The city of Jerusalem

by C. R. Conder

The description of Jerusalem at the time of its fall, given by Tacitus,[350] is brief, but so like the longer accounts of Josephus as to have been supposed to be founded on them; it contains, however, details which seem original. He says that “there were other walls beneath the royal palace, besides the tower of Antonia, with its top particularly conspicuous.... The temple was like a citadel, having walls of its own.... The cloisters wherewith the temple was enclosed were an excellent fortification. They had a fountain of water that ran perpetually, and the mountains were hollowed underground; they had, moreover, pools and cisterns for the preservation of rain water.... Moreover, the covetous temper that prevailed in the time of Claudius gave the Jews an opportunity of purchasing with money leave to fortify Jerusalem. So they built walls in time of peace.” The estimate of population by Tacitus is, however, not much less exaggerated than the incredible calculations of Josephus; but the latter gives a very fair idea of the proportion between the actual combatants and of their respective numbers.

On the fifteenth day of the siege, after the corner of a tower was shaken by the battering ram of the 15th legion, and a sally from the “secret gate” near Hippicus had been repulsed, the wall of Agrippa was taken, in spite of the destruction of three siege towers. The defenders apparently found the line of defence too extended for their numbers, and many—grown weary of fighting and watching—had retired to the inner city to sleep. The Romans demolished the rampart, and wasted the north quarter of the town, which had already been partly destroyed by Cestius Gallus. The camp of Titus was moved within Agrippa’s wall to a place on the north-west of the second wall known as the “Camp of the Assyrians,” in memory of the attack made on Hezekiah in 703 B. C., when the Assyrian leaders stood outside the wall by the “Conduit of the Upper Pool.” Simon therefore endeavoured to prevent the building of new banks by sallies from Hippicus on this side, at the gate by which “the water was brought in” to that tower by the ancient conduit of Ahaz, as it is still brought in to the citadel even now.

On the twentieth day of the siege the second wall was breached, and the Romans broke in on the north at “a place where were the merchants of wool, the braziers, the market for cloth, and where the narrow streets led obliquely to the wall.” They were, however, driven out again, and the wall was not finally taken till three days later, when a truce was called to see if the Jews would submit. As no overtures were made by the defenders, the new banks against the upper city and Antonia were begun on the twenty-eighth day, and finished on the thirty-seventh day of the siege, when the struggle again became desperate.[351]

The bank erected by the 10th legion is described as being near the Pool Amygdalon, and that of the 15th legion was 30 cubits from it—evidently on the west—at the monument of the high-priest John Hyrcanus. A few words may be spared to discuss these sites.[352] Josephus wrote his “Wars of the Jews” in Aramaic,[353] but whether he personally translated this work into Greek may be doubted, as the translator shows signs of imperfect acquaintance with the language of the original. Thus it is probable that Amygdalon (“the almond”) is only a transliteration really for Ha-Migdolon (“the great tower”). The pool is not noticed till after the second wall had been taken, at its weakest point on the north-west, where (as described in 134 B. C.) the ground was on the same level inside and outside the rampart.[354] It seems clear therefore that this pool was the tank now known as “Hezekiah’s Pool,” near the great tower of Phasaelus. The monument of John Hyrcanus must have been to its west, and is described as being outside the second wall, though only about 40 feet either from the pool or from the Roman bank, which must have been on the saddle west of the pool. This description defines pretty closely the line of the second wall at this point. The banks raised by the Romans were for the protection of those who worked the rams, balistæ, and siege towers, and for this reason John’s monument could not have been far north of the wall of the upper city. All the notices agree in placing it somewhere near the Pool Amygdalon to the west.

