CHAPTER XIV. THE FALL OF JERUSALEM
[68-70 A.D.]
Josephus escaped from the general massacre at Jotapata with much difficulty. His life was threatened not only by the Roman soldiers who found him shut up in a cave and wished to have his life, but also by the forty other inmates of the cave who did not approve of Josephus’ desire to surrender. Josephus had recourse to the pious subterfuge of a divine vision ordering him to surrender to the Romans. But his companions in misery treated him as a contemptible coward, and he was forced to prove his physical valour by holding them all at bay. He finally suggested that they draw lots and kill each other successively. By some strange circumstance, which Josephus does not explain, the Jews in the cave bravely met death at the hands of one another until only two survived, of whom Josephus was one. Josephus easily persuaded this man to resign the privilege of martyrdom and join him in surrendering to the Romans. Josephus is our only authority for the story and he does not shine in particular brilliance even according to his own explanation. Dean Milman heaps contempt upon him for the hypocrisy and trickery of his attitude in this matter, but in the first place it would have been a profitless folly to yield to the fanaticism of his comrades, and in the second place his death would have deprived us of his invaluable history. And even Milman, while confessing the inconsistency of Josephus’ character, admits the glory of his generalship in spite of his lack of previous military instruction, confesses that he held the Roman arms in check for two months on the very frontier of an “insignificant province,” and takes the siege of Jotapata as a type of “the nature of the conflict of the Jews with the Roman supremacy, against which, in the wide circle of the empire, they were the last desperate combatants for freedom.” Josephus was treated as a traitor by the Jews, even as Thucydides had been exiled by the Greeks, but he strove hard to mitigate the horrible extremes to which Roman cruelty was driven by the superb courage of the doomed nation.
Jotapata having fallen, the Roman arms speedily overran the country. The Samaritans, despised by the Jews, entrenched themselves on Mount Gerizim, where they were massacred to the number of eleven thousand and six hundred. The city of Cæsarea was surrendered by the Greeks who had massacred the Jews in the city. Tiberias also opened its gates to the Romans. Tarichea resisted, and received only butchery as the reward of its heroism. Many of the inhabitants fled to the Lake of Galilee in light fishing boats, and yet when they were pursued by the heavy barks of the Romans, they had the courage to attack the Romans with stones. “Feeble warfare,” as Milman says, “which only irritated the pursuers: for if thrown from a distance they did no damage, only splashing the water over the soldiers or falling harmless from their iron cuirasses; if those who threw them approached nearer, they could be hit in their turn by Roman arrows. All the shores were occupied by hostile soldiers, and they were pursued into every inlet and creek; some were transfixed with spears from the high banks of the vessels, some were boarded and put to the sword, the boats of others were crushed or swamped, and the people drowned. If their heads rose as they were swimming, they were hit with an arrow, or by the prow of the bark; if they clung to the side of the enemy’s vessel, their hands and heads were hewn off. The few survivors were driven to the shore, where they met with no more mercy. Either before they landed, or in the act of landing, they were cut down or pierced through. The blue waters of the whole lake were tinged with blood, and its clear surface exhaled for several days a fœtid steam. The shores were strewn with wrecks of boats and swollen bodies that lay rotting in the sun, and infected the air, till the conquerors themselves shrank from the effects of their own barbarities. Here we must add to our bloody catalogue the loss of six thousand lives.”
Those who had remained in the town and surrendered peaceably, trusting in Roman honesty, had even more bitter fate. After long and cold-blooded deliberation, Vespasian had twelve hundred of the aged and weak put to death; six thousand of the strongest were sent to help dig the ditch which Nero was trying to cut through the Isthmus of Corinth; more than thirty thousand others were sold as slaves. This deed of Vespasian, as Milman says, “tarnished his fame forever.” The harshness, however, led to the instant surrender of all the rest of Galilee except the towns of Gamala, Giscala, and Itabyrium. Gamala held out four months, and its fate was as curious as it was terrible. Josephus describes the town as clinging to the side of a mountain with the houses very thick and close to one another. The Romans made a breach in the walls and gradually forced the Jews up to the top of the town, where they made a sudden rally and charged fiercely down upon the Romans, who being able neither to resist the impetus of the Jews nor to press back the Romans in their rear, took refuge in the houses. The houses were so lightly built that they collapsed under the weight of the crowded soldiers and the whole town came tumbling down the cliff-side like a pack of cards. The Romans suffered a great panic with heavy loss and the Jews drove them out of the town, Vespasian himself being saved with great difficulty from slaughter. Gradually, however, the city was overcome and a bloody massacre followed. Hundreds threw themselves over the precipices with their wives and children. Hundreds of others the Romans flung over the cliffs. Nine thousand corpses marked the vain courage of the people of Gamala. Itabyrium had fallen in the meanwhile and Giscala was abandoned by its commander John of Giscala, who took his troops and his ambition into Jerusalem, though hotly pursued by Titus.
