6. The Destruction of the Temple.—As befitted a kingdom of priests, their Temple had become to the Jews, in literal truth, their stronghold and their tower of defence. If only they had worshipped within those ‘borders of precious stones’ with half the fervour that they fought there, the end might have been very different. On the 7th of Ab, 3830of the Jewish era (corresponding to the year 70 C.E.), fire was set to the cloisters of the Temple. All that day and all the next the flames smouldered, and the people, faint with hunger and sick with misery, looked on with dull eyes, unregarding. Then again their mood changed, and on the morning of the 9th, with desperate, despairing effort, they rushed forth on the Roman swords. They were driven back, and Titus, seeing the crisis had come, summoned a hasty council of war to decide upon the fate of the Temple. His generals, smarting under their repulses, voted for its complete destruction. Titus had some touch of human feeling, some sympathy with that passion of defence. He would have spared the Jews their Temple, and have been content to plant the Roman eagle on its walls. It was saved that last degradation. On that same evening a detachment of Roman soldiers was told off to put out the smouldering cinders of the blackened cloisters. The pent-up people, faint with famine and restless with misery, burst out once more in ineffectual fury. Once more they were driven back to the very door of the Temple, and a Roman soldier, in careless wrath, took up a burning brand and tossed it after the retreating crowd. It fell on some inflammable stuff in a porchway, and quickly the Temple itself was on fire. Titus rushed to the spot, and tried with hand and voice to stay the work of destruction. It was too late. The shadow of the sword was lifted in the light of the flames. Then that too faded and died out, and darkness closed in upon the Jews, a thick darkness that could be felt.
BOOK II.
70 TO 1600.
DARKNESS.
[a]וַיְהִי חשֶׁךְ־אֲפֵלָה]
EXOD x. 22.
‘A fifteen hundred years’ tragedy.’
CHAPTER XII.
AFTER THE WAR.
1. Titus completes his Conquest.—With the taking of the capital the war was practically at an end. Jerusalem, ‘grander in her fall than even in her days of magnificence,’ was in the hands of the Romans, and Titus did not loiter nor grow lenient over the rest of his work. What fire and sword had left standing was ordered to be deliberately destroyed, and the ruins of the city and its Temple and its walls were all made level with the ground. The chief leaders of the defence were taken to Rome, and John of Gischala made a strong point of interest in Titus’s triumphal entry. There was presently a ceremony in which the ambitious Jewish soldier once more played the first part; he was led out to public execution.
2. Masada.—There were three fortresses whichheld out even after the fall of Jerusalem, and one of them, Masada by name, in a certain sense was never taken by the Romans. The garrison of this place was commanded by a descendant of Judas of Galilee, named Eleazar. Eleazar was quite hopeless of victory and quite fearless of death. When he found that the entry of the enemy was only a question of hours, he called all his little world together and made them a speech. He told them of the Roman way of dealing with prisoners of war, and bade them make their choice between surrender and self-inflicted death. Like the voice of one man came the answer of the nine hundred men who listened to him. ‘We will die by our own hands, we and our wives and our children; rather death than dishonour.’ Then they deliberately set fire to their poor dwellings and exchanged death-wounds. Thus, guided by fires lit by dead hands, and stumbling over unresisting corpses, the Romans entered the silent city, and came into possession of the last Jewish stronghold.