Hebrew word for "son (ben, 12)" sounds like the word for "stone (even, 17%)." The people in the city heard the cry and took cover. The incoming stones made a terrible sound of rushing wind. Their impact crashed like a bomb blast.
The Romans realized that the white stones were easy to spot in the air, so they began blackening them with soot before loading them on the catapults.
For the last seven and a half years, the people of Jerusalem had become accustomed to the mournful voice of Yeshua ben Chananiyah, the mysterious prophet who began his sad lament in the year that James, the brother of the Master, died. At Sukkot of 62 CE, Yeshua ben Chananiyah began a tireless routine of wandering the streets of Jerusalem and walking the circumference of its walls, crying out, "A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the holy house, a voice against the bridegroom and the bride, and a voice against this whole people!"
The Sadducean leaders and chief priests arrested him and flogged him for disturbing the peace. The Roman procurator (Albinus) had him scourged. Nothing availed. As soon as they released him, the man resumed his gloomy lament. For seven and a half years, he lived as a homeless man, circling about the city, always crying out, "Woe! Woe to Jerusalem!" At festival times, his cry grew louder.
During the week of Passover in 70 CE, the tenth legion hurled their stones against Jerusalem. The Prophet Yeshua paced the circumference of the city atop the city walls, heedless of the danger, calling out louder than ever, day after day, "Woe, woe to the city again, and to the people, and to the holy house!" During the missile assault, he abruptly stopped, lifted up his voice, and cried out, "Woe! Woe to myself also!" Just then one of the great stones hurled from the siege engines came sailing through the air and struck him dead, and he gave up his spirit.
References
This lesson is adapted from Daniel Lancaster's teachings in The Sent Ones, as presented by First Fruits of Zion for the Torah Club.
The Third And Second Walls
Josephus, Jewish War 5:274-347/vi.3-viii.2
Titus ordered his men to erect an embankment around Jerusalem. They set fire to the suburbs and began building the earthwork while the defenders launched small, desperate attacks against the construction crews. Despite these efforts, the soldiers continued raising the embankment and constructing siege towers to fire down on the walls and protect the battering rams. Within a few days, the embankment surrounded the city— just as our Master predicted (Luke 19:43).
With the embankment complete, the Romans moved their battering rams forward and began pounding at several points along the walls. The relentless blows drove the Zealot factions to forget their quarrels; Simon son of Giora and John of Gischala made an uneasy truce. Their men launched repeated attacks against the Roman machines, hurling pitch and setting siege works on fire. The bravery of the Jewish revolutionaries astonished the Romans.
During one such sally, the Romans captured a Jew. Titus had him crucified before the city walls-the first of many executions during the siege.
The largest battering ram, nicknamed Nico ("Victor"), flanked by siege towers, hammered relentlessly at the city's most vulnerable point-the northern wall, also called the third wall. King Herod Agrippa I had started to build that outermost third wall to enclose the expanding city, but Rome forced the king to leave it unfinished. At the outbreak of the revolt, the people of Jerusalem hastily completed the third wall begun by the king, but the workmanship was poor. (Note that the expanded wall line encompassed the small hill called Golgotha and the garden of the Master's tomb. To this day, the tomb remains inside the wall line of old Jerusalem.) The rushed construction job could not long withstand Nico's pounding.
On the seventh of lyyar, Nico broke through the third wall. Roman soldiers poured through the breach. The defenders made no attempt to hold the outer district. They fell back to the safety of the second wall, the original wall line before Agrippa's expansion, which enclosed the city's Second Quarter.
Titus moved his camp into the new city, pitching it just outside the bowshot range of the second wall. The defenders launched hit-and-run attacks, striking hard and then retreating to the safety of the wall. When pursuing the fleeing Jews, the Romans came under a rain of arrows from the second wall. Battles persisted throughout the day. That night, the Romans slept in armor, and at dawn the fighting resumed.