“But Jerusalem,” says Milman, “was ill-preparing herself to assume the part which became the metropolis of the nation, in this slow contest; and better had it been for her, if John of Giscala had perished in the trenches of his native town, or been cut off in his flight by the pursuing cavalry. His fame had gone before him to Jerusalem, perhaps not a little enhanced by the defection of his rival Josephus. The multitude poured out to meet him, as well to do him honour, as to receive authentic tidings of the disasters in Galilee. They assumed a lofty demeanour, declared that for Giscala, and such insignificant villages, it was not worth risking the blood of brave men—they had reserved all theirs to be shed in the defence of the capital. Yet to many their retreat was too manifestly a flight, and from the dreadful details of massacre and captivity, they foreboded the fate which awaited themselves. John, however, represented the Roman force as greatly enfeebled, and their engines worn out before Jotapata and Gamala; and urged, that if they were so long in subduing the towns of Galilee, they would inevitably be repulsed with shame from Jerusalem. John was a man of the most insinuating address, and the most plausible and fluent eloquence. The war and the peace factions not only distracted the public councils, but in every family, among the dearest and most intimate friends, this vital question created stern and bloody divisions. Every one assembled a band of adherents, or joined himself to some organised party. The youth were everywhere unanimous in their ardour for war; the older in vain endeavoured to allay the frenzy by calmer and more prudent reasoning. First individuals, afterwards bands of desperate men, began to spread over the whole country, spoiling either by open robbery, or under pretence of chastising those who were traitors to the cause of their country. The unoffending and peaceful who saw their houses burning, and their families plundered, thought they could have nothing worse to apprehend from the conquest of the Romans than from the lawless violence of their own countrymen.”
There is no space here to tell in detail the horrors of the civil war that ensued within Jerusalem. The cruelties inflicted by the Romans themselves hardly rivalled the infamous treacheries, murders, and indignities even to corpses, which the Jews heaped upon their own people. The Roman Empire itself, however, was also undergoing the throes of a civil war, in which the Jews thought they saw the dissolution of the empire and the golden opportunity for the independence of their own country. But the ship of Roman state weathered this tempest as so many another, and by the spring of the year 70 A.D. Titus commenced the siege of the city in earnest. At this time Jerusalem was crowded with something like a million persons who had come in for the Passover, but the aggregate number of fighting men seems to have been less than twenty-four thousand, while the forces of Titus are estimated at about eighty thousand. The Jews expected succour from their kinsmen of Parthia as well as from other quarters of the empire, but before these arrived, if they were ever sent at all, the forces of Titus appeared before the city. Taking six hundred horse with him Titus advanced at once to reconnoitre, but as no one appeared to oppose his progress he incautiously approached so near the wall that he was suddenly surrounded by a multitude of men who rushed out from one of the gates behind him. Bareheaded and without his breastplate as he was, yet he forced his way through this multitude and escaped unharmed to the Roman camp, although many of his followers were slain.
[70 A.D.]
Attempts were made at once to take the walls by storm, but these assaults were repulsed by the defenders, the Roman army retired to its entrenchments, and a regular siege began. Battering-rams were brought into play against the walls, while catapults and ballistæ were plied incessantly against the defenders on the walls, and were responded to with similar weapons by them. In the use of these weapons, however, the Jews were very unskilful, while the bolts and stones thrown from the Roman camp did effective work both on the walls and inside them. The enormous thickness of the outer walls resisted the battering-rams for some days, but they gave way at last and the defenders retired within their second line. This second wall was carried five days later and Titus was thus made master of the lower city.