SPEECH BY JOSEPHUS

Titus appears to have been anxious to save his men, and even to save the besieged; he now endeavoured to induce them to submit, while afterwards he preferred the slower method of blockade to the chances of assault on the two remaining strongholds. Josephus was commissioned to address the defenders, which he did at some danger to himself.[355] Though he was a priest, and a Pharisee, he was hated by the Zealots because he belonged to the moderate party, and to the liberal school of educated Jews who agreed with Gamaliel in Jerusalem and Philo in Egypt. He had fought bravely in Galilee, but was disgusted with the Zealot leaders, John and Eleazar. He had a wider knowledge of the world than they had, and his embassy to Poppea—nearly twenty years before—had made him favourably known at Rome.[356] Vespasian spared his life when he was captured after the fall of Jotapata; and from that time, knowing that the struggle for freedom was hopeless, he endeavoured to save his country from further misery. His speech to the besieged was on the familiar lines of which we have instances in the New Testament, rehearsing Hebrew history from Abraham down to Herod. Its most interesting passage, however, is that which refers to Siloam. He regarded the Romans as being now in the right, though in the wrong when Sosius was defeated, and that they were consequently favoured by God in the supply of water due to the abundant rain of the season. “As for Titus, those springs which were formerly almost dried up when they were under your power, since he has come, run more plentifully than they did before; accordingly you know that Siloam, as well as all the other springs that were without the city, did so far fail that water was strictly sold by measure, whereas they now have such a great quantity of water, for your enemies, as is sufficient not only for drink both for themselves and their beasts, but even to water their gardens.” This passage agrees with the accounts of the south wall already mentioned in placing Siloam outside its line. It is also remarkable that, while the besieged suffered long agonies from famine, they are not said to have suffered from thirst. No doubt the rains also filled their cisterns, and the great tanks would have been filled up from the aqueducts before the latter were cut off by the Romans.

The horrors of the siege, famine, rapine, and dissension within, crucifixion and torture for those who deserted, are detailed by Josephus. “A deep silence also and a kind of deadly night had seized on the city; while yet the robbers were still more terrible than these miseries were themselves”; yet there was no thought of submission among those desperate men who fought on for all that was dear to them—for faith and freedom as of old. They had been goaded to rebellion after years of oppression, and Nero was as guilty of the burning of Jerusalem as he was of the burning of Rome. Yet without the miseries of those four months the new world could not begin. The Christian and the Jew alike were set free from the shackles of the past when the undying fire went out for ever on Tammuz 17—thenceforth a fast-day in Israel.[357]

THE ROMAN WALL

All through May the struggle for Antonia went on, from the thirty-eighth day of the siege till the sixty-eighth day. The Roman banks in the fosse were undermined—no doubt by use of the rock tunnel leading to the Pool Strouthios—and the Romans were forced for a time to abandon their engines. The banks against the upper city were also destroyed, and Titus, after these repulses, determined to surround the city with a blockading wall, and so to starve out the defenders. The length of 40 furlongs, or 5 miles, given by Josephus for this vallum[358] appears to be fairly correct. It had thirteen small forts along its line. Its appearance may be judged from the existing remains of a similar wall, built by Silva round Masada[359] a little later, on which I have looked down from the heights of that desert fortress near the Dead Sea. It is a dry-stone rampart, with two large camps behind it on the north-west and north-east. Its length is less than 3,000 yards, and in part of this distance there are six small forts on the line at intervals of 500 feet on the average. The vallum of Titus began near his own headquarters at the “Camp of the Assyrians,” and stretched east through Bezetha and over the Kidron to Olivet, where it bent at the “Rock of the Dovecote.” This point seems to be fixed by the description of an existing rock cutting noted[360] by Sir Charles Wilson in 1864: “Entering the village of Siloam on the north, there is on the left a high cliff which bears evident signs of having been worked as a quarry, and on the summit of which is a curious place which appears to have been an old dovecote cut in the rock.” Thence the wall went to the “other hill” (the south summit of Olivet), “over the valley which reaches to Siloam.” It then crossed the “Valley of the Fountain,” by which perhaps we may understand the present “Well of Job,” and climbed the south precipice of Hinnom, near the “monument of Ananus the high-priest,” which was probably the fine tomb now called the “Retreat of the Apostles,” which was converted later into a chapel with a frescoed roof.[361] The wall ran along the cliff to the west side of the city, and turned north near a hamlet called the “House of Erebinthi,”[362] and thus reached Herod’s monuments near the present Mâmilla pool, and its original starting-place farther north-east. This work is said to have been completed in three days.

THE TEMPLE TAKEN