Titus advanced a battering ram to the middle tower on the north side of the second wall and hammered relentlessly. As the tower began to crumble, the defenders feigned surrender, engaging in prolonged negotiations to delay further Roman progress. This ruse temporarily halted the assault, buying time for a counter strategy. When the Romans realized the trick, they renewed their attack, and the tower quickly collapsed.
On the fifth day after the first wall's breach, a small gap opened in the second wall. Roman soldiers surged through the opening into the narrow market streets of the garment district, where wool and cloth merchants had their shops. This time, the defenders did not retreat to the next wall but counterattacked, trapping the soldiers in cramped streets and breaking their formation. As the trapped troops tried to escape, the narrow breach became a deadly bottleneck, prompting Titus to station archers at street level to hold back the Zealots while his men slowly withdrew. The siege left both sides exhausted, with every hour raising the stakes of this brutal conflict.
The Zealots celebrated this minor victory as if they had repelled the Romans. Yet after three days, they could no longer withstand the relentless assault. The defenders abandoned the Second Quarter and retreated behind the first wall that surrounded the Upper City. Titus demolished the second wall, garrisoned the southern towers, and prepared for the next phase of his assault.
References
This lesson is adapted from Daniel Lancaster's teachings in The Sent Ones, as presented by First Fruits of Zion for the Torah Club.
Warning to Surrender
Josephus, Jewish War 5:348-419/ix.I-4
Titus decided to take a few days off from the siege to pay his soldiers. He commanded the army to form up in battle array in full view of the city. The soldiers polished their breastplates and helmets and put on their finest regalia for the demonstration. The cavalrymen adorned their horses with fine trappings. The formation spread out along the length of the old wall and the northern side of the Temple. Their armor and weapons glittered in the sun, and the sheer depth of the ranks stifled all hope for the defenders. The people of Jerusalem crowded the rooftops, the city wall, and the northern wall of the Temple to see the enormous army spread out below them. The paymasters worked their way through the ranks, giving each man his pay. It took them four days, one day per legion, to pay the whole army as one rank replaced another in the formations.
Titus hoped that the display of numbers might help soften the resistance. King Agrippa and Queen Bernice were present, urging him to spare the Temple and the city if at all possible. King Agrippa still hoped that he might soon be king of Jerusalem and all Judea. Queen Bernice had set her sights even higher. As she surveyed the ranks of polished soldiers, she imagined that she might one day be the wife of Caesar and the queen of the legions.
Under the urging of the Herodians, Titus again offered the rebels the opportunity to surrender. He sent Josephus out to try to persuade the people to surrender. Josephus went around the wall looking for a good place from which he might address the city while staying safely out of the range of arrows. Then he began to implore the people on the walls. He offered a long, persuasive speech, magnifying the invincible power of Rome and the foolishness of resistance. He reminded the people of the Holy Temple and urged them to spare it from the disaster of war. He reminded them of the many sins and impieties committed during the revolt, and he chided them for imagining that God might still be inclined to rescue them. He warned them that the first wall could not hold out against the Romans any better than the third and second walls. The end was near, but if the people would surrender, Titus promised to spare their lives and the Holy Temple.
While Josephus shouted these words, the men on the walls jested, jeered, and launched insults and arrows at him. Josephus tried another approach.
He reminded the people of the long scope of biblical history. He traced out the history of the Jewish people, beginning with Abraham. He observed that wars were not won by might or power but by God's help, and he assured the people of Jerusalem that God had abandoned their cause. He reminded them of the fall of Jerusalem under the Babylonians. He said, "As for you, which commandments of our lawgiver have you kept? Which things prohibited by our lawgiver have you not done? How much more wicked are you than those who were punished in the past? You have not even avoided sins ordinarily done in secret: thefts, murderous plots, adulteries. You are fighting over rapine and murder, and you have invented strange new ways of wickedness. You have made the Temple itself a receptacle of your filth, and this divine place is polluted by the hands of our own countrymen!" With words like this, he hoped to shake their confidence in a miraculous deliverance. He said, "I can only imagine that God has left His sanctuary and now stands on the side of those against whom you fight!" He lamented that his own wife and mother were trapped inside the walls of the city, but he willingly forfeited their lives if that might help spare the nation. He said, "Perhaps you think that it is only for their sake that 1 counsel you to surrender. If so, kill them, or take even my own blood if it will help convince you to save your own lives. For I am ready to die if it will help you come to your senses after my death."