Famine now added to the war within and without the city its ghastly terrors. Never has a more thrilling picture of human misery been painted than that of Josephus.[a]
JOSEPHUS’ ACCOUNT OF THE FAMINE
It was now a miserable case, and a sight that would justly bring tears into our eyes, how men stood as to their food, while the more powerful had more than enough, and the weaker were lamenting (for want of it). But the famine was too hard for all other passions, and it is destructive to nothing so much as to modesty; for what was otherwise worthy of reverence was in this case despised; insomuch that children pulled the very morsels that their fathers were eating out of their very mouths, and what was still more to be pitied, so did the mothers do as to their infants; and when those that were most dear were perishing under their hands, they were not ashamed to take from them the very last drops that might preserve their lives; and while they ate after this manner, yet were they not concealed in so doing; but the seditious everywhere came upon them immediately, and snatched away from them what they had gotten from others; for when they saw any house shut up, this was to them a signal that the people within had gotten some food; whereupon they broke open the doors, and ran in, and took pieces of what they were eating, almost up out of their very throats, and this by force: the old men, who held their food fast, were beaten; and if the women hid what they had within their hands, their hair was torn for so doing; nor was there any commiseration shown either to the aged or to infants, but they lifted up children from the ground as they hung upon the morsels they had gotten, and shook them down upon the floor; but still were they more barbarously cruel to those that had prevented their coming in, and had actually swallowed down what they were going to seize upon, as if they had been unjustly defrauded of their right.
They also invented terrible methods of torment to discover where any food was, and they were these: to stop up the passages of the privy parts of the miserable wretches, and a man was forced to bear what it is terrible even to hear, in order to make him confess that he had but one loaf of bread, or that he might discover a handful of barley-meal that was concealed; and this was done when these tormentors were not themselves hungry; for the thing had been less barbarous had necessity forced them to it; but this was done to keep their madness in exercise, and as making preparation of provisions for themselves for the following days. These men went also to meet those that had crept out of the city by night, as far as the Roman guards, to gather some plants and herbs that grew wild; and when those people thought they had got clear of the enemy, these snatched from them what they had brought with them, even while they had frequently entreated them, and that by calling upon the tremendous name of God, to give them back some part of what they had brought; though these would not give them the least crumb; and they were to be well contented that they were only spoiled, and not slain at the same time.
It is therefore impossible to go distinctly over every instance of these men’s iniquity. I shall therefore speak my mind here at once briefly: That neither did any other city ever suffer such miseries, nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this was, from the beginning of the world. Finally, they brought the Hebrew nation into contempt, that they might themselves appear comparatively less impious with regard to strangers. They confessed what was true, that they were the slaves, the scum, and the spurious and abortive offspring of our nation, while they overthrew the city themselves, and forced the Romans, whether they would or no, to gain a melancholy reputation, by acting gloriously against them, and did almost draw that fire upon the temple, which they seemed to think came too slowly; and, indeed, when they saw that temple burning from the upper city, they were neither troubled at it, nor did they shed any tears on that account, while yet these passions were discovered among the Romans themselves: which circumstances we shall speak of hereafter in their proper place, when we come to treat of such matters.
So now Titus’ banks were advanced a great way, notwithstanding his soldiers had been very much distressed from the wall. He then sent a party of horsemen, and ordered they should lay ambushes for those that went out into the valleys to gather food. Some of these were indeed fighting men, who were not contented with what they got by rapine; but the greater part of them were poor people, who were deterred from deserting by the concern they were under for their own relations: for they could not hope to escape away, together with their wives and children, without the knowledge of the seditious; nor could they think of leaving these relations to be slain by the robbers on their account; nay, the severity of the famine made them bold in thus going out: so nothing remained but that, when they were concealed from the robbers, they should be taken by the enemy; and when they were going to be taken, they were forced to defend themselves, for fear of being punished: as after they had fought, they thought it too late to make any supplications for mercy: so they were first whipped, and then tormented with all sorts of tortures before they died, and were then crucified before the wall of the city. This miserable procedure made Titus greatly to pity them, while they caught every day five hundred Jews; nay, some days they caught more; yet did it not appear to be safe for him to let those that were taken by force go their way; and to set a guard over so many, he saw would be to make such as guarded them useless to him.
The main reason why he did not forbid that cruelty was this, that he hoped the Jews might perhaps yield at that sight, out of fear lest they might themselves afterwards be liable to the same cruel treatment. So the soldiers, out of the wrath and hatred they bore the Jews, nailed those they caught, one after one way, and another after another, to the crosses, by way of jest; when their multitude was so great, that room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses wanting for the bodies.
