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 between 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 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 on to the new pavements below and there they were found nearly 2000 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.7
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 five 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.8
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 for ever 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.