References
This lesson is adapted from Daniel Lancaster's teachings in The Sent Ones, as presented by First Fruits of Zion for the Torah Club.
The Famine
Josephus, Jewish War 5:425-445/x.2-5
The famine had become severe for those in the city. Simon son of Giora's men conducted a house-to-house search for rations and hidden food. When they found hidden supplies, they punished the homeowner for denying he had food. If they found none, they tormented the homeowner worse because they supposed he had hidden it more carefully. They assumed that anyone who did not look emaciated must be hiding supplies somewhere. Men sold all that they had for a single measure of wheat or barley, and if they were lucky enough to acquire grain, they hid themselves in the innermost chambers of their houses to eat it. "Some ate the grain without grinding it ... others baked bread... but they snatched it out of the fire, half-baked, and ate it in haste for fear of being discovered."
Hunger drove people to madness. Children stole the last morsels from dying parents; mothers took scraps from their children. The compulsion of starvation turned men against their own families (Deuteronomy 28:54-55).
The rebel soldiers and bandits confiscated all the food and provision they found. They had not yet run through their own supplies, but they feared the approaching days. They left families without a single scrap, and they tortured anyone they suspected of hiding food. Since the wealthy could reasonably be expected to have provisions laid up, the Zealots pressed them the hardest. They accused them of attempting defection and put them to death to better ransack their homes in the quest for food (Deuteronomy 28:29-31).
The Romans had abundant provisions. The soldiers liked to taunt the hungry Jerusalemites. They drew near the walls to do their cooking and eat their meals in full view of the starving people. The famine forced people to abandon the city, searching for food outside the walls. In the middle of the night, some of the hungry citizens of Jerusalem crept out from the city as far as the Roman embankment to gather what plants and herbs they might nd. If they escaped capture, they needed yet to escape the Zealots who confiscated anything they acquired outside the city.
References
This lesson is adapted from Daniel Lancaster's teachings in The Sent Ones, as presented by First Fruits of Zion for the Torah Club.
The Crucifixions
Josephus, Jewish War 5:446-459/xi.I-2
Despite the Zealots' attempts to keep people from defecting, the Romans captured several hundred people outside the walls daily. Titus had the prisoners scourged, tormented, and crucified. The Romans erected an encircling grove of crosses in view of the city walls. "The soldiers, out of the wrath and hatred they felt toward the Jews, nailed up the prisoners on the crosses, one in one position, another in another position, by way of jest, until their number was so great that no room remained for more crosses, and no crosses lacked for bodies." Those crucified outside the walls numbered in the thousands.
Forty years earlier, when the Romans led our Master outside the city walls to be crucifed, the women of Jerusalem followed Him weeping. He said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, 'Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed'... For if they do these things [to the righteous], what will happen [to the wicked]?" (Luke 23:28-31).
The families of the crucified stood on the walls where they could see their own loved ones hung in obscene positions. The Zealots brought the relatives of the crucified to the walls and warned, 'These are miseries awaiting those who flee to the Romans and supplicate for mercy." These things happened to fulfill the curse in the Torah that says, "You shall be driven mad by the sight of what you see" (Deuteronomy 28:34).
On one occasion, Josephus recognized three of the crucified men as former friends of his. He went to Titus and asked that the men might be taken down. Titus consented. They took the three men down from their crosses and turned them over to the care of one of the camp physicians. Two of them died; one recovered.
Whenever Titus and his men caught one of the Zealots, they cut off his hands and sent him back into the city with a warning for their captains, "This is what Titus says, 'Stop this madness and do not force me to destroy the city. Save your lives and your temple."