But so far were the seditious from repenting at this sad sight, that, on the contrary, they made the rest of the multitude believe otherwise; for they brought the relations of those that had deserted upon the wall, with such of the populace as were very eager to go over upon the security offered them, and showed them what miseries those underwent who fled to the Romans; and told them that those who were caught were supplicants to them, and not such as were taken prisoners. This sight kept many of those within the city who were so eager to desert, till the truth was known; yet did some of them run away immediately as unto certain punishment, esteeming death from their enemies to be a quiet departure, if compared with that by famine.
So Titus commanded that the hands of many of those that were caught should be cut off, that they might not be thought deserters, and might be credited on account of the calamity they were under, and sent them in to John and Simon, with this exhortation, that they would now at length leave off (their madness), and not force him to destroy the city, whereby they would have those advantages of repentance, even in their utmost distress, that they would preserve their own lives, and so fine a city of their own, and that temple which was their peculiar pride. He then went round about the banks that were cast up, and hastened them, in order to show that his words should in no long time be followed by his deeds. In answer to which, the seditious cast reproaches upon Cæsar himself, and upon his father also, and cried out with a loud voice, that they contemned death, and did well in preferring it before slavery; that they would do all the mischief to the Romans they could while they had breath in them; and that for their own city, since they were, as he said, to be destroyed, they had no concern about it, and that the world itself was a better temple to God than this. That yet this temple would be preserved by him that inhabited therein, whom they still had for their assistant in this war, and did therefore laugh at all his threatenings, which would come to nothing; because the conclusion of the whole depended upon God only. These words were mixed with reproaches, and with them they made a mighty clamour.
So all hope of escaping was now cut off from the Jews, together with their liberty of going out of the city. Then did the famine widen its progress, and devoured the people by whole houses and families; the upper rooms were full of women and children that were dying by famine; and the lanes of the city were full of the dead bodies of the aged; the children also and the young men wandered about the market-places like shadows, all swelled with the famine, and fell down dead wheresoever their misery seized them. As for burying them, those that were sick themselves were not able to do it; and those that were hearty and well, were deterred from doing it by the great multitude of those dead bodies, and by the uncertainty there was how soon they should die themselves; for many died as they were burying others, and many went to their coffins before that fatal hour was come!
Nor was there any lamentation made under these calamities, nor were heard any mournful complaints; but the famine confounded all natural passions; for those who were just going to die, looked upon those that were gone to their rest before them with dry eyes and open mouths.
A deep silence also, and a kind of deadly night, had seized upon the city; while yet the robbers were still more terrible than these miseries were themselves; for they brake open those houses which were no other than graves of dead bodies, and plundered them of what they had; and carrying off the coverings of their bodies, went out laughing, and tried the points of their swords on their dead bodies; and, in order to prove what mettle they were made of, they thrust some of those through that still lay alive upon the ground; but for those that entreated them to lend them their right hand, and their sword to despatch them, they were too proud to grant their requests, and left them to be consumed by the famine. Now every one of these died with their eyes fixed upon the temple, and left the seditious alive behind them. Now the seditious at first gave orders that the dead should be buried out of the public treasury, as not enduring the stench of their dead bodies. But afterwards, when they could not do that, they had them cast down from the walls into the valleys beneath.
However, when Titus, in going his rounds along those valleys, saw them full of dead bodies, and the thick putrefaction running about them, he gave a groan, and, spreading out his hands to heaven, called God to witness that this was not his doing.
Some of the deserters, having no other way, leaped down from the wall immediately, while others of them went out of the city with stones, as if they would fight them; but thereupon, they fled away to the Romans: but here a worse fate accompanied these than what they had found within the city; and they met with a quicker despatch from the too great abundance they had among the Romans, than they could have done from the famine among the Jews; for when they came first to the Romans, they were puffed up by the famine, and swelled like men in a dropsy; after which they all on the sudden over-filled those bodies that were before empty, and so burst asunder, excepting such only as were skilful enough to restrain their appetites, and, by degrees, took in their food into bodies unaccustomed thereto.
Yet did another plague seize upon those that were thus preserved; for there was found among the Syrian deserters a certain person who was caught gathering pieces of gold out of the excrements of the Jews’ bellies,—for the deserters used to swallow such pieces of gold, when they came out,—and for these did the seditious search them all, for there was a great quantity of gold in the city, insomuch that as much was now sold (in the Roman camp) for twelve Attic drachmæ as was sold before for twenty-five; but when this contrivance was discovered in one instance, the fame of it filled their several camps, that the deserters came to them full of gold. So the multitude of the Arabians, with the Syrians, cut up those that came as supplicants, and searched their bellies. Nor does it seem to me that any misery befell the Jews that was more terrible than this, since in one night’s time about two thousand of these deserters were thus dissected.