As Titus inspected the construction of the siege ramps and towers, the Jews on the walls called down imprecations on him and upon his father. They declared that they preferred death to slavery and that so long as they had breath within them, they would fight on against him. As for the Temple, they declared that they had no fear-for God has a Temple that transcends the creation.
Not all the Jews had lost hope. Many still waited for the fulfillment of the apocalyptic promises of Ezekiel (38-39) and Zechariah (12, 14). They believed the Roman army was Gog and Magog. They anticipated deliverance at any moment. They shouted to Titus, "This Temple will be saved by Him that dwells within it, who will yet be our helper in this war. Your threats will come to nothing, for the matter depends only upon God."
References
This lesson is adapted from Daniel Lancaster's teachings in The Sent Ones, as presented by First Fruits of Zion for the Torah Club.
Battle for the Ramps
Josephus, Jewish War 5:466-490/xi.3-6
It took the legions seventeen days of continuous labor to raise the four siege ramps against the first wall and finish construction of the enormous siege towers. During those seventeen days, the Zealots had not been idle. John of Gischala ordered his men to tunnel beneath the wall of the fortress and undermine the entire siege platform. His men created massive caverns beneath the earth directly beneath the ramps. They supported the weight of the ceiling with cedar beams, which they covered with flammable pitch and bitumen. As the Romans began to haul their siege engines up into the wooden towers, the Zealots filled the cavern with incendiary materials and ignited a blaze. The oxygen-starved fire smoldered away the support beams. All at once, the ground beneath the siege platforms collapsed. The enormous siege towers twisted and fell into a heap of lumber. Thick plumes of smoke rose from the ground, but as the smoldering fire received the sudden burst of oxygen, a great blaze of flame shot up from the ground. The blaze consumed the lumber of the towers and destroyed the siege engines. The Romans watched in stunned disbelief as the flames consumed their hard labor.
Several of the siege towers against the Upper City still stood. Titus ordered an immediate assault. The Romans brought up the rams and began to pound against the northern side of the first wall. When the hammering started, three men volunteered to lead a suicide assault on the towers. (One of them was the son of a convert from Adiabene.) The three men carried torches and loaded themselves with incendiary supplies of oil, pitch, and bitumen. They left the city and rushed toward the siege platforms where the rams were shaking the walls. They threw themselves into the midst of the foes, heedless of arrows, spear thrusts, and sword strokes, until they reached the enclosures of the battering rams within the towers and ignited the timbers.
The Romans came running to extinguish the fire and salvage their siege engines, but the defenders on the walls met them with volleys of missiles. Another company of defenders leaped down and laid hold of the rams, even though the metal now glowed red-hot. The fire spread from the rams to the timbers of the siege towers. Surrounded by the flames, the Roman soldiers abandoned the towers and withdrew.
As the Romans fell back from the siege towers, the defenders poured out of the city and pursued them back to their encampment in the new city. They overran the soldiers assigned to guard the camp posts and assaulted the walls of the encampment. The Romans were utterly unprepared for the sudden onslaught. The Jewish revolutionaries showed no fear of death. Without armor, they plunged their bodies against the spear points and swords of the troops defending the camp while more fighters came up from behind them.
Titus arrived and scolded the commanders in the camp, "Why did you let the Jews out of their prison? You were supposed to be breaching their walls! Now they are assaulting the walls of your camp!" He took some picked troops and attempted to outflank the attackers, but in the dust, confusion, and cacophonous noise of the close battle, he could scarcely make his orders understood. The Jews withdrew back to the city and celebrated their victory. Outside the wall of the Upper City, the siege works collapsed into two great bonfires.
References
This lesson is adapted from Daniel Lancaster's teachings in The Sent Ones, as presented by First Fruits of Zion for the Torah Club.
Shavu’ot 70 CE
Josephus, Jewish War 5:49I-526/xii.I-4
Titus gave up on penetrating the Upper City and Temple Mount. He decided to starve the city. He ordered the legions to construct a short wall encircling the city with garrisons stationed at even intervals. He wanted to ensure that no one could escape the city without detection and that no one could enter the city with supplies. The four legions competed against each other to be the first to complete their section of the wall. None of the legions wanted the shame of finishing last. With that many men furiously working day and night, the project took only three days to complete. The total circumference of the wall was nearly five miles.
Ironically, the Romans began constructing the wall around Jerusalem on Sivan 3, the anniversary of the day on which the LORD said to Moses, "You shall set bounds for the people all around, saying, 'Beware that you do not go up on the mountain or touch the border of it; whoever touches the mountain shall surely be put to death'" (Exodus I9:12). They completed the wall on Sivan 6, the day of Shavuot (Pentecost) -forty years after the outpouring of the Spirit (Acts 2), four years after the voices in the Temple had been heard, saying, "Let us remove from here" (Lesson 38).
Ordinarily, on the Festival of Shavuot, the city filled with pilgrims bringing the first fruits of their crops into the city. At Shavu'ot, the priesthood celebrated the wheat harvest. Every man feasted on the bounty of the land. On Shavuot 70 CE, the city was quiet and still. The priesthood carried out the rituals and meager sacrifices in the Temple as best they could, but even the sacred provisions were running short. They could see that they had only enough animals left for a few more weeks of sacrifice. John of Gischala and his men on the Temple Mount had been raiding the sacred storehouses and seizing livestock reserved for the sacrifice. They indulged in the sanctified oil and wine and generally helped themselves to the holy things. John explained to his men, "It is proper for us to use the holy things while we are fighting on behalf of the Holy One. One who fights to defend the Temple should live off the Temple."
While John and his men indulged in the sacred things, the famine tightened its grip on the city below them. It devoured whole households and families.
Emaciated women and children hilled the rooftops and upper rooms of the houses. Corpses of the elderly and infirm, the first to die from famine, blocked the alleys. Boys and young men haunted the marketplace like silent shadows, swollen with famine, collapsing wherever their strength failed them.
The dead became too numerous to attend. No one mourned. No one had the strength to wail for their loved ones. No sound of lamentation was heard in the city. Starvation stifled all compassion, sympathy, and affection. A deadly silence hung over the city. The dying looked silently to the Temple, but they uttered no prayers.
The Romans stood near the walls and stuffed themselves to satiety, showing the people on the walls the great quantity of provisions and supplies they had with them in their camps. The sparse rations that did remain in the city went to the Zealots and the fighting men.
Initially, men tried to keep pace with the dying by carrying their bodies to mass graves outside the gates, but the corpses quickly outnumbered those willing to do the work. The men resorted to simply pitching the dead over the walls and into the valleys below. These things happened to fulfill the curse in the Torah that says, "Your carcasses will be food to all birds of the sky and to the beasts of the earth, and there will be no one to frighten them away" (Deuteronomy 28:26, cf. Matthew 24:28, Luke 17:37).
Titus observed the growing piles of corpses in the valleys, but the process of starving out the city seemed to be taking longer than he had anticipated. He began to regret his decision, and he lamented losing the glory of conquering the city by siege. He did not like the idea of giving the whole victory to the famine.
He decided to resume the siege with the construction of new siege works. All the trees around the city had already been cut down for fuel, crosses, and the construction of the last set of siege works. He had to send his men nearly twelve miles to acquire timber. They hauled the new lumber to the city and began building four new towers, larger and better protected than the last ones. Ignoring the Upper City, he placed all four against the walls of the Fortress Antonia.
References
This lesson is adapted from Daniel Lancaster's teachings in The Sent Ones, as presented by First Fruits of Zion for the Torah Club.
Land of the Sadducees
Josephus, Jewish War 5:527-533/xiti.I
During the course of their purges, the Zealots killed off the remnants of the Sadducean aristocracy and chief priests. Simon son of Giora condemned them for involvement in the plot to surrender the city. The Zealots conducted the executions on the city walls, in full view of the Romans. Simon son of Giora said, "Now you will see whether or not your new friends will come to save you."