But as for John, when he could no longer plunder the people, he betook himself to sacrilege, and melted down many of the sacred utensils which had been given to the temple, as also many of those vessels which were necessary for such as ministered about holy things, the caldrons, the dishes, and the tables; nay, he did not abstain from those pouring-vessels that were sent them by Augustus and his wife; for the Roman emperors did ever both honour and adorn this temple. Whereas this man, who was a Jew, seized upon what were the donations of foreigners, and said to those that were with him that it was proper for them to use divine things while they were fighting for the Divinity, without fear, and that such whose warfare is for the temple, should live of the temple; on which account he emptied the vessels of that sacred wine and oil, which the priests kept to be poured on the burnt-offerings, and which lay in the inner court of the temple, and distributed it among the multitude, who, in their anointing themselves and drinking, used (each of them) above an hin of them. And here I cannot but speak my mind, and what the concern I am under dictates to me, and it is this: I suppose, that had the Romans made any longer delay in coming against these villains, the city would either have been swallowed up by the ground opening upon them, or been overflowed by water, or else been destroyed by such thunder as the country of Sodom perished by, for it had brought forth a generation of men much more atheistical than were those that suffered such punishments, for by their madness it was that all the people came to be destroyed.
And, indeed, why do I relate these particular calamities?—while Manneus, the son of Lazarus, came running to Titus at this very time, and told him that there had been carried out through that one gate, which was entrusted to his care, no fewer than a hundred and fifteen thousand eight hundred and eighty dead bodies, in the interval between the fourteenth day of the month Xanthicus (Nisan), when the Romans pitched their camp by the city, and the first day of the month Panemus (Tammuz). This was itself a prodigious multitude; and though this man was not himself set as a governor at that gate, yet was he appointed to pay the public stipend for carrying these bodies out, and so was obliged of necessity to number them, while the rest were buried by their relations, though all their burial was but this, to bring them away, and cast them out of the city. After this man there ran away to Titus many of the eminent citizens, and told him the entire number of the poor that were dead; and that no fewer than six hundred thousand were thrown out at the gates, though still the number of the rest could not be discovered; and they told him further, that when they were no longer able to carry out the dead bodies of the poor, they laid their corpses on heaps in very large houses, and shut them up therein; as also that a medimnus of wheat was sold for a talent; and that when, a while afterwards, it was not possible to gather herbs, by reason the city was all walled about, some persons were driven to that terrible distress as to search the common sewers and old dunghills of cattle, and to eat the dung which they got there; and what they of old could not endure so much as to see, they now used for food. When the Romans barely heard all this, they commiserated their case; while the seditious, who saw it also, did not repent, but suffered the same distress to come upon themselves; for they were blinded by that fate which was already coming upon the city, and upon themselves also.
Now of those that perished by famine in the city, the number was prodigious, and the miseries they underwent were unspeakable; for if so much as the shadow of any kind of food did anywhere appear, a war was commenced presently; and the dearest friends fell a fighting one with another about it, snatching from each other the most miserable supports of life. Nor would men believe that those who were dying had no food; but the robbers would search them when they were expiring, lest any one should have concealed food in their bosoms, and counterfeited dying: nay, these robbers gaped for want, and ran about stumbling and staggering along like mad dogs, and reeling against the doors of the houses like drunken men; they would also, in the great distress they were in, rush into the very same houses two or three times in one and the same day. Moreover, their hunger was so intolerable, that it obliged them to chew everything, while they gathered such things as the most sordid animals would not touch, and endured to eat them; nor did they at length abstain from girdles and shoes; and the very leather which belonged to their shields they pulled off and gnawed; the very wisps of old hay became food to some; and some gathered up fibres, and sold a very small weight of them for four Attic drachmæ. But why do I describe the shameless impudence that the famine brought on men in their eating inanimate things, while I am going to relate a matter of fact, the like to which no history relates, either among the Greeks or Barbarians! It is horrible to speak of it, and incredible when heard. I had indeed willingly omitted this calamity of ours, that I might not seem to deliver what is so portentous to posterity, but that I have innumerable witnesses to it in my own age; and besides, my country would have had little reason to thank me for suppressing the miseries that she underwent at this time.