They struck the priests down and tossed their bodies over the walls. Simon arrested and executed several other priests and legislators who had served on the Sadducean Sanhedrin, including Aristeus, the secretary of the Sanhedrin. Simon ordered that the bodies of the priests and legislators remain unburied outside the walls, and he ordered the immediate execution of anyone who might mourn for the men. He also implicated Mattityahu, the father of Josephus. He arrested him and placed him in prison with the proclamation that anyone who spoke to him would be put to death.
In this manner the last of the Sadducees died ingloriously, fulfilling the imprecation that they had called down on themselves before the tribunal of Pontius Pilate (Matthew 27:25).
References
This lesson is adapted from Daniel Lancaster's teachings in The Sent Ones, as presented by First Fruits of Zion for the Torah Club.
Josephus and the Deserters
Josephus, Jewish War 5:54I-561/xiii.3-5
While Josephus made his daily rounds outside the city walls, spouting an endless stream of Roman propaganda, a well-aimed stone from the wall struck him on the head. He fell to the ground unconscious. The Jews on the wall cheered. A small force sallied down from the city to take his body. The Romans came quickly to his defense and fought off the body-snatchers. As the Roman soldiers carried Josephus away, the people continued to cheer. The glad news that Josephus was dead quickly spread through the city. Inside the city, his mother heard about it from inside her prison cell and secretly lamented.
Josephus disappointed the people when he appeared fully recovered from his wound a few days later. He immediately took up the same recitation of propaganda, encouraging the people of the city to desert and flee to the Romans. He promised that Titus guaranteed safety to everyone who abandoned the city and surrendered. The ugly ring of crosses encircling the city and hung with the bodies of dying men contradicted his assurances. Every day, soldiers took down the dead and crucified fresh victims. It tended to deter defectors.
Despite the risk of crucifixion, many of the people decided to take their chances and accept the assurances of clemency. They asked themselves, "Can the Romans do anything worse to us than we are suffering from starvation?" In those days of desperation, hundreds leapt from the walls or stole out through hidden passages. When the deserters came to the Romans, they begged for food. The Roman soldiers observed the men's emaciated bodies and swollen stomachs and offered them as much as they wanted to eat-fully knowing that their famished gorging would kill them. Many of the deserters ate until their shrunken gullets burst, much to the amusement of their hosts.
A rumor went around the camps that the deserters concealed their gold by swallowing the coins before leaving the city. It was true. Some did. Jerusalem had an abundance of gold, which had become useless within the walls. Before deserting the city, some men swallowed a few coins of gold with the intention of retrieving the money later from their excrement. When the soldiers found out about the concealed gold, they took it upon themselves to dissect the deserters. They gutted every man that came over to them and searched their entrails in the quest for gold coins. In one night's time, they dissected two thousand men. According to Josephus, when Titus heard about the atrocity, he forbade his soldiers from participating in such butchery, but the orders went ignored.
References
This lesson is adapted from Daniel Lancaster's teachings in The Sent Ones, as presented by First Fruits of Zion for the Torah Club.
Body Count (Tammuz 1, 70 CE)
Josephus, Jewish War 5:562-572/xiii.6-7
John of Gischala and his men on the Temple Mount continued to sustain themselves from the Temple's sacred provisions. They drank the wine reserved for wine libations, and they used the oil intended for bread offerings and for the menorah. They melted down sacred vessels and created weapons and even struck their own coins. In the city below, the famine continued to ravage the citizens. It struck the poor and the common folk the hardest. They had no subsistence laid up at all. By then, a single measure of wheat sold for a talent of gold. The poor opened the common sewers and dug at old dung hills of cattle in the search for anything remotely edible.
On the first day of the month of Tammuz, a certain gatekeeper named Manneus son of Lazarus defected to the Romans. He told Titus that he had been responsible for numbering the dead carried out through his gate, and that since Passover when the Romans pitched their camp, he had counted 115,880 dead bodies carried out of the city to the mass graves by way of his gate. Others estimated that more than 600,000 dead had already been tossed over the walls. Even if Josephus inflated these numbers by a factor of ten, the scope of the disaster is still staggering. These things seemed to fulfill the warnings of Moses: "Then you shall be left few in number, whereas you were as numerous as the stars of heaven, because you did not obey the LORD your God" (Deuteronomy 28:62).
References
This lesson is adapted from Daniel Lancaster's teachings in The Sent Ones, as presented by First Fruits of Zion for the Torah Club.
The Doomed Generation
Some teachers find it difficult to resist the temptation of exploiting the tragedy to support a theological agenda against the Jews. Interpreters cite the miseries of the people and devastation of the city as evidence that God abandoned and rejected the Jewish people as a punishment for rejecting Jesus. Others claim that the people suffered such atrocities because God was avenging the crucifixion of His Son. For example, Eusebius says: "Such was the reward which the Jews received for their wickedness and impiety against the Christ of God" (Ecclesiastical History 3.7.I).
God did not abandon the Jewish people, nor did He seek vengeance against an entire nation for the evil misdeeds of a few wicked men. The destruction that befell the nation was brought about by the sins of the nation. Moses had foretold that all these things and more would come upon the Jewish people if they failed "to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes" (Deuteronomy 28:15). Though God is patient and long-suffering, He stores up His wrath for a day of reckoning. After many long centuries, that day of reckoning had arrived.
This explains why our Master Yeshua urgently called His generation to repentance. He hoped to reverse the judgment against the nation, snatch them back from exile, and bring them into the Messianic Era. He went out preaching, "Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand," which means, "Quit sinning, turn back to Torah, because the opportunity to enter the Messianic Era is here now."
Our Master Yeshua warned the generation about the terrible doom that hung over them. He earnestly sought after the wayward sheep of Israel who had wandered into secularism and sin, calling on them to repent, turn back to Torah, and avert the impending disaster. A narrow reading of the Gospels sometimes gives people the impression that the wicked generation of whom the Master spoke were primarily Pharisees and religious Jews. On the contrary, Yeshua considered the Pharisees and the religious as the healthy and the righteous. Although he upbraided the Pharisees for religious pretense and hypocrisy, He did not criticize them for their devotion. Instead, He sought after sinners: tax collectors, thieves, harlots, wealthy moneylenders, Zealot terrorists, and secular Jews who had turned away from the ways of Torah.
Instead of destruction, the Master's generation might have chosen the path of repentance. Instead of exile, they might have chosen the kingdom. Yeshua said, "If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes" (Luke 19:42). He warned them, "This generation is a wicked generation" (Luke II:29), and He said, "I say to you that it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for you" (Matthew II:24).
The words of Josephus further confirm the Master's condemnation of the wicked generation:
Never did any age since the beginning of the world ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this one. (Josephus, Jewish War 5:442/x.5)
If the Romans had delayed in coming against those villains any longer, the city would either have been swallowed up by the ground opening upon them or washed away by water or destroyed by the thunder that destroyed the land of Sodom, for the city had brought forth a generation of men much more atheistic than were those who suffered such punishments. It was by their madness that all the people came to be killed. (Josephus, Jewish War 5:566/xiti.6)
Despite all this, the generation that saw the destruction of Jerusalem was not more uniquely wicked than any other generation. The Zealots, bandits, and religious fanatics responsible for the sacrilege and fratricide within the holy city were not unlike the zealots, bandits, and godless religious fanatics of later generations who believed that, in the midst of violence, corruption, and massacres, they served God's best interests. The apostolic generation was not worse than those before them, nor were they worse than those that came after them. They suffered so exceptionally because they had the misfortune to live at a prophetic juncture in the story of Israel, and they missed their opportunity. A critical moment in history passed them by: "They will level you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation" (Luke 19:44). Would our own generation have fared any better?
A generation in which the Temple is not built is considered to be one in which it was destroyed. (y. Yoma I:10)
References
This lesson is adapted from Daniel Lancaster's teachings in The Sent Ones, as presented by First Fruits of Zion for the Torah Club.