There was a certain woman that dwelt beyond Jordan, her name was Mary; her father was Eleazar, of the village Bethezub, which signifies “the House of Hyssop.” She was eminent for her family and her wealth, and had fled away to Jerusalem with the rest of the multitude, and was with them besieged therein at this time. The other effects of this woman had been already seized upon; such, I mean, as she had brought with her out of Peræa, and removed to the city. What she had treasured up besides, as also what food she had contrived to save, had been also carried off by the rapacious guards, who came every day running into her house for that purpose. This put the poor woman into a very great passion, and by the frequent reproaches and imprecations she cast at these rapacious villains, she had provoked them to anger against her; but none of them, either out of the indignation she had raised against herself, or out of the commiseration of her case, would take away her life; and if she found any food, she perceived her labours were for others, and not for herself; and it was now become impossible for her any way to find any more food, while the famine pierced through her very bowels and marrow, when also her passion was fired to a degree beyond the famine itself; nor did she consult with anything but with her passion and the necessity she was in.
She then attempted a most unnatural thing; and snatching up her son, who was a child sucking at her breast, she said: “O thou miserable infant! for whom shall I preserve thee in this war, this famine, and this sedition? As to the war with the Romans, if they preserve our lives, we must be slaves! This famine also will destroy us, even before that slavery comes upon us;—yet are these seditious rogues more terrible than both the other. Come on; be thou my food, and be thou a fury to these seditious varlets and a byword to the world, which is all that is now wanting to complete the calamities of us Jews.”
As soon as she had said this she slew her son; and then roasted him, and ate the one half of him, and kept the other half by her concealed. Upon this the seditious came in presently, and smelling the horrid scent of this food, they threatened her, that they would cut her throat immediately if she did not show them what food she had gotten ready. She replied, that she had saved a very fine portion of it for them; and withal uncovered what was left of her son. Hereupon they were seized with a horror and amazement of mind, and stood astonished at the sight; when she said to them:
“This is mine own son; and what hath been done was mine own doing! Come, eat of this food; for I have eaten of it myself! Do not you pretend to be either more tender than a woman, or more compassionate than a mother; but if you be so scrupulous, and do abominate this my sacrifice, as I have eaten the one half, let the rest be reserved for me also.”
After which, those men went out trembling, being never so much affrighted at anything as they were at this, and with some difficulty they left the rest of that meat to the mother. Upon which the whole city was full of this horrid action immediately; and while everybody laid this miserable case before their own eyes, they trembled, as if this unheard-of action had been done by themselves. So those that were thus distressed by the famine were very desirous to die; and those already dead were esteemed happy, because they had not lived long enough either to hear or to see such miseries.
This sad instance was quickly told to the Romans, some of whom could not believe it, and others pitied the distress which the Jews were under; but there were many of them who were hereby induced to a more bitter hatred than ordinary against our nation;—but for Cæsar, he excused himself before God as to this matter, and said, that he had proposed peace and liberty to the Jews, as well as an oblivion of all their former insolent practices; but that they, instead of concord, had chosen sedition; instead of peace, war; and before satiety and abundance, a famine. That they had begun with their own hands to burn down that temple, which we have preserved hitherto; and that therefore they deserved to eat such food as this was. That, however, this horrid action of eating one’s own child, ought to be covered with the overthrow of their very country itself; and men ought not to leave such a city upon the habitable earth to be seen by the sun, wherein mothers are thus fed, although such food be fitter for the fathers than for the mothers to eat of, since it is they that continue still in a state of war against us, after they have undergone such miseries as these. And at the same time that he said this, he reflected on the desperate condition these men must be in; nor could he expect that such men could be recovered to sobriety of mind after they had endured those very sufferings for the avoiding whereof it only was probable they might have repented.[c]
THE CLOSE OF JEWISH HISTORY
In spite of such gaunt famine, however, the war went on and the resistance continued. Soon the battering-rams made a breach in the wall of Antonia, and Titus called upon his soldiers to mount the breach, but only one soldier, Sibanus, and eleven others responded, and these were overwhelmed at once. Two nights later, however, twenty-four soldiers crept into the breach, and Antonia was taken. Titus at once made offers of clemency and many accepted his offer of mercy, but the rest fled to Zion and the temple. He then called a council of war to decide whether the temple should be saved; many of his generals were in favour of destroying it, but nevertheless Titus ordered the flames to be extinguished, fixing the next day for the final assault. But even Roman discipline could not control the infuriated soldiers and one of them threw a blazing torch into the gilded lattice of the porch. “The flames sprang up at once. The Jews uttered one simultaneous shriek and grasped their swords with a furious determination of revenging and perishing in the ruins of the temple. Titus rushed down with the utmost speed: he shouted, he made signs to his soldiers to quench the fire: his voice was drowned and his signs unnoticed in the blind confusion. The legionaries either could not or would not hear: they rushed on, trampling each other down in their furious haste, or stumbling over the crumbling ruins, and perished with the enemy. Each exhorted the other, and each hurled his blazing brand into the inner part of the edifice, and then hastened to his work of carnage. The unarmed and the defenceless people were slain in thousands; they lay heaped like sacrifices round the altar; the steps of the temple ran with streams of blood, which washed down the bodies which lay upon it.”
Titus himself entered the Holy of Holies before the flames had reached the sanctuary, and with a last effort attempted to save it, but in his very presence his soldiers fired the great door and the building was soon wrapt in flames.
[70-73 A.D.]
Thus was Jerusalem destroyed. Josephus reckons that the number of people who perished in this siege was one million one hundred thousand, and while this is probably an exaggeration it is not impossible that such a number may have perished, when we remember that a large proportion of the male population of Judea had gathered in Jerusalem for the Passover. Persecutions of the remaining Jews were soon begun at Antioch, where several Jews were burnt and tortured. It is to Titus’ credit that these persecutions were checked and his soldiers rebuked: “The country of the Jews is destroyed—thither they cannot return: it would be hard to allow them no home to return to—leave them in peace.” The booty taken at Jerusalem was so enormous as to cause an immense depreciation in the value of gold and silver throughout Asia, and this even though the treasures of the temple had been burned and destroyed.
The revolt lasted a little longer in the Dead Sea region. The castle of Herodion soon fell; Macherus surrendered, but the men were slain, the women and children sent to slavery. Masada held out till the year 73, when the garrison, seeing their case hopeless, killed their wives and children, and then themselves after setting fire to the castle. The Jews in other parts of the world suffered many disasters and made a few efforts at revolt under Zealots, but gradually all resistance was crushed out in blood, and the Jews having perished by the hundred thousand, ceased to be a nation. As Munk said, “Almost all Judea became a desert; the wolves and the hyenas entered the cities.”[a]
Entrance to the Tomb of the Kings, Jerusalem
From that day forward the Jews have no important history. The extremist party of the prophets and Zealots, which was likewise the nationalist party, no longer existed; it had been drowned in blood. As for the priests and rabbis, they had long since withdrawn from the conflict, but it is due to them that the Jews, having completely lost their national existence, have been able to subsist to this day as a religious body. “Renouncing the hope of playing a political rôle,” says Munk, “the Jews directed all their efforts towards a moral aim, and devoted themselves wholly to consolidating their religious unity.” Convinced at last that their mission as a body politic was at an end, and that the sanctuary at Jerusalem, with its priests and sacrifices, could no longer be the symbol about which the scattered remnants of the Jewish nation were to gather, they laid down their arms, and sought by peaceful ways and intellectual methods to strengthen themselves as a religious body. For a while Palestine still remained the chief seat of religious study, the rabbis settling in several cities of Galilee, notably Sephoris and Tiberias. From the school of Tiberias, founded about the year 180, came forth the famous rabbi, Yehudah, surnamed the Holy, who collected the incomplete codes and traditional laws of the schools of the Pharisees, and, in the first quarter of the third century, fashioned them into an immense system of laws known under the name of the Mishnah, or Second Law. This code is divided into six parts, entitled Sedarim, orders. Each of the six is subdivided into several treatises, each treatise into chapters. This code was annotated, discussed, and amplified, first by the Palestinian and then by the Babylonian school, and each school afterwards made a collection of these annotations and discussions. The name of Gemara, Complement, was given to these collections, which were much more voluminous than the Mishnah that serves for their text. The Mishnah and the Gemara together form the Talmud, the Teaching.
The Zealots who had perished in the struggle for independence or in the massacres that followed on their defeat, and the rabbis who laboured in obscurity and silence, constituted but a comparatively small part of the Jewish population, and we may well ask what became of the innumerable slaves who flooded the empire after the fall of Jerusalem. They did not all succumb to the arduous toils of the Coliseum. Under Hadrian there was a fresh influx of Jewish slaves; Dion Cassius, who speaks of five hundred and eighty thousand men killed in the course of the war, says nothing of women or children. We cannot doubt that they were sold, according to the common custom. Renan says that at the yearly fair of the Terebinth, near Hebron, Jews could be bought at the same price as horses. Once bought, they ran no further risk of death from hunger or destitution, for a slave, even if bought at the price of a horse, represented money’s worth, which it was not in his master’s interest to lose. Among their co-religionists, slaves like themselves, or freedmen, these unhappy beings found the pathetic brotherhood of the poor, ingenious in expedients. All the little nameless trades offered resources to this humiliated race, unscrupulous, skilful in exploiting the vices of the ruling classes, armed with good reasons for not loving the human race. Mingled with slaves of other races, they communicated to them the fanaticism of their wrath and their hopes of revenge. This revenge was afterwards relegated to a distant future; but at that time, smarting under the memory of recent disaster, they dreamt of it as complete and in the immediate future. Let the world come to an end, since nothing could reform it; let it go down to the bottomless pit, with all its defilements, and the agonies of the outcasts of life, and oppressions without number, and inexpiable ills! The hour of deliverance is near, and the accursed shall go to everlasting fire, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The fall of the Jewish nation redounded to the advantage of Christian propaganda. From that time forward we hear less and less of the Jews and more and more of the Christians.
It is an inevitable consequence of military government that after every conquest the conquered impose their ideas on the conquerors. When Rome had subjugated Greece, she herself submitted to the dominion of the Hellenistic spirit, which imposed on the Romans its own forms of art, its literary culture, its mythology, and its philosophy. Rome, mistress of Asia, was invaded by Asiatic luxury, the East opened upon the West the floodgates of its superstitions, sensual, gloomy, frenzied, or ascetic; nothing was talked of save mysteries, funeral feasts, horoscopes, magic, purifications, Isis and Mithras, the passion of Attys, gods dead and risen again. Egypt had deified the Pharaohs, Rome deified the Cæsars. Finally, Judea, the last province conquered by the Romans, was the last to impose its religious thought upon the world. The obscure traditions of a despised people were destined to take the place of the glorious memories of Greece and Rome. A monarchy required a monarchial religion. The republic had vanished from the earth, it could not be left in the heavens. The images of the gods still stood in their temples, but since the time of Augustus the only god of the empire had been the emperor. Since the conscience of the conquerors of the world had not revolted from the apotheosis of tyrants, the conquered were fully entitled to seek among their own ranks for a worthier object. One nation alone had refused its incense to the emperors. That nation was destined to provide a God for the coming centuries. In the arrogant words of a Jew of our own times, this nation said to the world, “Till thou art able to understand me, behold a man of my race, make of him thy god.” Humanity had found its social ideal in servitude; it was just that the gibbet of slaves should become the symbol of the religion of the human race.
Thus in the great Christian synthesis, the worship of the God-man, which sums up the whole of Greek anthropomorphism, took its place by the side of Jewish monotheism. With the principle of universal order, the source and reason of things, was associated, in the unity of the Divine, the moral law in its loftiest form, the sacrifice of self and redemption through suffering. But while other religions, when introduced into the empire, had allowed the traditions and monuments of Græco-Roman civilisation to remain, the monistic religion of the Semitic race was destined to exclude all other religious forms and wipe out the traces of them. Like the wind of the desert that destroys everything in its path, the solitary God of Sinai was to sweep away all the works of the past. Hence, some centuries later, Rutilius Numatianus, the last of pagan poets, exclaimed, in the midst of the ruins of civilisation and the empire, “Would to the gods that Judea had never been conquered! The plague, extirpated there, hath spread abroad, and a vanquished nation oppresses its conquerors.” Had this poet had a little of the living faith of those he despised, had religion been anything to him beyond a literary form, he would have recognised that this conquest of the world by Jewish thought was but a just vengeance for the hideous wars of Titus and Hadrian, and a striking proof of the justice of the gods. The events of human history are neither effects of capricious chance nor phases of necessary evolution, but moral consequences of a great law of equilibrium and expiation which is the nemesis of history.[e]
The Tower of David, Jerusalem